I really do want to get worked up about college football's latest cheating scandal. You know, the one where the rouge Wake Forest radio analyst shared intelligence with opponents, including - by its own admission - the University of Louisville.
I'd love to work up some pretend outrage that a college football coach would use leaked information to its benefit. I'd love to make fun of UofL's stunning reversal and their lack of punitive action against the coach who accepted said information. And I'd love to swing away at the low-hanging fruit that is Bobby Petrino - one of the biggest scumbags in a business full of them - for being the lastest control-freak coach to conveniently have no control over whether a staff member was communicating with someone who had specific intel on an opponent.
But I can't.
I'm too numb to scandal, especially in 2016. Too cynical to not think that pretty much everyone is cheating, and unfortunately, too jaded to believe that those who haven't been caught are on the up and up.
I love college sports, but neither you or I have to rack our brains for too long to come up a lengthy list of instances where a coach, a staff, or an entire athletic department went out of its way to first gain an unfair advantage, and then cover up the evidence.
Paying players. Buying houses. Fixing grades. Manufacturing phony courses. Promising jobs to high school coaches of top prospects. Strippers. No-show jobs provided by boosters. The enabling of a pedophile. I can continue, but you get the point.
A college football coach will use, or at least willingly turn his back on, all of those things, and I'm supposed to be surprised - and angry - when a coach takes advantage of having first-hand knowledge of what the other team runs on third and long?
A college coach will literally do anything to win, and I'm supposed to be floored when I hear that he may have used leaked game plans to his advantage?
Come on.
If you're worked up about this, I don't know whether I should tell you to grow up or have you tell me to have higher standards. As much as I love college football and basketball, I've come to accept that at the most benign, there's going to be corner-cutting, and at worst, there will be blatant disregard for the rules. I'm operating under the premise that any coach at any program being offered inside info on an opponent would not only accept it, but would put it to good use.
I hate that I feel this way, but can you blame me? And can you put that blame on me? These guys cheat, and even worse, we want them to cheat. Show me a fan who claims that they'd rather lose fairly than win with some rules being broken, and I'll show you hundreds of vacated wins and forfeited championships because those don't exist either.
This scandal will play out the way they all do. Fans of the offending team will sell themselves out to rush to the defense of the successful coach of the program they love. Everyone else will clutch their pearls and pretend that the guy coaching their favorite team is too bathed in integrity to even consider such blatant flaunting of the rules.
I'd love to get to a point where something like this really shocked me, and I think a lot of us would love college sports even more if things like fairness, honor, and winning within the rules really were among its defining characteristics.
Those things, much like me being shocked - SHOCKED - when I hear that a college coach cheated, are a thing of the past.