When You Lie Down With Dogs, You Wake Up With Fleas ***

There has been quite a bit of discussion in our house about the penalties imposed on USC by the NCAA this week. In full disclosure, we are a PAC-10 family. More specifically, we are a UCLA-CAL-Stanford family. We are VERY Ucla, with 3 of my sisters having graduated from Ucla, a brother-in-law with a UCLA post graduate degree, a nephew graduating from UCLA this week, and Kiki currently attending. So we have quite a bit to say about USC on any given day, but we run at the mouth with commentary this week.

USC is one of those institutions that elicits strong emotions from people. You either LOVE them or HATE them; there doesn't seem to be any middle ground. Sort of like cilantro. Over the years, I must admit, we have been on the hating side. Probably not all deserved but they always seem to give us great ammunition. It's easy to hate them. They always win, they always have celebrities roaming the sidelines, they always get their games televised. All those things are pretty superficial but there were other things as well. Their sort of "take-no-prisoners" attitude rubs people the wrong way. There was the blow up last year between UCLA and USC when Pete Carroll decided to run up the score in retaliation for UCLA (probably ill advisedly) using its time outs to try and get the ball back late in the 4th quarter in a 21-7 game. This was after Coach Carroll cried foul when Stanford ran up the score against USC just TWO WEEKS PRIOR!! Stanford might have been retaliating for USC running up the score the year prior. It seems as far as USC believes, what is sauce for the goose shouldn't be sauce for the gander. And that is why people don't like them. It is one thing to run up a score to get a higher BCS ranking but then you can't complain when others do it to you. It is part of the game -on both sides.

I don't believe that USC didn't know about the Bush/Mayo/unnamed female tennis player infractions. OJ Mayo, a kid with a very humble background, had a 43 inch screen tv in his dorm room. No one saw that? Please. Reggie Bush, college student with middle class working parents, drives a blinged out SUV. C'mon. USC has to have the biggest pair of blinders to not see these things and not wonder how, why. If they didn't know, they should have. You can't choose to ignore things and then claim innocence. In law, very often the standard is not what you knew or when you knew it but should you have known it. In the very least, USC wasn't keeping a close enough eye on its players to know that they were possibly endangering the program with infractions. Why? Because USC is caught up in its' own hype. Take this quote from USC's athletic director yesterday:

USC athletic director Mike Garrett, speaking at a previously scheduled USC Coaches' Tour at the Airport Marriott in Burlingame, Calif., had this to say to boosters: "As I read the decision by the NCAA, all I could get out of all of this was ... I read between the lines, and there was nothing but a lot of envy, and they wish they all were Trojans."

Really? This is a jealousy thing? Really? It seems like a childish response to me. I think he would have been better off with the old "I'm rubber and you're glue" rebuttal. Always works. Of course, this is spoken by a man who probably is in danger of losing his job very soon, so you have to take what he says with a grain of salt. But it is this very attitude that the NCAA indicates in its' decision that:

"The general campus environment surrounding the violations troubled the committee"

Ya' think? From the day they first discovered they could throw a ball farther or run faster than their other classmates, gifted athletes have been conditioned to know the rules don't apply to them. It starts out with missing a class or two to travel to a game and culminates in scholarships to schools that they most likely couldn't attend by way of their high school grade point average. It is up to the adults in their lives to act like adults and tell them no. Unfortunately that does not happen often. And we are where we are. College football and basketball programs are mere training camps for pros. Players start off with a few free cars and "no-rent" housing for their parents and then graduate to the pros where they get slaps on their hands for smacking around their wives or girlfriends or carrying concealed weapons in night clubs. Why are we surprised?

I am not buying USC claims of ignorance. Pete Carroll left USC as soon as he could, got out while the getting was good. All this happened on his watch. By the time he left, USC knew what was coming down. It was why they voluntarily imposed some of their own penalties on their basketball team before the NCAA finished their investigation. So what did USC do when it came down to hiring a new coach? I would think a University that wanted to rehabilitate their image might choose a coach whose integrity was beyond reproach. Someone the kids could look up to, a role model. No - they hired Lane Kiffin. Kiffin was the University of Tennessee coach for one short year. Of course he had a six year contract with Tennessee which he had just formalized three months before taking the USC job. USC came calling and Kiffin broke his contract. Committment. In his short tenure with Tennessee he and his staff amassed 6 "minor" recruiting violations. In addition on his way out the door, one of his staff was accussed of calling the Tennessee recruits and trying to convince them to come to USC. Classy.

USC hired a coach that would fit into their win at any cost culture. And sometimes when you play with fire, you get burned.

***Apologies to my canine loving friends.