Tennessee's Tragic Trio: Stallworth, Little, Goodrich

On Oct. 19, 1998, the St. Louis Rams' Leonard Little drove his Lincoln Navigator through a red light and crashed into a car driven by a 47-year-old mother. Later tests confirmed his blood alcohol level was .19, more than twice the legal limit in the state of Missouri. The next day the mother died.

On Jan. 14, 2003 Dallas Cowboys cornerback Dwayne Goodrich spent a night out with friends at a local strip club. At two in the morning, he hopped on the interstate. That night a car caught on fire on that same interstate and three good Samaritans rushed to aid the motorist caught inside. Goodrich struck all three, killing two.

On March 14, 2009 Cleveland Browns wide receiver Donte Stallworth struck and killed a pedestrian in Miami Beach while driving his Bentley at 7:15 in the morning. Stallworth had been out drinking the night before and blood tests later confirmed he was impaired at the time of the accident.

What do all three of these men share in common besides being NFL players who have killed others while operating vehicles? They all played collegiate football for the University of Tennessee.

The trio represent a dark stain on the University of Tennessee's football program. And it leaves some wondering whether there was a culture of alcohol tolerance that aided in the later crimes, whether the players learned in Knoxville that the law didn't apply to them.

Their teammates, all of whom requested their names not be used, dispute the notion. "Alcohol was there, but it wasn't there any more than at any other college. I think it's a coincidence that this happened, 100 percent coincidental," says one.

If so, it's a coincidence that strains the bounds of credulity .On opening day 2008, 38 Tennessee Volunteer football players were on National Football League rosters. Six years ago, Goodrich was also in the NFL. By the spring of 2009, two of those 38, along with Goodrich, had combined to kill three men and one woman while driving a car. In 1998, the year of Little's conviction, 16,673 people died in alcohol related traffic accidents. By 2003, the year of Goodrich's crime, 17,013 motorists lost their lives to alcohol related accidents.

I was so overwhelmed by the freakishness of this coincidence that I contacted a math PhD at the University of Maryland, Chris Shaw, to run a statistical analysis for me. Below I've incorporated his data. Taking as a rough base the 300 million people who live in America and selecting 17,000 as the baseline number of victims, that means every year each of us has a .005667 percent chance of becoming a victim of an impaired driver.

But since all three men were drivers, not the victims, we need to adjust down to the roughly 220 million drivers in the country. And we have to assume that all of these people have a roughly equal chance of making the same mistake as Little, Goodrich, and Stallworth. Running these numbers again for an 11 year period (the length of time these accidents occurred), we discover that around .0052 percent of us would make that mistake.

Now shrink that pool of eligible drivers to around 175 scholarship football players from Tennessee over the six years from 1995 to 2001 and run the numbers to see what the odds are that three men would make this same mistake. To say it defies the laws of probability is an understatement. There's a .016 percent statistical chance of this actually happening. Or, flipping the numbers, a 99.984 percent chance of it never happening. Putting that into further context, it would take 10,000 D1 football programs for you to expect this to occur to one program. That's nearly 9,900 more D1 programs than there currently are.

The University of Tennessee and former coach Phil Fulmer declined to comment on the incidents.

Fans and players remember much more than their eventually darkened future.

Little's first season with the Tennessee Vols was 1995. An Asheville, N.C., native who spent a year in junior college before arriving on campus, Little was immediately a force of nature, corralling 11 sacks as an undersized defensive end, and wreaking havoc in offensive backfields across the country as a sophomore. With his wide-set eyes, prominent cheekbones, and eye-catching No. 1 jersey, there was something leonine in Little's gaze. As he leaned down on his left hand, nervous muscles twitching in the moment before the snap, he looked the part of a lion who just decided the gazelle in front of him was on the dinner menu. In Oct. 1995, Little lined up across from Alabama's quarterback, Brian Burgdorf. At the time, Little was playing in just the seventh football game of his Tennessee career, while the Vols' losing streak to Alabama had already run nine long seasons. As Burgdorf took the snap from under center and sprinted right, Little came off his left defensive end position and collapsed him like a house of cards. The hit was so electric, the term de-cleater almost does it a disservice. Burgdorf went down, Alabama never got back up. In the millisecond immediately following that play, Little, whose hit vanquished almost a decade's frustration, was a Tennessee legend for life. Leonard Little was five days shy of 21.



(In the above video you can see many of Little's vicious hits, the final hit on the video is his shot on Burgdorf. It happens quickly and isn't the perfect angle, but it's crippling.)

By 1997, Little and Peyton Manning were co-captains on a Tennessee team that would win an SEC Championship. Teammates recall Little as a stern and quiet leader. He was never in trouble at Tennessee, indeed he graduated with a degree in psychology before his football career was complete.

"He wasn't a partier," says one player on those teams, "he just wasn't. He was quiet, but never caused any trouble. Zero."

A third round pick of the Rams in the 1998 NFL draft, Little was celebrating his 24th birthday on the night he stepped from the shadows of professional football obscurity and made his name synonymous with NFL misbehavior. In the wake of his accident, Little was suspended for eight games by the NFL. His punishment? 90 days in jail and 1,000 hours of community service. A few years later, Little took the field for the NFC Championship Game. One of the many photographers ringing the field to cover the game was the husband of the woman he killed.

Dwayne Goodrich, the top-ranked defensive back in his high-school class, signed with Tennessee in the spring of 1996. A 5-foot-11, 200-pound native of Oak Lawn, Ill., Goodrich and Little started alongside each other on the UT defense in 1997. Goodrich played four years, three as a starter at left cornerback. A stealthy athlete with a nose for the ball, Goodrich pounced when others blinked, picking off a quarterback's pass or grabbing a bouncing fumble and racing the other direction. In the 1998 BCS title game, Goodrich stifled Florida State All-American wide receiver Peter Warrick. In the second quarter, Goodrich stepped in front of Warrick and picked off a Marcus Outzen pass that he returned for a touchdown. In the six seconds it took him to cover the 54 yards of Fiesta Bowl turf, Goodrich's life peaked.

He would be named the Fiesta Bowl defensive MVP and after the following season he was drafted in the second round by the Dallas Cowboys. He never made a significant contribution on the field, On that January night in 2003, Goodrich spent another six seconds, the bookend to his mad dash to the end zone in the BCS title game, swerving his BMW to avoid the fiery car on the interstate. In so doing Goodrich struck all three men at such a high rate of speed that the clothes and shoes were ripped off all of them. He did not stop, and did not report to police until the next day. The victims' families allege he was intoxicated, but Goodrich claims that was not the case. He is now serving 12 years in prison. At Tennessee's 10-year reunion for the national championship team of 1998, Goodrich's mother attended on his behalf. "Dwayne wishes he could be here," she said.

"Dwayne, man, Dwayne was funny," says another former teammate. "An exciting, funny guy. You wanted to have him around you. He was never in trouble, always played hard. It's unbelievable to me what happened to him, it really is."

Stallworth, a native of Sacramento, Calif., came to Knoxville as a heralded wide receiver in the class of 1998. Wanting to play in the SEC, Stallworth contacted Florida, but was rebuffed. "Tell him we don't recruit California," said Steve Spurrier.

A teammate of Goodrich's for two years, Stallworth emerged as a dominant big-play wide receiver by his junior season. In the next-to-last regular season SEC game in 2001, Stallworth scored three times against Kentucky on touchdown catches covering 59, 23, and 38 yards. With his combination of speed and smarts, it was impossible for teams to cover him with one defensive player. Watching Stallworth sprint down the sideline, it all seemed too easy, as he left one man after another in his wake, it never appeared he was even attempting to run very fast. No one caught Stallworth from behind. Leaving college with a year of eligibility remaining, Stallworth put up a blazing 40 time and was selected No. 13 overall in 2002's first round by the New Orleans Saints.

"Donte, and I'm not just saying this to say it, is one of the nicest guys you have ever met in your life. Everyone loved him," a former teammate said this week. "Football's a violent game, but Donte wouldn't hurt a fly."

Little, Goodrich, and Stallworth were all teammates at Tennessee during a dominant run for the program. From 1995 to 2001, the Vol football team compiled a record of 73-14, winning two SEC Championships, a national title, finishing the season ranked in the top 10, five of the six years. But there was a downside to Tennessee's on-field success, the team courted trouble off the field. While many of the programs star players were exemplary on and off the gridiron, think Manning and linebacker Al Wilson, others flirted with the dark side of collegiate athletics. Arrests were not uncommon; the criminal justice system of Knoxville was familiar with the Vols. But, according to their teammates, that was not the case with Little, Goodrich, or Stallworth.

"All of them were good guys," says another teammate, "sometimes you'd look around the locker room and think, and every team had these guys not just us, 'That guy is going to be in real trouble some day.' But none of those three guys were like that. None of them. Not even remotely close. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, whether any of them ever did a thing that made me think they might end up like this. And no matter how long I think about it, nothing. They were good guys. I thought they'd reflect well on our program. They just made some bad decisions. Maybe it was the only bad decision they've made in their whole lives."

In the wake of the accidents we're left with several questions, none of which have easy answers. How long after an individual leaves a university do we still associate their actions, good or bad, with that university? Little was gone less than a year, Goodrich three years, Stallworth seven. Is it even fair to acknowledge their relationship to Tennessee in conjunction with their crimes? Or should we be more focused on the NFL, the league that made each of these young men a millionaire when they signed their first contract? Is that league the more likely culprit? Or is it even possible to assign any blame that extends beyond the men themselves? How we might wonder, in a world of such infinite variety, does the wheel of fate spin so similarly for these three men?

In the end, there's really only one certainty, lightning has struck in Knoxville.