Mitch McGary Turning Pro After Positive Weed Tests Nets Him a 1-Year Ban

By D.J. Byrnes on April 25, 2014 at 9:39 am
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Well, this is bizarre. From Yahoo!:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Mitch McGary took a deep breath. He wanted to tell the story of why he smoked marijuana one night in March, why the NCAA suspended him for a year because of it and why the confluence of those events is helping lead him to declare for June's NBA draft. It wasn't easy, so he started at the beginning.

For months, McGary had struggled to come to terms with the back injury that limited him to just eight games for the University of Michigan this season, none after mid-December. Less than a year earlier, he helped lead the Wolverines to the 2013 national title game as a star freshman. Now, he was a spectator.

One night in mid-March, with the NCAA tournament about to begin without him, McGary was hanging out with a group of friends at Michigan. He had a few drinks. Someone offered some marijuana – a common occurrence, he said, on campus.

"I always turned it down," McGary told Yahoo Sports. "But that night I didn't."

The NCAA recently ruled that the Devil's Lettuce isn't a performance-enhancing drug and relaxed its draconian sentencing standards on the issue. (It's now a mere 6-month ban for smoking the plant, but obviously McGary wasn't grandfathered in.)

It was probably in McGary's best interest to leave Michigan anyway after failing to take advantage of his sky-high stock after Michigan's run to the 2013 finals, but now it looks like he's fleeing the consequences of his actions.

I guess the message is simple: Don't drink alcohol, because you'll end up smoking your buddy's weed. 


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