The Fulmer Cup — especially with the recent one-man, taser fueled surge from San Jose St. to throw the contest into complete disarray — as noted by MountainLair is lacking real presence from the Big East.

That’s not fair. The Bulls are trying to show they are a player in the realm of arrests and criminal activity. It’s just that the damn academics keep them from being part of the team. Case in point:

I caught the arrest late enough Monday night that I wasn’t able to get a lot of details beyond the basic charges. In short, police say Stirrups stole digital cameras worth about $300 each and other small items from cars parked in the parking lot near Tampa International Airport where he and his mother worked.

When I called Pearl River Community College, where Stirrups was set to play this fall after failing to qualify academically at USF, coach Tim Hatten was blunt: This was not the kind of activity he’d tolerate in his program, not the kind of character he wanted to bring to Mississippi. Unless the charges go away very quickly, Stirrups has no place on his team.

The easy reaction is that it’s slightly hypocritical that one day after he takes Carlton Hill off USF’s hands, knowing he’s had a recent arrest for possession of marijuana, Hatten says he wants no part of Stirrups and his error in judgment. With Stirrups though, the issue is greater, because it attacks a coach’s ability to trust the young man. If he’s willing to steal from customers of a business that employs both himself and his own mother, what conscience would stop him from stealing from a teammate’s locker?

What’s truly mindless in all of this, both funny and sad at the same time, is how Stirrups got caught: With both cameras, police say he took a few pictures of himself and friends before pawning them, never deleting the images. So when police were able to recover the cameras, they saw the post-theft pics and showed them around at the parking lot office. Of course, they could identify him; he worked there. It’s the kind of silliness you normally laugh at while reading Carl Hiassen novels.

His six felony counts are remarkably similar to another USF signee who failed to qualify academically and wound up at Pearl River three years ago, a linebacker named Gene Coleman.

[Emphasis added.]

They are trying. That’s important. They just need to get that element academically qualified first. Right now, they aren’t quite there yet.