Miami - Florida State; or, why college football got a bad rap

Tonight's main event and last remaining joy of the Labor Day Weekend comes in the form of the Miami - Florida State game.

There was a time when this game would have been a showstopper, something most fans would have dropped everything to check out.

That time has passed, partly because the teams, when playing by the rules, just aren't as good as they used to be.

1) Miami: This is a school that's consistently broken the rules over the past 20 years

For the past couple years, it's seemed like the U is trying to turn themselves around, although that massive brawl with Florida International, in which I was fortunate enough to watch one Miami player stamp on an FIU player's head.

2) Florida State: And the Hurricanes aren't alone in their problems

Florida State has had its share of problems. Right now it's clear to me at least that Bobby Bowden doesn't do much actual interacting with his players, and as a result his "student-athletes" spent a lot of time getting away with not actually attending classes.

Now, one of my favorite Sports Illustrated covers of all times:



For those of you unfamiliar with the magazine's reasoning (in 1995), here's a highlight. The article was written as an open letter to the university's president:

During the past decade your school enrolled and suited up at least one player who had scored a 200 on his verbal SAT—the number you get for spelling your name correctly. An on-campus disturbance, involving some 40 members of the football team, required 14 squad cars and a police dog to quell. Fifty-seven players were implicated in a financial-aid scandal that the feds call "perhaps the largest centralized fraud upon the federal Pell Grant program ever committed." And among numerous cases of improper payments to players from agents was one in which the nondelivery of a promised installment led a Hurricane player to barge into an agent's office and put a gun to his head.

The illegal acts with which your Hurricanes have been charged run the gamut from disorderly conduct and shoplifting to drunken driving, burglary, arson, assault and sexual battery. Surely you read the exhaustive and chilling piece about your football program in The Miami Herald of May 18. That paper's reporters did the math: No fewer than one of every seven scholarship players on last season's team has been arrested while enrolled at your university.

Anyway, I really enjoyed that, even though it was 14 years ago. I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before a similar story is written about USC, though SI will have to decide between writing the open letter about its football program or its basketball program. How to pick between Reggie Bush and OJ Mayo?