The Dumbest Punishment Ever

     2004 seemed to be a great year for the University of Southern California football program.  After their great 2003 season, in which they were co-national champions, they returned their most important role players for the next season including quarterback Matt Leinart, and running backs Reggie Bush and Lendale White.  With their stellar returning roster, they were ranked #1 in the preseason polls, and did not disappoint, as they went on to go undefeated during the regular season to earn a spot in the BCS National Championship game against Oklahoma.  They beat the daylights out of Oklahoma in that game 55-19 to easily win their second consecutive national championship.     Now 7 years later, the BCS is telling us that game didn't count. 

     Over the past 7 years, we have learned some new things about that national champion USC team.  For one, Reggie Bush, the most talented player on that team was said to have received improper benefits as a student-athlete, making him an ineligible player during his last two years at USC.  Since then, USC has had all of their 2005 wins, and some of their 2004 wins vacated, and now today the BCS has announced that they are vacating their 2004 National Championship.  Recently, the USC football program has been banned from bowl games for two seasons, and has lost a significant amount of football scholarships. 

     I guess I understand the post-season ban, and the loss of scholarships, other than the fact that the ban is for the 2011 and 2012 seasons, which is punishing players that had nothing to do with these violations.  Even the coach Pete Carroll is now gone, and is the head football coach for the Seattle Seahawks.  But all that being said, that punishment makes a lot more sense to me than vacating wins and championships.  I watched USC pretty frequently those seasons, and now 6 and 7 years later someone is telling me those games really didn't happen?  I don't see the purpose of this, the games happened, I remember them so well.  So the National Championship in 2004, as well as Reggie Bush's Heisman Trophy Award are all vacated.  The only thing this seems to do is make it so when someone looks back through the list of National Champions and Heisman Trophy winners, in those two cases there will be a line that says vacant, and probably an asterisk and a sentence explaining this whole mess.

     The problem with this punishment is that it doesn't really punish the people that made the violations.  There is a black mark in the record books and everything, but that's it.  It's almost getting to the point where that is the case with every record.  Look at baseball, in what other sports would the all-time career leaders in some of the most important stats not be in the hall of fame, or really look like they are anywhere close to ever getting in, like Pete Rose, Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens.

     In my actual job of school teacher, my principal often says to us teachers that it is okay to have a problem, as long as you also come with a solution.  This is the thing I struggle with most on punishing players who formerly violated eligibility rules.  While I don't care for the current punishments, I don't really have a good solution on what you can do.  You can't punish people who aren't there anymore, and it stinks to have to punish people who had nothing to do with the violations.  So until I hear something I haven't thought of yet, I'm just going to have to go on having a problem with no solution.