Harbaugh-Schwartz incident is no big deal. This is football!

Please, don't get your Jim shorts in a bunch over that Jim Harbaugh-Jim Schwartz handshake brouhaha.

This is football, folks, not a spelling bee.

It isn't baseball either.

Baseball is the genteel hot-weather sport of bikinis and summer breezes. Football is the cruel cold-weather sport of parkas and wind chills.

These games are as different as bunts and punts. The former you lay down as if putting it to sleep; the latter you boom into the air as if to bomb the enemy.

The White Sox forfeited all their dignity during the Ozzie Guillen-Kenny Williams nonsense the past few years.

Dignity? Football forfeited its a century ago when the first forearm shiver was delivered to an unsuspecting cranial area.

But this isn't about football in relation to baseball. It's about football in relation to itself.

Football is Bears quarterback Jay Cutler being caught by sideline microphones telling somebody to tell somebody else, “(Bleep) you.”

It is Packers linebacker A.J. Hawk flipping the bird toward the sideline as some sort of inside joke.

If you want civility, take your kids to a Disney flick. If you want full-frontal confrontation, take them to a football game.

Football's objective is to viciously block opponents so they can't violently tackle the poor sap with the ball.

So, congratulations to those Jim dandies for nearly starting a riot after San Francisco's victory at Detroit.

Harbaugh is the 49ers' head coach. Maybe you remember that he was a Bears quarterback in the late 1980s and early '90s.

Apparently Mike Ditka's combative nature rubbed off on Harbaugh, causing a delayed reaction after he became a coach.

In the Pac-10 for Stanford, Harbaugh ruffled the armor of USC coach Pete Carroll and other of his counterparts.

Now in Harbaugh's first NFL coaching season he has started with Schwartz, no sideline flower himself.

Harbaugh engaged in a conflict with Schwartz, the Lions' coach, during postgame handshakes. He celebrated too insensitively, Schwartz responded too sensitively, and good for both them I say.

It was a childish, silly, jerkish exchange that was embarrassing for both men, their teams and the NFL. Translation: Each of them can coach for me anytime he wants.

“I haven't been in that situation at all,” Bears head coach Lovie Smith said Monday. “I'm not interested in talking about it, to tell you the truth.”

Maybe that's one reason many people around here, including me, would prefer a Bears coach with less civility.

Smith is a tough guy. He's just not as loudly tough or as animatedly tough as, say, someone worthy of the title of Da Coach of the Bears.

It's OK for football coaches to blow up occasionally, for gosh sakes. Be annoying the way Harbaugh is prone to being. Be annoyed the way Schwartz was by Harbaugh.

You wouldn't mind if Smith lost it and bopped a bobby during the Bears' visit to London this week, would you?

Some of the aftermath of the Harbaugh-Schwartz dust-up centered on what exactly the protocol is for the postgame handshake.

Protocol? This is freakin' football. Football doesn't need no stinkin' protocol. Unwritten rules? In this sport they're unspeakable.

The NFL didn't fine these grim Jims for their behavior because their behavior was just fine.

By football standards, that is.