Chris

Big 12 fan bases, ranked from most fun to most annoying and entitled: 1. Texas Tech 2. BYU 3. Iowa State 4. Houston 5. Baylor 6. West Virginia 7. Oklahoma State 8. Cincinnati 9. Kansas State 10. UCF 11. Arizona 12. Kansas 13. TCU 14. Colorado 15. Arizona State 16. Utah

Wreck ‘em!

I hate gambling and oppose it in all its forms and would love for all of it to be illegal, but corrupt conferences hiring refs to rig games using secret clocks and then paying off their victims to keep quiet is a much bigger threat to the integrity of athletics than a player betting on outcomes he had no control over. That’s exactly what happened last night in Ann Arbor, and everyone knows it. The Big 10 tried to destroy Texas Tech for the crime of supporting a player who never played a single snap for the school and whose transgressions all started when he played in the Big 10. Brendan Sorsby is banned from the NCAA, but every single Big 10 referee involved in rigging that game for Michigan will be officiating games next week. Brendan Sorsby can’t play college football, but the Big 10 employees who used a secret clock to rig a game and then lie about it will all continue to get paid to do the same thing the next time a non-conference opponent threatens a Big 10 playoff bid. The Big 10 threatened to ban its members from playing Texas Tech because of one player who gambled while he played in the Big 10. Is anyone going to refuse to play Michigan, or play the Big 10, as a result of Big 10 referees blatantly rigging games for Big 10 schools? No? Isn’t that interesting. Unless and until every school and conference that had a meltdown over Texas Tech officially boycotts Michigan and the Big 10, we’ll know that the entire Texas Tech uproar was fake. It was never about the integrity of the game. It was never about the sanctity of the sport. What they were actually mad about was a new world in which their ability to illegally pay players under the table no longer mattered, and they hated the new guy who was now eating their lunch. When every school and conference which cried about Texas Tech directs the exact same threats at Michigan and the Big 10 for what happened yesterday, we can take them seriously. I’m not holding my breath.