The Daily Beast: Heisman Hypocrisy

[dcpony]

Good piece by Buzz Bissinger

When Cam Newton accepted college football’s top trophy, his father was conspicuously absent. Buzz Bissinger, our new sports columnist, salutes a man who dared to take on the system that enriches college sports but screws the players.

During ESPN’s interminable presentation Saturday of the Heisman Trophy to college football’s best player, in which über-sycophant analyst Lee Corso pretty much interviewed anyone who had ever touched a football, the one person who should have been there was not there at all.

That was Cecil Newton. His son is Cam Newton, the spectacular quarterback of Auburn University, who won college football’s most esteemed honor in a landslide vote. Newton’s path to Auburn is rife with stench, but when you throw for 2,589 yards and 28 touchdowns and run for 1,409 yards and 20 more, does it really matter?


Like the Mafia, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, ostensibly there to sanction college sports and keep the game clean, is really in the business of finding fall guys to protect the multimillion-dollar empire. The NCAA doesn’t off potential snitches. It just does its best to make them disappear.

Cecil Newton became that fall guy, so much so that he was basically banned from attending the Heisman ceremony in New York to witness his son’s beatific moment. Both the NCAA and Auburn recently acknowledged that he and a scouting service director named Kenny Rogers, in what was described as a “pay-for-play” deal during the recruiting of Cecil’s son, tried to hit up the potential pimp of Mississippi State University (I’m sorry, I meant the fine academic institution of Mississippi State, perhaps the only school in the United States that Sarah Palin did not attend for an hour).

Newton, working through at least one intermediary, is said to have asked for as much as $180,000 for Cam’s services, according to three former Mississippi State football players that include Rogers himself. As someone who has written about sports for more than two decades, I have a grave problem with that.

Cecil Newton didn’t ask for enough.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and- ... -the-ncaa/