Barely a day after it was reported that Auburn quarterback Sean White had been arrested for public intoxication, Tigers head coach Gus Malzahn dismissed White from the program, saying in a statement that White had “made poor decisions that are not in the best interest of our program, and more importantly, himself.”
White was reportedly arrested “on view” at 2:45 a.m. Sunday morning following Auburn’s win over Mercer this weekend, with the location of the arrest listed in the report as Auburn’s police station. Details in the arrest report are scarce. However, it does say that White did not resist, had no injuries, and previously had not been arrested.
The strangest part of this story is that White, at 21, is of the legal drinking age. That doesn’t mean it was OK for him to be drunk in public in front of cops, and it would have been very dangerous had he gotten behind the wheel of a car. But based on the details currently being released, White didn’t do anything out of the ordinary for an average college student. A 21-year-old getting a little too drunk during the weekend certainly doesn’t seem like the kind of offense that would get the starting quarterback in last season’s Sugar Bowl kicked off a team.
White was previously suspended two games for undisclosed reasons at the beginning of this season, and he’s lost the starting job and didn’t play against Mercer. It seems like there might be more to this story—some additional behavior that led to Malzahn wanting him gone—but based solely on the information that’s public, this is a pretty dumb reason to punish a college student in such a severe way.
The fairly vague arrest report, obtained by the Montgomery Adviser, is embedded below.