Time to take inventory in college sports

Universities might as well blow their own cover and begin offering classes in the Two Faces of Hypocrisy, Advanced Cheating and the Art of Lying.

It’s either that or get this whole big-time athletic mess under control, which is a daunting assignment.

The latest scandal no longer is about a particular school or player or conference or coach.

It’s about higher education in general.

Ohio State isn’t the New York Yankees outspending everybody, Jim Tressel isn’t Bill Belichick spying on opponents, and Terrelle Pryor isn’t Jose Canseco abusing performance enhancers.

Winning at all costs is what pro sports are all about. It shouldn’t be what collegiate athletics are all about.

We as fans, the media and detached citizens can’t keep issuing a wink-wink when a school breaks the rules.

Not after Auburn’s BCS football title remains shrouded in doubt because of a dubious quarterback. Not when Connecticut won the NCAA basketball title with a low academic rating and a coach skirting the rules.

So while not everybody cheats and lies, enough champions do that everybody becomes as suspect as baseball players during the steroids era.

Shouldn’t education on any level be more about teaching right from wrong than preaching winning from losing?

Ethics won’t be ingrained in workers in the workplace if they aren’t in students, much less athletes, in the classroom.

The best and worst characteristics of athletics and athletes are the most visible entities on campuses these days. They set the pace for the rest of the race, so to speak.

Sports are so glorified that an impressionable college kid can’t help but think it’s worth doing it that way.

Like, if athletes are rewarded for winning regardless of suspicions over how they won, why wouldn’t a political science student grow into a dirty politician?

Why wouldn’t a journalism graduate file false news reports from sites he or she never visited?

Why wouldn’t a finance major become an inside trader on Wall Street?

Heck, it becomes a game within a game: Let’s see how far we can go, how wealthy we can get and how popular we can be before getting caught.

OK, so this whole premise might be false. Maybe others aren’t influenced by the behavior of a cheating player who is applauded and a lying coach who got rich.

Then again, maybe the premise is valid and higher education’s lapse in athletic integrity spills into other areas of society.

It sure looks like it’s time for university presidents, chancellors, athletic directors, trustees, benefactors and alumni to take a personal inventory of their priorities, stop being obsessed with championships and start considering the consequences of looking the other way in the name of winning.

Those in charge should be searching for ways to market schools with something other than cases full of trophies, stadiums full of fans and coaches full of it.

Colleges are supposed to be packed with the brightest minds among us, so someone on campus should be able to concoct a better way than letting athletics be everything to everybody.

Otherwise, eventually we’ll be a land populated mostly by liars, cheaters, cover-upers, sore losers and sorry winners.

mimrem@dailyherald.com