But who wins from this?  No one!  So why does the NCAA and BCS continue to mess with history almost a decade old?

SCOTT JACOBS

Well BCS you did it.  You stripped USC naked of their 2004 BCS title, and eliminated from history their participation in one of college football’s most exciting games: their epic Rose Bowl title clash versus Texas.

The mighty Trojans lost their appeal, and no longer look so mighty. Pete Carrol is now with the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, and Reggie Bush, the main man behind this massive mess, is an NFL veteran, unsure of his own NFL future.  Sure would love to hear him comment on this.  Maybe a, “um, whoops,” or “I’m so, so sorry.”

But that’s not going to happen.  Reggie Bush is leaving the past exactly there, in the past.

He gave up his Heisman already, suffered public scorn, and now his school — already under heavy NCAA sanctions including year 2 of a 2 year bowl ban — is in the news again for all the wrong reasons.  It’s a sad tale, but a deeply unfair one.

Live as a team, die as a team, the old saying goes.  But football is not basketball.  It is not a 12-15 man operation.  Football runs much deeper than that. College football teams run nearly 100 players deep — from the stars, to the backups, to the third stringers all the way down to the practice squad.

So yeah, it’s perfectly rational to not only penalize a school, but to lambast two glorious teams because of the idiotic selfish actions of one super-talented and even more scandalous teammate.  It’s perfectly logical to run the gauntlet on nearly 100 other guys who bled their heart and soul out there nearly every day, because one superstar took improper benefits.

I understand the NCAA is all about sending messages, and USC is a big fish in a massive college football pond.  The Trojans have history like few other football programs possess.  But in the end who was truly affected (in the forms of penalty for this)? — USC and a team most likely 95% innocent, along with Reggie Bush’ Heisman.

While losing a Heisman is humiliating, Reggie Bush hasn’t been fined, or told to give back to the school that he ended up sending 5 years backwards.  Nope, he just gets to live his multi-millionaire life with a slap on the wrist, while the school that he helped lead to a title, basically starts over.

I guess the question here is — why strip USC of their title now?  They won the 2005 Orange Bowl over Oklahoma (the same year ironically that Auburn went 13-0), and now we’re going to just pretend it didn’t happen?  This feels like Michigan all over again, only this time I’m referring to the basketball team (The Fab Five which had to vacate their entire 1992-93 season because of major sanctions amongst other things). Years after the fact Michigan was forced to take down their banners and delete their players from the record books.  It was one of the great scandals and penalties in NCAA history.

So who wins?

It’s based on principle, which is completely understandable, but why go through this?  What is the end result?  Shame? Sadness?  Bitterness?  Fans going ‘you know what, you can take away our name from the history books, but you can’t take away what we saw.’

What really gets accomplished by going back in history and pretending something ceased to exist.    Why not just asterisk it instead.  Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, they all broke records by cheating, yet their names remain in the record books.  Obviously they’ll never be voted into the Hall of Fame, just like Bush will never get into the College Football Hall of Fame.

But rather than leave a blank, why don’t we leave an explanation.  Let fans and future players understand why the mighty Trojans have that gruesome asterisk next to their good name.  Maybe a side note of who gone done did it, and how one man’s actions took down a modern day sports empire.

In life you can’t just pretend that things didn’t happen.  Bush screwed up.  Maybe USC should just put up a Hall of Shame, and stick his picture and his vacated Heisman in there.  Wouldn’t that do more than pretending this whole thing just never happened?

What’s next, asking fans to burn all their2004 championship gear, and any videos of those games to be erased as if i never happened?  What are they thinking in Auburn, where the Tigers went undefeated that year, didn’t make the championship, and now find themselves in an empty season because a disgraced star led a fake team to an even more phony title.  Then again, the Tigers may be staring at an investigation of the same magnitude in coming years with the Cam Newton Express now in Carolina.

At the end of the day, by taking away their berth in the National Title Game against Vince Young and Texas, does that mean that the Longhorns won a mythical championship because they didn’t play a real team?

It’s sticky and confusing, and it just opens the door to a bunch of questions that can’t be answered, because you can’t go back in time.

No matter how hard the NCAA or BCS tries.

Photo: Getty

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