The spark flashed at 7:44 a.m. Pacific time, a simple tweet from a reporter named Sam Alipour from ESPN The Magazine.
“My @ESPNMag story: marijuana & Oregon football,” it read. “50% of Ducks smoke weed. But ‘it’s not just us.’”
Afterward came the obligatory link, soon to be retweeted by ESPN The Magazine’s official Twitter account and thus passed to all of its 15,000-plus followers. What those first readers came upon was the headline “We smoked it all,” and a solitary photo of a football emblazoned with a marijuana leaf, underneath which was a fairly explosive story that quoted past and present day Oregon football players confirming widespread marijuana use on the team — anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of players. The piece opened with a current Oregon player — who was unnamed — lighting up a joint in his home with the reporter watching and claiming, “If you think Oregon’s the only team smoking weed, you’re crazy.” @@http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/7819621/ncf-oregon-ducks-deny-drug-culture-eugene-espn-magazine@@

Whether anyone truly fostered that notion didn’t matter. Within the confines of the social media world — which are both impossibly large and perilously narrow — all that mattered was Oregon’s name being plastered onto the Tweets and comments and Facebook posts that followed. Just over an hour after Alipour’s first tweet, the story having been digested by an early crowd of readers, he began to answer questions and criticisms posted to his account.
The response was decidedly and predictably mixed. Where fellow ESPN writer Arash Markazi was among the first to praise his colleague for a “nice story,” Duck offensive lineman Ramsen Golpashin took immediate offense, and wrote to Alipour, “So lets take an issue prevalent across CFB (college football), interview a bunch of Ducks, & make it an Oregon issue.” @@https://twitter.com/#!/samalipour/status/192643408450424832@@
Alipour responded by pointing out the story didn’t just concern Oregon, but the message was clear: “We smoked it all” had struck a nerve, the athletic department was scrambling to respond and Eugene once again found itself at the center of attention for the wrong reasons.
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University junior Sam Connell only skimmed the article, but he wasn’t happy with what he saw. He doesn’t have anything against marijuana in general, but draws a line when it comes to those who, like it or not, represent the University of Oregon as a whole.
“I don’t think smoking weed is necessarily a bad thing, as long as you do it on your own time and not affiliated with any extracurricular activity or anything like that,” Connell said. “I’m not embarrassed, I’m just upset that that’s the attention that our school is getting. Because there’s a lot better stuff that we could be known for besides our athletes getting high a lot.”
For Connell, a potential solution lies in better drug testing practices. One of the statistics that struck him in ESPN’s coverage was that just .6 percent of 400,000 student athletes in the NCAA are tested for marijuana. Of course, a key point in the Oregon athletic department’s limited response to the story Wednesday was that drug testing policies are limited by state law, which does not allow for random testing. According to the athletic department Substance Use and Drug Testing policy, “The screening process shall be initiated only on the basis of individualized reasonable suspicion or on the basis of failing a laboratory-generated specimen-integrity test in the course of a previous screening under these rules … ‘Reasonable suspicion’ shall not mean a mere ‘hunch’ or ‘intuition.’ It shall instead be based upon a specific event or occurrence which has led to the belief that a student-athlete has used any drugs.”
In the absence of such evidence, the athletic department asserts that it is handcuffed to enforce testing. @@enforcing testing?@@But that doesn’t keep Connell and others from wondering what more could be done to prevent such damning stories from coming to life.
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Yet in many ways, Connell appears to be in the minority among the student body. Indeed, when sophomore Conor Rowe first caught wind of the story, one idea sparked to mind. Maybe, he thought, this could actually help recruiting.
Where some like Connell see the revelations as troubling, Rowe views the prevalence of marijuana in sports as a simple fact of life.
“I played sports in high school, I knew a lot of people who played sports in high school,” Rowe said. “And a lot more people than people would think smoke marijuana and play sports at the same time. I’m not really surprised at all; everyone knows Eugene is notorious for marijuana and whatnot.
“You know, Michael Phelps likes to party, and he’s an Olympic athlete. He’s probably the most fit person I’d put my money on.”
Oregon players, apparently, are just more forthcoming than others; perhaps that honesty and the apparent abundance of marijuana will encourage other like-minded players to attend the school.
“On top of all the sweet uniforms, facilities, yeah I bet that goes through (their mind),” Rowe said. “They’re not saying it; maybe just between themselves. But they’re thinking about it for sure, at least I think.”
Junior MacAllister Mawson, while wholly unsurprised with the article’s core revelations (“My initial reaction was, ‘Duh’”), also found himself struck by the players’ honesty. Both the forthcomingness of the players and lack of discernible bias from the author were refreshing for Mawson, and unlike Connell, he doesn’t care about how Oregon is perceived at a national level.
“Who cares about Oregon PR?” he said. “I don’t really care how the nation sees us. And the other thing is, you could see it as a bad thing, but you could also see it as being a good thing. Eugene is an open-minded campus where the athletes are free to maybe smoke weed. They’re also very good athletes, so I think it’s obvious that it’s not affecting their performance.
“I think that maybe some students will see that article and be like, ‘University of Oregon seems like a cool place, a good place to go to school.’”
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In many ways, the spark lit by Alipour’s article when it popped up early Wednesday morning was more the embodiment of a half-screwed lightbulb being tightened to life. Past events — from Jeremiah Masoli’s dismissal to Cliff Harris’ much-discussed transgressions — hinted at what ESPN’s piece stated explicitly: a great many Oregon players, perhaps even a majority, use marijuana.
Elsewhere, perhaps this information would have been digested differently. Indeed, at a national level 26.7 percent of college football players use the drug, and that includes students in schools far removed from discussion as “weed capital of the world,” as former Duck Reuben Droughns described Eugene in the story. Where Alabama coach Nick Saban calls marijuana a “huge problem” in another ESPN piece written by Mark Schlabach, many students in Eugene view it as commonplace.
“You walk around, there’s people smoking everywhere,” Rowe said.  “The whole streets smell like weed.” @@http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/7819005/ncf-tcu-marijuana-problem-just-one-many-elite-college-programs-espn-magazine@@
Most of that smell isn’t coming from football players; as senior journalism major Cameron Clow tweeted, a 40 to 60 percent usage rate is “much lower than a given dorm hall, which is roughly the same size as the football team.” And who would know better than a student himself? @@https://twitter.com/#!/camclow/status/192661507727822849@@
Both the raw data and juicy anecdotes are out there for all to see. But, if student reactions are any indication, debate surrounding this particular issue will likely go the route of an ebbing flame or, yes, a withering joint: flickering, flickering, and then gone.