If the actual season is half as entertaining as the preseason, this will be a fun year for college football, especially in Big XII country. We’re not even in two-a-days, and we’ve got all kinds of excitement. You’ve got aggravated robberies and DWIs in Austin. Then, there’s the fallout from Bomar-gate in Norman, in which OU had to “vacate” all its wins from 2005.
But forget powerhouses like the Longhorns and Sooners. According Pete Holiday at FanHouse, the single dirtiest program in the country is Texas Tech. Holiday worked up some crazy mathematic formula for calculating the most unethical football programs in the country and found “the single worst infraction” in Lubbock. We’re on the edge of our seats to find out what exactly went down on the High Plains to make the Red Raiders number one—he doesn’t give details.
The Big XII South comes off as a rogue division. Besides Tech, Texas A&M, OU and Oklahoma State all make the list.
Mike Freeman at CBS Sports Line has a different list. Freeman thinks the SEC puts the Big XII to shame. “The SEC is to cheating what Superman is to comic book heroes,” he writes.
Come on Freeman, that analogy sucks! How about “the SEC is to cheating as dog fighting is to favorite NLF players’ pastimes,” or “college football is to ethical behavior as cockfighting is to fun family entertainment”?
Sucky analogies aside, these lists are a waste of time. All big-time football programs are factories of sleazy behavior. As Frank DeFord once said about college football: “The athletes are dumb, the colleges play dumb. Everybody is happy.”
Amen, Frank. It’s August and that means less than a month until hitting time begins. – Russell Cobb
This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2007.
