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Tuesday briefing: 5/21/2013

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Mike Gross

Manheim Central’s 39-38, double-overtime defeat of Pine-Richland in a howling blizzard for 2003 Class AAA state football championship game was the best game I have ever seen, in any sport at any level. The Barons’ 3-0 defeat of Strath Haven in the semis that year was, in its own bizarre way, almost as good.

The Jerry Sandusky scandal and all its ever expanding ripples is probably the most interesting and certainly most important thing I have covered, but the Barons’ run in 2003 was like a Disney sports movie, except that it happened. Still a little hard to believe.

Anyway, Lancaster Newspapers is publishing a book about the season, mostly those two games in particular, to mark its 10th anniversary. It will include archival material and original writing from BPR and, probably, be available in electronic and traditional formats.

I’m excited about it for a number of reasons, not least of which is that I want to write books, and this is sort of forcing me to develop that muscle. It’s going to occupy much of my summer (which is fine, especially since the Phillies suck) but not nearly all of it. There’s the U.S. Open coming up in a few weeks, Big Ten Media days in July, whatever Penn State stuff comes up. As we’ve learned, Penn State stuff will come up.

This week: District softball playoffs (you heard me) tomorrow, the Manheim Touchdown Club all-star game (yes, football) Saturday, and, I hope, a feature sometime on Chris Finch, the former F&M star and now Houston Rockets assistant coach.

In other news:

Got some interesting e-mails about the Penn State health-care column, more than one of which suggested the word vendetta could be applied to Sports Illustrated.

There’s a theory that some among the national media were arrogantly sure Penn State was going down in flames post-Sandusky. It hasn’t quite happened, so now they’re going to help it along. Sounds like crackpot-fan conspiracy-theory stuff, but in the wake of this SI piece there’s some substance behind it.

Did a radio spot on WLPA 1490 about the column yesterday, and Starkie and I just taped a “Low Post,” about it. I’ll link to it ASAP.

Yes, the United States Golf Association is a bunch of stuffy, blue-blazered aristocrats. It also loves and cares about the game in a way that has nothing to do with power or profit, and it is right about this anchored-putter thing.

Jennifer Johnson, 21, who got her first win on the LPGA tour Sunday, is a student of Mike Swisher, the retired pro at Lebanon Country Club, even though she’s from San Diego. On her web site, Johnson lists Lebanon CC among her “partners,” and even gives a shout-out to Seltzer’s Lebanon Bologna, which she describes as: “Unbelievably good and a great source of 90% lean beef protein on the golf course. Love the small 3 packs that my caddy and I can share on the course. My friends at Lebanon Country Club got me eating this stuff, and I can’t quit now!”

Lebanon bologna=health food? Yet another reason we can’t let the terrorists win.

Tuesday briefing: 5/7/13, on the Bulls, the Heat, Derrick Rose and etc..

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Mike Gross

Sixteen hours ago I tweeted this: “Maybe I’m nuts (ok, there’s no question about it) but I think the Bulls have a shot tonight. Heat hasn’t been in a fight in a long time.”

Which is probably as close as anybody came to predicting what happened in Miami last night.

I bring this up only partly to be a dick, because let’s face it, “the Bulls have a shot tonight,” is a pretty feeble excuse for a prediction. But I really did think the Heat would have some issues, some of them Bulls-specific, some not.

Miami is my current favorite sports team, really the only current sports team I root for. But they are, it’s fair to say, a team whose intensity and energy and focus wax and wane some. It’s not baked into their DNA as it is for the Bulls, for example. As I said in the tweet, they hadn’t been in a fight for a long time, arguably since the same Bulls ended their regular-season winning streak, what, six weeks ago?

They hadn’t played basketball at all in a week. Rust was an issue, obviously so in the first half, when the Heat got better shots than anyone should against the Bulls’ defense and just missed them.

But Miami led the game in the final minutes. With the freshest legs they will have in the playoffs, they allowed 35 fourth-quarter points to a team that can’t score.

As beat-up as they are, the Bulls can match Miami in defense and intensity, and out-do them on the glass (46-32 last night). The question is, or ought to be, how do they score?

Nate Robinson is the wild card. He scored a game-high 27, 24 in the second half, seven in the last two minutes. He’s like 5-7. What does Miami do with him? Sic Wade on him and deny him the ball? Put Lebron on him? That will at least look amusing. Actually Robinson’s fearlessness is a double-edged sword. His shot selection is often ridiculous, and he shoots his teams out of games and of often and into. Maybe the best course is for Miami to let him get even more full of himself than usual.

Also: Tibs is the best coach in this sport right now. I know all about Pops (and I enjoy the fact that we’re referring to coaches as Tibs and Pops), but Tibs gets things out of his troops that aren’t supposed to be possible in this sport. It’s hard to root against them.

Having said that: The Bulls aren’t winning the series. It’s entirely possible that last night was nothing more or less than the smack in the face Miami needed. But here’s a fun fact: Not counting games they tanked to rest people, the Heat has lost exactly twice since Super Bowl Sunday. Both losses were to the Chicago Bulls.

In other news:

In the penultimate game of the Memphis-Clippers series, Blake Griffin sustained a high-ankle sprain. Asked about this, Zack Randolph made a bid for the Olympic scoffing team: So what? Everybody’s hurt this time of year. Shut up and play, etc, etc.

Griffin ended up playing in the the next game, his and the Clippers’ last of the season as it turned out, so it should have been a moot point. Except that Randolph was objecting to Griffin even being an issue he should have to talk about.

Randolph mostly got approving nods from the media. Question: Why doesn’t what he said apply to Derrick Rose?

We all agree, I think, that a critical distinction in these matters in the one between being injured and being hurt, i.e., if you’re injured sit down, if you’re hurt, suck it up and get back out there. Most people seem to agree on that.

Griffin had a high ankle sprain, an injury that has caused NFL players to miss weeks and even months. So who could more accurately be described as injured, as opposed to hurt, a guy who tore an ACL a year ago or a guy with a high ankle sprain from two days ago?

On Jason Collins and social progress

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Mike Gross

Forty years ago, Billie Jean King was outed by an ex-girlfriend. King, widely regarded then and now as a tough-minded social pioneer, was compelled to publicly deny it. To lie about it. The time wasn’t right.

Thirty years ago, Martina Navratilova wanted to out herself but couldn’t, she said on ESPN radio this morning, because it would have been reason to deny her U.S. citizenship. Read that sentence again. Denied citizenship, in the 1980s, in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Twenty years ago America and the world were in the grip of terror and paranoia about HIV/AIDS, and NBA players openly expressed fear of being on the same court, perhaps mixing sweat and blood, with HIV-positive players.

Ten years ago, I wrote a column about Rush Limbaugh and Donovan McNabb, after Rush infamously said McNabb was overrated because of the media’s desire to see a black quarterback succeed, that included the following:

“Harken back 25 years, to when the sports media were just getting used to Doug Williams, one of the first big-time African-American NFL quarterbacks.
The first thing you should know about Doug Williams is that he wasn’t that much of a player, at least early in his career. Sure, he eventually hooked up with Joe Gibbs, the great Washington Redskins coach, became a pretty good QB and won a Super Bowl. Bear in mind that Mark Rypien won a Super Bowl with Gibbs.
But in 1979, Williams was pretty much Kordell Stewart. And everybody was afraid to say so.
The point is you could take what Rush Limbaugh said, remove McNabb’s name and plug in Doug Williams, go back 25 years, and there would at least be some reality-tethered basis for it.
That’s not because sportswriters are or ever were part of the giant, agenda-pushing liberal media conspiracy of dittohead fantasy. It’s because we root for the story.
Our favorite: one man struggling against and finally triumphing over racial and cultural barriers and, by doing it through sports, giving others hope.
The Jackie Robinson story. We love it to death.
Not a bad story to love, but we get carried away.
We tried to make Tiger Woods Jackie Robinson. Remember that aboriginal sprinter who won a gold medal at the Sydney Olympics? Aborigines are to Australia as blacks are to America, sort of, so we tried to make her Jackie Robinson, too.
In 1979, we tried hard to make Doug Williams Jackie Robinson.

I bring this up in the hope that we don’t try to make Jason Collins Jackie Robinson, because he isn’t even close. Nothing at all against Collins. That he isn’t close is a good thing, because its a measure of how far we’ve come.

Jason Collins is a marginal NBA player, and he’s 34 and about to be a free agent. His gayness, it says here, is more likely to help him get an NBA job next season than to hurt. If he does play again and maybe if he doesn’t, he’ll face some hatred and stupidity.

The black community, which dominates the NBA, and the fundamentalist Christian community (two groups which intersect, apparently, at ESPN’s Chris Broussard) are not known for their tolerance on this topic. It’ll be interesting to see if the two sides of this country’s Grand Canyon-esque political divide can refrain from turning Collins (on one side of the divide) and Broussard (on the other) into straw men for their purposes.

On other other hand, what if Broussard served his views without a palate-cleansing side order of religion?

Anyway, I don’t fear for Collins’ safety, no matter how political he intends to become. In fact, a prediction: The heat he faces won’t match what LeBron James, for example, faced for exercizing his right to escape a hopeless basketball situation in Cleveland.

In a couple days, most of us will have moved on. No more to see here. Go about your business, folks. Social progress, fitfully, marches on.

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More on Steven Bench and Bill O’Brien

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Mike Gross

The piece on Bench leaving Penn State in today’s paper was by necessity short and basic. That’s not a complaint; space was at a premium, that’s just how it goes sometimes.

But there’s a lot more I want to say about the situation and what it shows us about Bill O’Brien. That’s what blogs are for.

At one of the Friday-night get-togethers on the road last year, somebody asked O’Brien to describe what he looks for in a quarterback, and he launched into an amazing spiel. A quarterback has to be the smartest guy in the room, and the most knowledgable, and the hardest-working.

He has to know that every minute he’s on the field, in practice and in games, there are eyes on him. Everything he says, verbally or through body language, registers. Quarterbacks are different, are perceived differently, than everyone else on a football team, and the ideal quarterback not only gets that, in all the ways it manifests itself, but welcomes it.

It wasn’t a prepared speech, of course, just a bunch of guys sitting around with beers. But O’Brien was, I believe, speaking from specific memory. I believe he was describing Tom Brady.

Every year he’s at Penn State, I believe, O’Brien will try to find his Brady, not so much in terms of talent and skill (although that would, of course, be ideal) but in terms of the intangibles he spoke of, and in terms of replicating the kind of relationship he had with Brady as the New England Patriots’ QB coach and offensive coordinator. There can only be one Brady at a time, of course, which is one reason why a two-QB system is something O’Brien can barely bring himself to discuss.

Matt McGloin turned himself into that guy last year. Asked in a post-game presser when he knew it, O’Brien immediately mentioned a QB-room session, long before the season started, in which O’Brien named a play and asked McGloin to go the board and diagram it. McGloin did it, as quickly as if he was signing his own name, and could not only draw it but get inside it, and describe not only his role in the play but the role of the other 10 players.

Tyler Ferguson may not have even been ahead of Bench, in any tangible way. But I’m hearing that Ferguson has worked as if obsessed since he got to Penn State in January. He’s probably not O’Brien’s next Tom Brady yet, but he’s made it clearer than ever that Bench would never be. As Neil Rudel pointed out in a smart column today, O’Brien didn’t play Bench last year at times, in the dregs of blowout wins, when getting McGloin out just for his health seemed an obvious move.

Most college coaches would probably have kept Bench, as insurance or as a player he hasn’t seen enough to write off. But that would mean a third guy (with Ferguson and Christian Hackenberg) getting practice snaps in August, complicating things, blurring the big-picture.

Further, O’Brien may believe one of his two freshman walk-ons, D.J. Crook and Austin Whipple, can be at least 85-90 percent of Steven Bench and save him a precious scholarship.

Yes, we’re back to the NCAA sanctions. They’ve forced O’Brien to manage his roster like an NFL coach. Cut and run. Decide and move on. Travel lean and fast. He is, even without the sanctions, just by nature, incredibly, startlingly confident and decisive. Time will tell if another adjective – impulsive – should be thrown in there.

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Monday briefing: 4/22/13

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Mike Gross

Charles Barkley, on TNT last night, said this is going to be the worst first round in NBA playoff history. I like Charles. I really do. But in his endless effort to be flippant and audacious, he says way too many dumb things.

True, in eight first-round NBA playoff game ones this weekend, eight favorite/home teams won, six of them easily, with only one game going to the wire (here’s to you: Andre Miller).

Most years, there are only 4-5 teams with any chance at all to win the NBA championship, and we all know which they are by December or so. There is no such thing as the equivalent of the 2012 Baltimore Orioles in the NBA. You can’t do it with smoke and mirrors. The teams that are good are really good.

Over the last three seasons, 2010-12, in 24 first-round series, the higher seed has gone 19-5. Of the five “upsets,” two of them came in 4- vs. 5-seed matches, one of them Utah over Denver in 2010 when the teams had the same regular-season record. Last year, the Sixers wouldn’t have beat the Bulls without Derrick Rose’s injury.

The NBA regular season, and the playoffs, are both twice as long as they ought to be. As a result, it takes to long to get to the really good stuff. But then when those 4-5 legit teams play the roughly 12th-through-16th best teams, what happens is what’s supposed to happen. Not a bad thing.

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Tiger and the Rules of Golf

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Mike Gross

In Sunday’s paper I had a column on the Tiger illegal-drop controversy. I was unhappy with it by the time I was driving home from work Saturday night (although I got a few e-mails from readers who said they dug it; I appreciate that).

Around 2 a.m. Sunday morning I woke up and, frustrated, pretty much rewrote the thing in my head. I do that sometimes. Anyway, it should have gone something like this:

Tiger Woods could have had a little better handle on the Rules of Golf.

Joe LeCava, Tiger’s caddie, could have been sharp and aware enough that, when Tiger was consulting with him about his plan to drop back a couple yards to fit this wedge shot in a little better, he could have said, “Dude, are you sure you’re allowed to do that?

Luke Donald and Scott Piercy, Tiger’s playing partners, could have been a little more vigilant in their role as co-officials of their threesome, perhaps asking Tiger, in a polite and gentlemanly manner, what he was up to there.

The self-appointed rules official at home on his couch somewhere could have left his phone in his fanny pack, if you want to go there.

ESPN’s Andy North could have said something less stupid than, “I saw a travel in that Lakers’ game. Should I call it in and see what happens?”

On the other hand, Brandel Chamblee of the Golf Channel, who wanted to see Tiger WD and said “This is going to be the most controversial thing that follows him around for the rest of his career,” could have brought it down a notch.

If we’re talking bad decisions and controversies that will follow Tiger around, No. 1 and 2 involve a Swedish model and a Texas swing coach, and there’s nothing in third place.

And yes, after the rules committee talked to Tiger Saturday morning and he had a chance to think long and hard about what happened here, he could have taken it on himself to step aside.

But there’s no real villain in any of the above. Just a whole lot of B-to-C-minus behavior when Grade-A behavior would have been nice.

The only inexplicable behavior, really indefensible behavior, came from the Augusta National rules committee. To review, Tiger did what he did, and the guy on the couch called in and said I think maybe he did it, so the rules committee said we’ll look at the replay and see what we think.

They looked at the replay, looking for a specific thing, and the video shows pretty clearly that the specific thing happened, and the rules committee just shrugged and said no problem, nothing to see here, no penalty, everybody just move along. It’d be crazy to state flatly that the committee reacted as it did because the competitor in question happened to be Tiger Woods, but it’d be equally crazy to utterly reject that possibility.

The committee didn’t reopen the case until Tiger essentially admitted breaking the rule on purpose, and strategically, in an interview with ESPN.

How? According to rules committee chair Fred Ridley, Tiger was still on the course when the review occurred. Even if you don’t quite trust the video for some reason, think the camera angle is inconclusive, whatever …. how can you not at least say, “We’ve got to make sure we talk to Tiger before he signs his card?”

If they did talk to Tiger, presumably he would have told the committee is essence what he told ESPN, they’d have assessed a two-shot penalty, and we wouldn’t be talking about this right now.

Golf is, with justification, proud of its reputation for self-government. The players officiate themselves, and keep their own score. But in patting itself on the back for its own integrity, golf is failing, I think to see that it has some problems in terms of how its rules are enforced.

Think about just this: If Tiger was an obscure golfer, and there was thus no video on what he did Friday and no interview afterward, he’d have completely gotten away with it. No penalty. No DQ. Nothing.

It’s not about cheating. Gaming the system is not the issue. But this small part of golf is a little broke right now. It’s fixable, but not without acknowledging the problem.

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Masters post mortem

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Mike Gross

When golfers say, in whatever phrasing, that every failure is a step toward eventual success, it sounds like something from a syrupy self-help book or a poster of a kitten on a college girls’ dorm- room wall.

But it’s also the simple truth, and there has never been a better example of it than Adam Scott.

Scott is 32. He is a brilliant talent with an immaculate swing but, until very lately, by consensus an underachieving career, held back by a balky putter.

He has remade himself on the greens with the long putter, and has quietly finished 15th or better in seven of the last nine majors. Quietly, at least, until he took an three-shot lead with four holes left in the British Open last summer and blew it, just because he was turned a quarter-turn too tight.

Sunday, he was exactly the right amount of tight, and there’s no question that the failures, the persistent knocking on the door, made him that way.

Scott figures as a worthy candidate for world No. 1, you’d think, for at least the next five years or so, assuming they don’t ban the long putter. Good Tweet from Sunday: “Manute Bol called. He wants his putter back.”

If they do ban it, it’ll really be interesting to see how/if he recovers, because he really anchors it. Looks like he’s driving a fence post into the ground.

The rest of the cast:

Angel Cabrera: A weird amalgam of, let’s say, Lee Trevino and Mark Calcavecchia, world No. 269 came within less than an inch (the combined length by which he missed perfect-looking chip/putts on 17 in regulation and each playoff hole) of winning his third major.

What a goofy career. His only two wins on the US Tour are a Masters and a US Open. The vast majority of his 39 international wins are in relatively minor-league events even by international standards. Interesting hall of fame debate.

Tianlang Guan: At age 14, he shot 300 with a slow-play penalty, made the cut and was low amateur. As much attention as he got, not sure it was enough. Tiger Woods is rightly considered one of sport’s all-time prodigies, and at, say, 18, he wasn’t one of the best 200 players in the world. This kid is 14. Doesn’t mean we’ll ever hear from him again, but geez.

Eldrick Tiger Woods: I’ll get to the illegal drop and its fallout in a subsequent post. …

I thought he drove it tremendously. Seems like he’s assimilated Sean Foley’s ideas fully now, and is playing golf, not golf swing.

But his age is not the only reason he’ll never be what he once was. He has scar tissue now, and that’s the critical fact that defines the current golf era. It seems to have affected him in terms of scoring, and as a competitor.

He might still be the best golfer in the world because he’s the most talented golfer ever, and he still works at it and fights like crazy. But he’s no longer mentally and emotionally bulletproof, and it’s hard to imagine he ever will be again.

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Monday briefing: 4/15/13

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Mike Gross

Was planning to do a big, rambling Masters post-mortem and some other stuff, but the events of today in Boston have made that, and any sportswriting, seem silly and pointless. My heart will be back in it, or I’ll force it to be, tomorrow.

Anyhow, this week:

At LNP, news side staff is working on Boston Marathon stories from a local perspective, since of course some local folks ran the marathon. Other than offering a few ideas/suggestions, I’m not involved.

From me, tomorrow, the Masters post-mortem and other stuff on BPR, the Low Post with Starkie, and an advance on the Blue-White game for Wednesday’s paper. Couple other things in the hopper, about which I can’t say more than that right now.

Thursday is the Barnstormers’ season opener. I’ll be doing a column to go alongside Burt Wilson’s game coverage. I’ll be surprised if the BSers aren’t very good again. Also, LNP’s Barnstormers’ season preview tabloid section, appears in tomorrow’s paper. It’s an impressive piece of work and, if you’re at all into the team, a must buy.

I’m hoping to start doing podcasts from time to time. I’m not sure what’s technically involved, but I’m told it’s doable, and I’ll find out tomorrow, which is one of my two major in-office days of the week. Best-case scenario is an NBA playoff podcast Friday.

Saturday is the fabulous Blue-White game at the Beav. Story, column, etc.

As to the horrific events in Boston, I have nothing to add to the tons of things you’ll read and hear over the coming days, except that the possibility of this sort of violent mayhem at major sports events is just going to be a reality of modern life from now on. I’m reminded of the unease I felt walking into Beaver Stadium in the weeks after 9/11, unease that, sadly, will never fully go away.

Peace.

Friday briefing: 4/12/13

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Mike Gross

Tiger’s right where he wants to be after round one at Augusta. Didn’t hit it great, didn’t do anything special, but managed his way around nicely. Since he played about as bad as he’s going to, his confidence is likely through the roof.

He got himself right in the hunt but wasn’t the story of the day, so everybody could talk about somebody else (the 14 year-old and Sergio, for two examples) for 24 hours.

My sense is that Tiger’s going to hang around the outskirts until Sunday, and then make a big move. That isn’t his usual MO, but there it is.

Much more on Eldrick in a Masters column Sunday. Also, I’ll be getting a look at the Barnstormers Saturday, and I’ll have a gamer on their exhibition game for Sunday’s paper.

Best name for a shot-putter ever: Conestoga Valley’s Sunflower Greene.

Links:

Jason Whitlock has an interesting proposal here to pay college basketball players.

I don’t see any specific objectionable things here. In general, though, paying players based on their rank within their high school/college class, only amps up an already crazy evaluation-of-teenagers industry.

However, I do like the idea, which Whitlock implies more than actually spells out, of college basketball splitting off from the NCAA and partnering with the NBA. It is absolutely in the NBA’s long-term interest to improve college basketball, and incentivize players staying in college. The D-league seems worthwhile going forward, but college basketball being replaced by some other feeder system is in no one’s best interest.

Joe Nocera, a New York Times columnist who’s specialty has been economics, has in recent years been all over college sports and NCAA issues. He has an informative look here at arguable corner cutting for sports even at places like Harvard and the service academies.

On Grantland, The Masked Man suggests pro wrestling may be no better suited to football stadiums than, say, college basketball.

And in a, um, somewhat different vein, terrific stuff from the New Statesman on post-atheism.

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Mike Rice/Rutgers column

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Mike Gross

Last week I did a column on the mess at Rutgers that, due to an oversight, didn’t make the paper. Here it is:

Like everyone else who isn’t on Fox News, I believe Mike Rice should have been fired.

Rutgers AD Tim Pernetti had to go too, as did Jimmy Martelli, Rice’s scummy assistant.

But I’d rather see all of those guys keep their jobs than Rutgers president Dr. Robert Barnchi.

On the surface that may seem crazy, a major university president losing his job because his basketball coach is a loon.

The truth is there is no better reason.

To understand this, one needs to go beneath the surface, to try and understand the beast that big-time college sports has become.

There was a time, hard as it is to imagine now, when college sports were no more or less than extracurricular activities, part of the educational process, casual fun.

They evolved, or devolved, to what we have now, not because of money. The money is an indirect byproduct, a way of keeping capitalistic score.

It happened entirely because Americans love this stuff, and because people really, really, really want to win.

If you start at 2013 – start at Mike Rice, if you like – and follow a path directly backward through 100,000-seat stadiums and billion-dollar TV contracts and million-dollar coaches’ contracts and sneaker deals and recruiting gurus and National Signing Day and strength coaches and the camp-and-clinic circuit and monolithic booster clubs and AAU and BCS and RPI and APR and NCAA and Prop 48 and Title IX and the very concept of athletic scholarships and even the notion of recruiting itself, you find yourself back at Americans loving this stuff, and really, really, really wanting to win.

As insane as Rice’s behavior was, an English prof throwing Penguin Classics at his students would seem even loonier, if we’re honest about it.

Rice probably thought he was merely motivating his players. What if there was more evidence he was right? What if he had Bobby Knight’s record?

Plenty of people defended Bobby Knight. Plenty still do. He’s talking on ESPN right now, as I write this.

Nobody’d be defending the English prof, because comparative lit has no scoreboard.

Pernetti didn’t want to fire Rice because he was heavily invested. Pernetti was closing in on a deal for Rutgers top enter the Big Ten. Rice was Pernetti’s guy, his big hire, a hire that would be judged entirely on giving Rutgers’ fans what they really, really, really want.

Martelli certainly wasn’t going to stop and reflect, because Rice gave him the trashy thrill of pushing people around and getting away with it.

Rutgers’ players didn’t blow the whistle on Rice, because college coaches wield massive power over college athletes.

These are the kind of people, and the kind of deeply entrenched realities, the American university, and Rutgers in particular, have hopped into bed with.

I have written before that I did not think college athletes should be paid to play. Still don’t.

Marketing an athlete’s image is another story, but otherwise the fundamental agreement between school and athletic that the scholarship represents is not, it says here, fundamentally unfair to the athlete.

Paying the athletes would solve no problems, make some problems worse and create a few new ones, and the Rutgers mess actually illustrates that. Imagine what Mike Rice would have been like if he held a salary over his player’s heads?

Nothing else most colleges can do compares to sports in terms of creating good will within and connection to the community, alumni and donor base. Universities that play big-time sports are in deep, and the investment is far more than financial.

Still, without free labor, the enterprise falls apart. If you don’t owe the athletes money, you owe them other things, and you owe them big.

You owe them a more-than-fair shot at an education. You owe them the freedom to leave if the coach does. You owe them all the protection that pro athletes get from their unions. You certainly owe them at least part of the profits from marketing their specific image.

God knows you owe them safety from brain-damaged coaches.

And by you I mean you, Dr. Robert Barnchi. If you think silly games are beneath you, that athletic oversight is something you can delegate, you’re failing to recognize how deep you’re in, how easily silly games can ruin everything else you’ve done.

You’d probably like to believe otherwise, but nothing you do is more important, because nothing you do is nearly as potentially incendiary.

Players, coaches, ADs, the NCAA, TV networks, media guys (ahem), fans …. we’re all invested. We’re addicts, really. We can’t help ourselves.

We really, really, really want to win.

There is one, and only one, way for college sports to be something of which we’re more proud than ashamed.

University presidents have to be the adults here. As pathetic as it sounds, nobody else can.