Although the official announcement is supposed to come out tomorrow, there's already an ESPN report saying that the NCAA will impose a 2 year postseason ban on USC along with a loss of scholarships, possibly stripping Reggie Bush of the Heisman Trophy and maybe even taking away their National Championship when they demolished Oklahoma in the final game.
The thing that really annoys me about this whole situation is the high level of hypocrisy across the country. These schools are making tons of money from student athletes, but the athletes themselves aren't allowed to get any perks?! The top tier college coaches are getting multi-million dollar deals, but it's wrong for a student to accept a rent-free residence for his family? Really?! (If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend you check out the movie Blue Chips with Nick Nolte and a young, skinny Shaquille O'Neal).
What's even worse is that the new recruits will have to suffer the consequences of violations that occurred when they were in middle school and high school. I understand punishments need to be handed down and that there are a lot of gray areas, but the people involved should still get penalized...even if they're no longer affiliated with the school. If we can find a way to extradite a criminal who fled to another country, then there's gotta be a way where the NCAA can impose fines on people like Bush or Pete Carroll who are now in the NFL. But then again, we're talking about the same people/organization who messes up year after year with the BCS system. Should we really be surprised at the lack of logic behind their actions?
[disclaimer: I'm not going to act like I'm on this "F**K Pete Carroll" tip b/c he did so much to bring the program back to the national spotlight, but if he knowingly participated in the violations, then I say fine his ass! At the same time, he knows the system and bounced to the NFL in order to avoid the consequences. You can't really hate on that...it's the American way]
Okay, I've expressed my objective viewpoints, now it's time to be more subjective. I don't have a rebuttal if it's proven that USC made these violations in the recruiting process, but if the violations took place after the athletes were already enrolled in the school, that's where I have to address the haters. You can take away the victories, the Heisman, the titles, etc. but you can't take away the fact that SC dominated for so many years. If anything, the conference should be thankful that the Trojans brought more attention to them as a whole b/c we all know that the Big 12 and SEC get the shine while the Pac-10 gets shunned.
I guess one positive thing about this situation is that it can finally weed out the real fans from the bandwagon fans. USC became real trendy here in L.A. over the last few years, so let's see who's cheering for them now that they can't get into any bowl games. Those "fans" will disappear in the next few years and will conveniently pop up again when, not if, the program rebuilds and gets back on top. I've been a fan since 1st or 2nd grade...how about you?
No comments:
Post a Comment