Wiedmer: A Brief Stopover At Sanity For College Football’s Crazy Train?

The song was playing over my younger daughter Ella Beth’s car radio as we drove to lunch a few days ago. Normally anything but a fan of Black Sabbath or its late front man Ozzy Osbourne - I’m more of a Beatles, Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkel kind of guy - I nevertheless couldn’t get Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” out of my head.

As I listened to the words, I thought, “Dadgumit, Osbourne saw into the future of college football, if not all college sports, when he wrote this 46 years ago.

And we just thought he was a Heavy Metal legend given to biting the heads off bats.”

Merely consider these lyrics: “Millions of people living as foes … Life’s a bitter shame … I’m going off the rails on a crazy train.”

Because as college football began in earnest this past weekend, mired in lawsuits, possibly hamstrung by lawyers, isn’t that what we’re on? Isn’t all of college athletics, but particularly college football, going off the rails on some crazy train?

Or, to be more precise, the Lane Train?

When Clemson traveled to LSU Saturday night to face the Bayou Bengals and their rebel without pause head coach Lane Kiffin, the media understandably spent a fair amount of time on two potential Tigers who aren’t on the roster - NFL campers Dae’Quan Wright and Zavian Harris - as it did the players on the field for the Tigers that crushed Clemson’s Tigers 51-10 after more than a two-hour storm delay.

As of Tuesday evening, this Red Stick red flag for lack of sportsmanship, if not ethics and fair play, seemed to have reached a predictable end. Threatened with expulsion from the Southeastern Conference it chartered with a dozen other schools in 1932, LSU left Wright and Harris - former Ole Miss Rebels during Kiffin’s time in Oxford - off its official 105-man roster.

While it might be interesting to see 11 of 16 SEC presidents will vote to expel the Tigers on Thursday - the number of votes needed for such a sanction - that also seems a knee-jerk reaction at best, even to rid the league of a perpetual jerk like Kiffin.

Because let’s be honest here, as disconcerting and disturbing as Kiffin’s attempt to add players rejected by the NFL to his roster, if the NCAA were to approve of such behavior, virtually every coach from every Power Four conference school in the country would almost immediately attempt to do the same thing, except, possibly, Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, and we saw on Saturday what that mindset, however laudable, might produce.

Of course, Kiffin couldn’t just let his actions do the talking. He had to inject a few barbs into the controversy. Walking off the field at Saturday’s halftime, already up 31-3, Lame Lane told ABC reporter Holly Rowe, “Imagine if we’d used pro players.”

Then again, this is the same former Tennessee, Southern Cal, Florida Atlantic and Ole Miss head coach who has the following statement posted in his locker room: “If you want to win at the highest level, you have to become a villain in someone else’s story.”

And all of this is coming at a time of massive unrest and controversy in college athletics. In this first weekend alone, there’s already nationwide anger and frustration over an apparent Western Michigan win over Michigan that became a 13-12 loss when officials somehow found an extra second for the Wolverines to connect on a Hail Mary touchdown pass after the clock had seemingly run out.

This LSU-SEC legal soap opera only underscores Swinney’s recent comments about college athletics in general. Said Swinney, who’s won two national championships at Clemson, “It’s embarrassing. I don’t blame the kids, but people trying to take advantage of the system. We have no rules, there’s no governance. It’s a joke.There’s zero rules, (and) when you enforce rules, someone just goes and finds a judge to say, ‘No, you can’t enforce that rule. Never did I think I’d be living in an era like this, but that’s where we are.”

But how much longer will we remain here? There’s a move under way to force Congress to get involved, as if big government needs to become a part of this, as if its track record in almost any area improves things. What’s really wrong here is that the NCAA’s member institutions won’t stand up for what’s right and equitable and just for the masses rather than the fortunate few such as the SEC and LSU.

What’s wrong here is a complete absence of integrity or character by grownups who should know better.

Come Thursday, the SEC could be shrunk to 15 schools. For a league that was the first to provide athletic scholarships, and thus start an arms race that has remained largely unabated for close to a century, it would be an interesting change of ideological direction for the league that always insists passion for its member schools “just means more.”

To briefly revisit the lyrics of “Crazy Train,” on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, perhaps these words could begin to mean more on all sides of the aisle, whatever aisle that is.

“Maybe it’s not too late,” Osbourne sang, “to learn how to love and forget how to hate.”

Or as perverse as it seems, would that make you a villain in someone else’s college football story?

From the source Mark Wiedmer can be reached at [email protected]