Blame adults for lawlessness in college sports

Welcome to the wild, wild West, also known as college athletics.

It's the badlands where rules, laws and principles don't apply. No wonder politicians, journalists and other graduates try to get away with what they can.

What else would we expect after they watch the most visible, celebrated men on campus operate that way?

Anyway, what a week it was in college sports.

Monday, Bobby Knight resigned at Texas Tech and the panderers at ESPN lauded him as if he were a decorated war hero instead of the dean of indiscretion.

Wednesday, the virtue-challenged Nick Saban provided Alabama with perhaps the nation's No. 1 football recruiting class.

Thursday, Bruce Weber dummied up as the basketball crowd in Illinois' Assembly Hall treated Indiana's Eric Gordon as if he robbed the Bank of Champaign.

Folks, this really is the wild freakin' West, where ethics are checked at the door.

Listen, I'm no poodle in a roomful of pit bulls. I understand integrity is lacking in sports in general.

Professional baseball players will take performance-enhancing drugs. NFL coaches will spy on opponents. NHL teams will employ goons.

Still, some silly voice always has whispered to me that college athletics should be more honorable than that.

But don't blame Gordon for reneging on his verbal commitment to play at Illinois, or even the high school football players who reneged on theirs so they could switch to the Illini.

Don't blame the students in Illinois' Orange Krush cheering section who behaved badly during the Indiana game.

Don't even blame the Nevada prep for holding a news conference on football signing day to announce he will play at California instead of Oregon, when neither school offered a scholarship.

They're all in their teens or early 20s and simply haven't sorted out right from wrong.

College is supposed to be a place where adults are supposed to teach propriety. Instead, an ethical vacuum has been created because kids too often learn from the morally bankrupt.

Remember, this is a system in which alleged mentors like prominent head coaches betray commitments to old jobs for better new ones.

It's a system in which a school like Indiana tolerated Knight's boorish behavior while he was winning, fired him when he wasn't winning as much, and replaced him two coaches later with a documented cheater.

It's a system in which the student-athlete equation at too many major-college programs tilts far toward the right -- though not toward the correct -- side of the hyphen.

It's a system in which otherwise esteemed universities allow themselves to be held hostage in the recruiting process by an uncommitted prep quarterback as if he would lead a campus research project to cure cancer.

It's a system in which the common defense for breaking football and basketball recruiting rules is "everybody does it."

Is that everything? Of course not, but all day isn't long enough to complete the list.

Seriously, college athletics have started to make the pros look like a Mother Teresa clinic on sportsmanship.

Education isn't what matters most anymore. Not even winning is. A school would be content with stupid losers if the program still generated enough revenue.

Meanwhile, fans and the media who ignore the stench start stinking just as badly.

Can't wait to see what happens this week in the wild, wild West.