Nov. 16 | 2:35 p.m. ET

BCS bashing is one of my favorite pastimes, as regular readers already know. Judging by the mail on my last attack on the last bastion of bullheaded buffoonery, a lot of you agree that college football needs a playoff system. (Okay, a few believe we need to go back to the 1950s, when life was perfect, but life would be dull without them.)

So, without wasting your time or my breath, here's a sampling of your opinions.

Bill from Salt Lake City:
Mike, you want a play-off and that is great, but stop whining about the BCS. The BCS system works wonderfully, and has from the beginning. In the Pre-BCS era sports writers and coaches voted for the national championship with all their prejudices and hopes. The BCS adds a touch of science to the final formula and we have a championship game. That's one better than before. Also, your argument is silly. If all teams had a single loss or two or whatever, still the coaches and writers make their picks, still the computer balances the human emotions and still the computer settles on a ranking. Perfect!

Kamaru from Charleston:
Thank you! Who in the darkest depths of Hades wants to see the National Championship decided by an MIT graduate who works for the Geek Squad at Best Buy part time? As a former High School football player, I feel disrespected that my sport uses the same judgment system as ice skating. Let the kids decide it on the field.

LD from Big Sandy, Texas
I'm for a playoff in college football, but we still have the same polls that would pick the same top teams. Does it matter if it's the top two or the top eight? I think the biggest problem we have is the human polls where you have opinions as to who the BEST teams are; they are team- or conference-biased.

Jim from Hudson, Ohio
So what?  It's only a game college football, not life or death. Let's go back to the way it was in the 50's and 60's where you had four major bowls and eliminated the majority of bowls that allow any 6-5 team to participate. College football . . .needs to get back to where legitimate STUDENT athletes participate and we get rid of these mercenaries now plyaing college football.

Edward from Long Beach
Since so many of the NCAA football officials are opposed to an eight-team playoff, why not just make it a four-team playoff? Let's say the season ended today and the BCS Standings were current. This would mean that the winner of #1 USC VS #4 Penn State will play the winner of #2 Texas vs #3 Miami. Sure you snubb out LSU, Notre Dame and so on, but that will be much more forgivable than all the other BCS mess from the past.

R. M. from Tempe
Basketball has 65-team playoff. Why stop football at eight teams? Should be a minimum of 16 for sure if you want a playoff to be fair.

B. Joseph from Northridge, Calif.
How bout singling out the critters who put the BCS together and singing their butts with loud protests of incompetence! Who are they?!...And...Who?!...decided these same critters to be the only unique people/group and or academia nerds who can determine qualification for a national championship by a methodology that is blatantly farcical...Every day BCS is held up to ridicule by a near unanimous fan base, expert coaches and analysts as well as entire nation's sports writers and commentators!

Adam from Providence
With all this talk about how the BCS doesn't work, it seems to me that the biggest problem with the system is that even when it doesn't work, it receives too much publicity. What if everybody just stopped caring? What if everyone just stopped debating about how bad the system is? If we keep talking and keep complaining, we still give this system a voice. But if we just stop giving it recognition, the system can crumble. I don't know about you, but I am pretty close to ceasing watching college football altogether. If no one will watch, the old dinosaurs running this sport will have to change.

David from ALexandria, La.
I am not in favor of a college Divison 1A playoff system, however, I do think the NCAA should reserve the right to implement a "plus one" game at the end of the bowl season, only IF NECESSARY.

Robert from Oakland
Isn't it time to call for a boycott of the BCS bowl games? The only way this is going to change if it affect the pocketbook. Don't watch any of the BCS bowls this year. Once the TV ratings start to drop, it would only be a matter of time before there was a playoff system.

Ross from Adamsville, Tenn.
. . . Isn't it amazing that D2, D3, NAIA, etc. are starting their playoffs now, yet D1 can't figure it out? I guess Presbyterian College and University of St. Francis just don't take their academics as seriously as Texas and USC.

Dave from St. Louis
Agree with your sentiments here 100 percent. . .There is some hidden reason that the schools desperately have clung to supporting the four big bowls, and refuse to expand the system to a tournament with 16 teams or whatever....

Nov. 14 | 2 a.m.

Alabama did the BCS a huge favor by losing to LSU to bring the number of undefeated teams in the nation down to two. All Texas has to do now is get past Texas A&M and the Big 12 championship game, while USC needs only to beat Fresno State and UCLA to set up a Rose Bowl that the BCS will hail fair and wide as proof that its cockamamie system works.

And this is the problem with the BCS. If you wanted the system to work, you had to cheer like you’d never cheered before for once-defeated LSU to beat undefeated Alabama. That’s because the BCS depends on ending the season with two — and only two — undefeated teams. Any more, and it’s a big problem. Any fewer, and this year it’s an even bigger problem.

No method of choosing a champion should rely on teams losing for it to work. It goes against the very spirit of competition and sportsmanship to hope that everybody loses at least once except for two teams. The image of the BCS administrators thanking their lucky stars each week and the ranks of the unbeatens shrank is simply disgusting.

What’s worse, foes of the BCS such as myself are now in the position of having to hope that either USC or Texas loses one of their final games so that the alleged system which is really nothing more than a concoction of opinions is again exposed as a horribly unfair way to choose the champion of intercollegiate athletics’ flagship sport.

Slide show   The Week in Sports Pictures The Giants on top of the football world, getting ready for the London Olympics and more. more photos

And if that should happen — and the BCS guardians are lighting candles and saying novenas at this moment in hopes that it doesn’t — we’re left with a bevy of once-beaten teams, all of which have an equal claim to play for the title.

LSU, Virginia Tech, Penn State, Miami and Alabama would all have equally legitimate claims, as ajr.com points out here. Not to mention the Texas or USC team that could end the season with one loss.

By the way, that’s seven teams right there with either one loss or no losses. Insert one more team into the mix — Notre Dame if you really want television ratings — and you have an eight-team playoff that very few fans would object to.

It won’t happen, of course, because it makes too much sense. The BCS isn’t about making sense, it’s about hoping almost everybody — but not quite everybody — loses.

Nov. 9 | 5:45 p.m. ET

“Free Terrell Owens!”

There’s a battle cry for you. Sends shivers down your spine, doesn’t it? Makes you want to grab your Sharpie, scribble a sign on a sheet of cardboard, tape it to a stick and picket NFL headquarters in Manhattan.

Or not.

But this is the angle NFL Players Association head Gene Upshaw is taking towards T.O. and the Eagles. Philly wants him suspended for four games and banned for the following four. Upshaw wants the Eagles to free the poor fellow; make him a free agent, the sooner the better.

Don’t hold it against Upshaw. He’s just doing his job. And actually, I’m on his side on this one. I know the Eagles would prefer to force Owens to sit out the rest of the season, the better to increase his suffering. But you never get anywhere by being vengeful. Better to cut him now and let him make his own deal somewhere else.

I know the dangers there. Another NFC team, or worse, another NFC East team, could take him and use him to knock the Eagles out of the playoffs. It could happen, too. But it’s a risk the Eagles should take, trusting to Denver or Oakland to grab him first.

I won’t tell a team not to sign him. Telling a guy like Al Davis not to sign a player is like telling a starving wolf not to lick a lamb chop. But I do have some advice for the team that decides it can tame the game’s most selfish player.

Give him a one-year contract.

That’s it. No multi-year deals for Owens. If a team signs him this year, make it just for the remaining games in the season. Tell him if he minds his own business, doesn’t diss his teammates in the national media, doesn’t whine about how many passes he catches, doesn’t draw any fines for over-the-top end-zone celebrations and maybe volunteers his off days at Habitat for Humanity, the team will offer him a really swell contract for the next year.

But don’t give him a big bonus. Don’t offer him this year and next. Just this year. Tell him, “Here’s how much you’ll make – if you don’t force us to dump you. Take it or leave it. Play well and be a good citizen, and we’ll pay you what you’re worth next year.”

Heck, tell him you’ll give him the average of the top two receivers in the league. Tell him you’ll pay him a dollar more than whatever the top-paid receiver gets. Tell him anything, but make it clear. It’s one year, and if we don’t like you, you’re gone.

That’s the only way to handle him. The multi-year contract with the Eagles is what created much of this mess to start with – that and T.O.’s agent, Drew Rosenhaus. So don’t do one. No signing bonuses, no roster bonuses. Just pay for performance.

If T.O. knows exactly what he’s getting and knows that next year is a new contract, he just might find it in his interest to get with the program. He just might earn his money and help his team instead of continuing his traveling idiot show.

Anything else is guaranteed trouble.

Nov. 7 | 2:30 a.m.

You’re doing something right if you say something so memorable and relevant that people remember you by it. So I’m more than willing to give Jets coach Herm “You Play to Win the Game” Edwards his due. That line will long outlive his NFL career, even if it continues another 20 years.

But you can take that motto to an extreme, and Edwards did that when he dragged Vinny Testaverde off his couch to try to win some games when Chad Pennington went down with a torn rotator cuff and backup Jay Fiedler followed him to the injured list in the third game of the season.

Testaverde helped the Jets win a game two weeks later against the Bucs. But that’s been it. Three straight losses have dropped the Jets to 2-6, and if anyone says they expected more out of Testaverde, they’re either sadly delusional or lying.

Even Edwards can’t have expected more. He certainly hoped for different results, but that’s all it was — hope. He was playing to win the games that even he knew were all but impossible to win.

And that’s the problem. All along, the Jets had another quarterback who had been with the team three years and was eager to take a shot at the starting job. He’s Brooks Bollinger, former Wisconsin quarterback who had a 30-12 record in college. His first two years with the Jets didn’t build much of a resume — just one appearance with a 5-for-9 passing line with no touchdowns and no interceptions.

But the Jets thought enough of him to keep him on the roster. In two years, he may not have many reps, but he had become familiar with the offense and the Jets personnel. He was on the roster for a reason other than holding a clipboard.

Edwards started him the week after Pennington’s and Fiedler’s injuries, and Bollinger didn’t do much in a 13-3 loss to the Ravens. But not many quarterbacks do a lot against Baltimore’s defense.

I thought then the only recourse for the Jets would be to continue to play Bollinger, who had a reputation in college of finding ways to win. At the worst, the team would lose games and get good position in the draft. At the best, Bollinger would turn into a reliable back-up or maybe even blossom as a starter. That is, after all, how Tom Brady got his start.

But Edwards went to Testaverde — playing to win the game. It hasn’t happened. And Sunday against San Diego, an ineffective and battered Testaverde was yanked against San Diego and the game handed over to Bollinger.

The kid damned near won it. He completed 11 of 20 passes for 106 yards and two touchdowns and the Jets came within five points of upsetting a very good Chargers team. He didn’t have an interception.

I couldn’t help but wonder if the Jets would have actually won the game if Edwards had given Bollinger the starting job and let him keep it after his first two quarterbacks went down. The kid breathed life into the Jets and they responded to his leadership. If he had had a bit more experience, it could have been different against San Diego.

I suspect Edwards will play Bollinger now. For one thing, at 2-6, the season is pretty much gone. For another, Bollinger is clearly the best the Jets have. Finally, he’s showing signs of that he could actually be a valuable player for the Jets.

The Giants did that last year when they went to Eli Manning and suffered through a string of defeats, from which Manning emerged as a budding star. Bollinger isn’t Manning. But he’s getting better; he could blossom.

The lesson here is that sometimes, you can’t play to win the game, you have to play to win the future.

Nov. 4 | 9:15 a.m. ET

It’s not Terrell Owens’ fault the Eagles are 4-3 and tied for last place in the ultra-competitive NFC East. On the other hand, he’s not doing a lot to make them better.

He’s back into distraction mode, this time saying that the Eagles would be undefeated if Brett Favre were their quarterback and saying the team has a “lack of class.”

He made the comments during an interview on ESPN. The remark about Favre was in response to a statement commentator Michael Irvin said on the air. The other was a straight whine because the Eagles didn’t stop the game and put on a fireworks display to celebrate his 100^th touchdown catch.

The Eagles are fighting hard with a badly wounded quarterback to defend their NFC championship. They have no running game, have on occasion seen their defense shredded and do not look like the team that has dominated their division for four consecutive years. They don’t need distractions.

You could defend him by saying that the Eagles might indeed be undefeated with Favre at the controls, but so, too, would the Ravens, Cowboys, Redskins, Bucs and a few other teams. It’s one of those statements that commentators make that sound great but mean nothing. The fact is Favre isn’t quarterbacking anyone but the Packers. It’s like saying the Red Sox would have dominated the 1930s and 1940s with Joe DiMaggio instead of Ted Williams in the outfield. It might be true, but it can’t be proved and it didn’t happen.

Fans may enjoy such discussions but players can’t get caught up in them. And when you belong to a team, you defend your teammates to outsiders, no matter what you think privately.

The proper response would have been: “Brett Favre’s not on our team, so I can’t answer that. All I know is our guy got to four straight title games and Favre’s team didn’t.”

That would have been the classy thing to say and also the right thing. But with Owens, it’s always about himself, not the team. If everything isn’t going his way, it becomes someone else’s fault.

If the Eagles deliberately chose not to mention Owens’ milestone catch, as seems likely, who can blame them? He’s been nothing but trouble since the end of last season. He’s trashed his quarterback, gotten into verbal fights with his coaches, was sent home during training camp, and has continued to whine about his contract. Since he’s shown no class to the team, the team can hardly be blamed for returning the disfavor.

It doesn’t help that the team is struggling, and he along with them. If the Eagles lose a couple more and start to fall out of the playoff chase, it will only get worse.

By the way, I think the Eagles would be undefeated if Jerry Rice in his prime were playing wide receiver instead of Owens. They’d also be undefeated if they had the ’66 Packers’ offensive line and Jim Brown playing running back. They’d be even more undefeated if Ray Lewis were playing middle linebacker.

And without Terrell Owens, they’d probably be 4-3 – exactly what they are now.

Nov. 2 | 2:20 p.m. ET

It’s about time Alex Rodriguez made the front of a New York tabloid for public naughtiness. Until this story broke about him playing poker in illegal clubs, I was starting to worry that he was walking proof that all the money in the world can’t buy you a good time.

I’m not saying you have to get drunk and get naked to have a good time. No matter what Lawrence Taylor thinks, getting hooked on cocaine doesn’t add to your legend. And getting into fights is just pointless.

So it wasn’t that A-Rod kept a low profile after hours and out of season in New York, It was more like no profile at all. If he had a vice we never saw it. If he was subject to actual human emotions, he never let it show.

A lot of people have their knickers in a knot over the story The Daily News ran Wednesday morning. It said A-Rod went to an illegal poker club five nights in a row. The Yankees, a source told the paper, told A-Rod it wasn’t a smart place to go, and Major League Baseball seconded that opinion.

The important thing to remember here is that, while running a poker game in New York is illegal, playing in one isn’t. So A-Rod isn’t doing anything wrong. And, with $25 million coming in every year, he’s got enough money to play high-stakes poker if he wants. Plus, if you really know what you’re doing, poker is more a game of skill than of chance; for the top professionals, it’s not really gambling.

I don’t know how good a player A-Rod is, but I suspect he’s a quick study. The objection of the story’s sources was that A-Rod should just get up a game in his co-op and not be going to public places where once every third or fourth blue moon something bad might happen. Given the high-class nature of the clubs he’s going to, that’s overstating the risk. Heck, David Wells goes to places where every third or fourth minute somebody loses a tooth to hostile action.

You can say that playing poker could lead to gambling on sports. You can worry about A-Rod getting the poker bug so bad he starts dumping major percentages of his bankroll and get in trouble with people with no sense of humor about money.

You can say a lot of things – and, if you listen to sports talk radio, you may already have – but bottom line is A-Rod makes Eagle Scouts look sordid. If he wants to see what it’s like to be naughty by playing one of the most popular games in America, so what?

Don’t tell me what could happen. If you live on any part of the Atlantic Coast, you could lose your house in a hurricane. If you live in Kansas, you can get erased by a tornado. If you go outdoors, you could get struck by lightning. If you play it safe and stay in your home with the doors locked, the alarm system on and a rottweiler standing guard, a meteor could plunge through your roof, hit you in the head, and kill you.

A-Rod’s going out and playing a little poker. He’s got the funds to finance his game. He’s not breaking any laws. And he may just be having a little honest fun.

Leave the guy alone.

Oct. 30 | 10:40 p.m. ET

I don’t think many people would mind being Manny Ramirez. Let’s face it, there’s not a lot of heavy lifting involved in his life.

Over the past five years, he’s made nearly $100 million with another $63 million coming in over the next three years. He’s headed for the Hall of Fame as one of the game’s best hitters. And, if there are annoyances in his life, like being expected to catch the occasional fly ball, on the whole it’s an awfully good life.

And yet here he is yet again asking to be set free of the torture of having to play baseball in Boston.

On the whole, I’ve liked Manny, if for no other reason than that he’s such a child of nature, with the emphasis on child. Plus, he’s one heckuva hitter.

But I’ve been reading some things coming out of Boston that makes me think that if he’s a child, he’s a very spoiled one. When the Red Sox promised him $160 million for eight years of his services, he made a very modest promise — to set up a foundation to funnel one million dollars into local charities.

But a report in the Boston Globe shows that after five years, he hasn’t even set up the foundation. His biggest charitable donation to date? Giving $20,000 worth of shoes to some kids in Florida, and the shoes were donated by his footwear sponsor.

It’s no wonder   Red Sox fans checking into message boards would be glad to be rid of him. They can live with someone being a baby. But a selfish baby is just too much.

Guys like Manny give athletes of every ilk a bad name. The assumption is that they’re all like Ramirez, rolling in cash and exceptionally reluctant to part with any of it.

That’s too bad, because there are a lot of big-name athletes who do a lot of good with their money. Jim Kelly, Doug Flutie and Boomer Esiason all used their celebrity as NFL quarterbacks to set up foundations to battle the diseases that attacked their children — degenerative nerve conditions for Kelly, autism for Flutie and cystic fibrosis for Esiason. Dan Marino has raised millions for a variety of charities. Tiki Barber and Warrick Dunn are just two other NFL players who are tireless in their work for charitable causes.

There probably aren’t enough like them, but there are more athletes who do something than the ones like Manny who talk big and produce small. With luck, Boston will get one of them if — and it’s a huge if — and when they finally move Manny out of town.

Oct. 27 | 11 p.m. ET

Fisher DeBerry, the Air Force Academy football coach, got himself in a lot of trouble for no good reason. But it’s not surprising his ill-considered remarks after losing to TCU raised a firestorm. If there’s one thing guaranteed to land you in hot water in this country, it’s talking about the color of people’s skin and drawing any conclusion at all about it.

According to the AP story, DeBerry said TCU “had a lot more Afro-American players than we did and they ran a lot faster than we did.”

Given a chance to extricate himself, he got in deeper: “It just seems to me to be that way. Afro-American kids can run very well. That doesn’t mean that Caucasian kids and other descents can’t run, but it’s very obvious to me that they run extremely well.”

The line has been taboo for so long it’s a wonder the 67-year-old coach didn’t get the memo about it. The reason it’s wrong is first because it’s a stereotype and second because  it’s not necessarily true.

Yes, some black athletes are very fast. So are some white athletes. But it’s not a racial thing, because race is pretty nebulous and may not exist at all as a biological distinction. I strongly urge you to do some reading on that topic, and this debate on NOVA’s Web site is a good place to start.

Another excellent discussion is available at Scientific American’s site, here.

You can group people according to general physical traits, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you anything, because within any broad population group, there is enormous variation.

And it’s in the variation that the truth may lie. Malcolm Gladwell, a Canadian of West Indian and African descent who was once a very good runner, is now an outstanding writer. In a piece a few years ago in the New Yorker, he tackled the subject of athletic ability and perceived racial differences.

He pointed out how important it is to know that there is more ethnic diversity in Africa than there is in Europe. And, it appears, there is more genetic variation within African populations than within populations from anywhere else on earth. Gladwell’s piece is one of the best articles written for a lay audience I’ve been able to find on the subject. If you truly want to learn rather than argue, read it here.

Gladwell doesn’t talk about race, but about origins. He points out that the greater genetic variation in African populations — understandable, since the human race originated there — predicts that there should be more Africans than whites at the extremes of performance. (It’s a math thing.) But those are tiny numbers of people — the best of the best. (Gladwell also notes that if his assertion is true, then there should be more blacks than whites who can’t run at all.) It says nothing about the average person.

That’s DeBerry’s problem. He’s looking at a subset of a subset, at one group of exceptional athletes within a group of good athletes, and applying his observation to everyone. It doesn’t work that way. The sooner we understand that, the better off we all will be.

Oct. 26 | 2:25 p.m. ET

In 1953, six years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line, the New York Yankees fielded an all-white team in the World Series. It would be the last time a team went to baseball’s October showcase without at least one African-American player – until now.

Joe Morgan is just one of many who noticed that the Astros don’t have a single American black player on its roster. It has Latin-American blacks, but none from the United States.

It’s been coming for a long time. During the 1994-95 seasons, African-Americans made up 19 percent of all baseball players; Latin-American players were represented in near identical numbers. And if you were a fan watching a game back then, you wouldn’t have noticed the change that was to come.

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But if you watched minor league games ten years ago, you would have been shocked at how few blacks were playing at the lowest levels of the professional game. I remember talking about it to Frank Robinson, who was then with the Orioles, and he said it was a growing concern. Kids in the inner cities, which is where many African-Americans live, didn’t have access to equipment and fields and leagues. Instead, they increasingly turned to basketball, a game that a kid could play by himself with nothing more than a pair of sneakers and an old, beat-up ball.

The lack of blacks in the minors was sure to show up in the bigs, and it has. The percentage of American blacks in baseball has steadily slipped until it is now just nine percent of all players. Latin-American players, on the other hand, now make up 26 percent of MLB’s collective roster. Koreans and Japanese are also beginning to come in increasing numbers.

Slide show Fall Classic Click for images of the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Colorado Rockies. more photos

I’ve had E-mails from people who tell me the decline is the result of a racist plot; the game’s policy makers are conspiring to keep blacks out. That’s absurd. With the amount of money to be made in sports, if Saddam Hussein could hit the splitter for average and power, somebody would be offering him a contract. Racial, ethnic and religious background means nothing if you can play.

Then there’s Dusty Baker, who has a penchant for making statement about race that are just as dumb as anything Jimmy the Greek ever said. The Cubs manager thinks it’s because it costs too much to play baseball.

Baker has a point, but it’s not enough to explain what’s happening. In the Dominican Republic, kids play with homemade bats and balls held together with duct tape. A paper bag might be a kid’s first glove. They’ve got no money at all down there, but they keep playing baseball.

I go back to Frank Robinson to see where it started. You don’t see many ballfields or Little League teams deep in the projects. And you don’t have any hip-hop ballplayers doing Nike commercials that play to the street kid the way basketball commercials do. Kids who live in the projects are more likely to look at basketball as a way out than baseball.

Bill Parcells saw the same thing in football, but in a very specific job – tight end. He told me that there were no end of kids playing power forward in college who had no chance of making the NBA but might have a very good chance of being a tight end or even a linebacker in the NFL. He blamed the lure of hoops for the dearth of good tight ends in his business.

Anyway, for an excellent look at baseball’s problem of participation, check out this section produced by detnews.com.

Oct. 24 | 2:30 a.m.

Tearing down the goalposts is a tradition that’s probably as old as the posts themselves. But just because it’s been around forever doesn’t mean the tradition should continue.

Last Saturday, at a tiny liberal arts college, Minnesota-Morris, a student was killed when students celebrated the last game in their old stadium by tearing down the posts. It’s not the first injury or death — four years ago, a student at Ball State attending his first football game was paralyzed by a goalpost being torn down by fans — and there will be more until the practice is banned utterly.

In the good old days, goal posts were made out of wood — two uprights and a crossbar. It didn’t take much to bring them down, which lessened the chances of getting injured when they did. Frequently, the downed posts were cut up into lengths and either given away or sold as souvenirs of a big win.

But posts are made of aluminum or steel now, and the uprights are taller than they used to be. You can’t just push on them to make them come down; you have to climb on them and jump on them. If you’re in the way when they fall, you can be in serious trouble. Even if they come down safely, there’s not a lot you can do with them — security doesn’t usually let kids leave the stadium with an entire goalpost, and steel’s not nearly as easy to saw into pieces as wood.

But even if you can still turn them into souvenirs, it’s a dumb practice. You don’t tear down the hoops after winning a basketball game. Soccer fans don’t tear apart the goals after a big victory. You don’t rip down the backstop after winning a baseball game. So why tear down the goalposts?

And don’t say tradition. Slavery was a tradition, too, as was wife-beating. Years of practice didn’t make them right, either. Any tradition that involves a substantial risk of injury or death probably needs rethinking.

Many schools are, in fact, trying to stop the practice. Once reserved for big wins, it’s now looked at by some students as part of the game. But let’s be honest. It’s not fun, it’s vandalism. Steel posts cost upwards of $8,000; aluminum posts are about $5,000.

There are posts that can be collapsed remotely and posts that are supposed to be indestructible. The NCAA has looked into ways to stop the recreational vandalism.

But this one has to start with students who have gained enough common sense from their college education to know the difference between fun and destruction. Let’s hope that sense isn’t a long time coming.

Oct. 20 | 6:30 p.m. ET

A lot of people probably think Eric James Torpy is the king of all idiots. He’s the guy who asked that the 30-year prison term about to be imposed on him be changed to 33 years so it would match the number of Larry Bird’s jersey. Bird, you see, is Torpy’s hero, although he clearly wasn’t his role model. To be like Larry, Torpy would have had to avoid robbery and shooting with intent to kill, the crimes of which he was convicted.

But I kind of admire this felon. The AP story includes this passage: “He said if he was going to go down, he was going to go down in Larry Bird’s jersey,” Oklahoma County District Judge Ray Elliott said Wednesday. “We accommodated his request and he was just as happy as he could be.”

It’s not much of a story, just four paragraphs. But until Torpy made his unusual request, he was a nobody with no future and no past to be proud of, just another loser who made too many bad decisions and was going to spend the better part of what remains of his life paying for them.

He’s still a loser, but at least he had the presence to realize this was his one chance to make a statement, his one chance to sneak his name into the newspapers and onto the Web and even get mentioned on television. It’s not even 15 minutes of fame, but it’s something.

He didn’t hurt anybody else to get that fame, didn’t break any laws. He just understood that if you’re going to go down, you may as well go down in flames.

But I wonder if he would have done the same if his hero had been Wayne Gretzky.

Dressed for success?
Almost as amusing as Torpy’s story are the complaints from a few NBA players about David Stern’s new dress code. The latest to weigh in with an absurd reading of the code is Indiana’s Stephen Jackson. He says the new rules outlawing chains is racist.

I can see how he feels that way. The code is aimed at the hip-hop culture that some NBA players feel they represent.

I personally don’t get offended by how anyone dresses; I can’t see how anyone who went through the 70s and wore bell bottoms and platform shoes and never got a haircut or a shave can say any clothing fad is offensive or silly.

But I understand that people who wear pants that buckle around their knees and are roomy enough to house a small family and top it off with 12 pounds of gold and platinum can be seen as scary to 50-year-old folks who live in the suburbs, work in offices and spend their money on NBA tickets. The fact that the players are black and the upscale fans white is not irrelevant or meaningless.

But the dress code isn’t aimed at a racial group as much as at a culture. In those strange 1970s to which I alluded, the same sorts of rules were applied to the hippy culture, which was primarily white. I, too, was offended back then. Today, I’m glad for whatever rules I had to comply with. Life is simply easier when you follow the norms of the group you belong to.

The players can dress any way they wish on their own time and with their own friends. The dress code applies only to their jobs. I couldn’t work for a newspaper back when I started if I didn’t wear a jacket and tie, and I wouldn’t mind if we went back to those days. So I wore a jacket and tie. Along the way, I discovered that if I went certain places, life was a lot smoother and social interaction easier if I dressed decently. When I was off work, I could dress any way I pleased.

It’s not racist. It’s a dress code.

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