A major component in the pageantry of college athletics is the idea of representation. Student-athletes represent their school when they compete on a national level, and must carry themselves with that notion in mind. A team of high GPAs means a school of high GPAs. A team of suspension candidates and hooligans means a school of the same. Supposedly.

So when you read a headline like “Illinois basketball player arrested” your instinct is to cringe, or at least shake your head in disappointment.

But when you cut through the crap, what we really appear to have is the University Police Department making a signature catch thanks to some questionable ethics on the part of the police and drunken panic on the part of Darius Paul.

Darius Paul is 20 years old, which means he’s old enough to enter bars in Champaign. And since he’s old enough to enter the bars, he’s de facto old enough to drink.

And while it may be shameful to see a son from the House of Paul bring arrest charges under the family name, let’s look at what the report says happened and see whether there’s really any problem.

So Paul was drunk. That’s not legal. But do you have a problem with a 20-year-old drinking alcohol? I don’t. It’s likely that the majority of writers who reported on Paul’s arrest, and the majority of those who read about it, and possibly the arresting officer himself, drank before they turned 21. Especially if they went to college. Especially if they went to Illinois. Everybody does it. It’s cliché because it’s true.

The officer approached Paul and another individual, according to the Daily Illini’s staff report, “because of the time of night and because they appeared to be trying to avoid contact with police.”

Well, let’s see about that. The time of night was before 3 a.m., which is how late campustown restaurants will stay open when they want to draw in the bar crowd. So I don’t know how the police officer can find it suspicious to see people walking around campustown before 3 a.m.

And they appeared to be trying to avoid contact with police. Well yeah. Any reasonable drunk 20-year-old would do well to avoid police. When I was 20, I generally stuck to that protocol.

When they tracked him down, Paul decided to run, which is where he went wrong in the police’s eyes. But hey, being Darius Paul means a few things: You have disciplinary actions to face beyond legal troubles should you get caught, you don’t want to make your team look bad, you don’t have $320 lying around to pay off a drinking ticket, the police know who you are and will happily catch you, and also it means you’re pretty fast.

So yes, of course he should have stopped and taken the hit. But he had been drinking and made a bad decision, like 20-year-olds will do.

It’s not like he got a DUI, which is an offense that puts people’s lives at risk. He’s just a 20-year-old college student, who drank and got caught. Though not necessarily positively, he’s representing his school accurately.

We can’t be sure how much of a factor race was in this arrest. If it’s not, then the police have made some weird leaps in determining that it’s suspicious for college students to be out at 3 a.m., and that their initial evasiveness was atypical.

But if race did factor in, then these logical leaps make a little more sense. Maybe being black at 3 a.m. constitutes probable cause. As a 5-foot-6 white guy, I don’t remember police ever questioning me for being out at 3 a.m., or looking to see if I’m “trying to avoid contact with” them.

It could’ve just been the odd sight of Paul’s 6-foot-8 frame that drew their attention. Or maybe the officer knew who he was and thought: “That’s Darius Paul, I’m going to go check on him.” I’d like to think race had nothing to do with it. But I’m honestly skeptical.

So what should John Groce do? Maybe a suspension for one regular season game, or a half, is appropriate. But don’t go overboard, and let’s all refrain from going overboard into the territory of questioning Darius Paul’s character. All he’s shown us is that he likes to have fun, and maybe that we shouldn’t trust him to make a crunch-time decision.

Eliot is a senior in Media. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @EliotTweet.