Upon Further Review (Week 9)

A Little Evil in Us All

I will assume, if you are a college football fan, that you have seen the video of Florida's Brandon Spikes digging into the facemask of a Georgia player during Saturday's game.

I'm not going to defend his actions. He was wrong. He has apologized, and been suspended for the first half of this Saturday's game against Vanderbilt.

But I do want to point out the hypocrisy of sports writers and broadcasters who called for his punishment to be more severe.

A 4-3 Georgia team against unbeaten and top-ranked Florida still makes for an appealing TV game because everybody knows that the emotions involved can can make things interesting. Part of the intrigue in rivalry games is the long and bitter history that often includes shocking victories, painful defeats, and, sometimes, controversial events.

When you, as a writer or talking head, are among the folks who fan the flames of that history, and spend the entire week leading up to the game repeatedly reminding everyone about the recent bad blood between the teams - Georgia's endzone celebration in 2007 and Florida's late timeouts last year - you can not then pretend to be shocked and offended when those feelings manifest themselves on the field.

In many of these games, things get ugly in the scrum at the end of a play. Fingers are twisted, punches are thrown at sensitive body parts, and allegations are made about some of your closest family members. It has been part of the game from the beginning, when mass formations and brutal gang tackling were commonplace, and "slugging" was not unusual.

The NCAA traces its own beginning to 1905 when scores of injuries and deaths on the football field caused Teddy Roosevelt to call for rule reforms to calm the "rugged nature" of the game.

Television hosts joyfully revisit highlights when someone gets "jacked up" but would rather pretend that petty scores aren't sometimes settled at the bottom of a pile. Moments like that happen in every game. Every game. The only difference is that this moment ended up on YouTube.

Did any of the alleged journalists who suddenly viewed themselves as the social conscience of the game, and argued for a harsher penalty on Spikes, bother to recall the circumstances of the five personal foul penalties that were called?

Did any of them listen afterward when even Georgia coach Mark Richt admitted that there was a play when Brandon Spikes "got hit with his helmet off?"

Did any of them notice that, at one point, Tim Tebow had shuffled blindly to the Florida sideline to receive first aid on his eyes?

Did any of them bother to watch the game tape even after Tebow said, "I don't think we did anything in that game that they didn't do. You can see it on film?"

Of course not. There's no time for that when when you're busy being self-righteous.

Fortunately, the furor subsided when the voice of reason appeared, oddly enough, in the form of Georgia running back Washaun Ealey, the gouging victim himself.

Ealey didn't think Spikes should be suspended for something like that. "I'm pretty sure it goes on back and forth," he said. "We probably do it and other teams do too. It's all football."

And there it was. He called the bluff. He brought attention to the one thing everyone tries to avoid seeing.

It's all football.

Maybe that's one of the reasons we enjoy it. Maybe there's a little evil in us all.

After Ealey's statement, the indignation among sports writers and broadcasters dried up as quickly as it had appeared. For many alleged journalists, suddenly, sitting in the saddle of their high horse wasn't such a comfortable place to be.

"Fat Little Girlfriends" to Blame for Texas Tech Loss

In case you missed it, Texas Tech was pretty terrible in their loss to Texas A&M on October 24. Red Raider coach Mike Leach had an interesting theory about how that happened. I had to watch this three times before I could make myself believe that he actually said what he did.



Umm. Yeah...