Crazy, fighting
football world

Last night it was "Can't Stand Ya in Atlanta."

Hello, Monday Night Football.

I was half expecting ESPN's Tom Jackson to smack Stuart Scott and Michael Irvin to hit Chris Mortensen with a folding chair.

Crazy.

And this comes on the heels of Hawaii's game at Michigan State in which UH:

But then came last night's madness, in which NFL referees actually went to instant replay to review their penalties on a pregame fight.

The play stands. Even grown men, pros, can hurt their teams with this stuff.

Ask Jeremiah Trotter, the Eagles' Pro Bowl linebacker, who didn't make a tackle last night after having been kicked out of the game before it began.

And yet, it still happened.

Football players are just like the rest of us: stupid.

Even I have been in a bench-clearing brawl. Really.

"Bellicosity in Division III."

Well, no, OK, I wasn't really in it, per se. When it broke out, I just happened to have been standing right next to the head coach. And out of a team of 60 guys, all plundering and pillaging in a wild free-for-all just yards away, he picked me to hold back. Me!

(Actually, I've decided to take it as a compliment. He knows I'm a bad man.)

I never even got to jump up and down like those tough guys last night, yelling, "Hold me back! Hold me back!" and "Wot! Wot!"

Missing the bench-clearing brawl. Sigh. I've never lived it down.

But seriously, you can't get much more stupid than fighting in football pads. For a variety of reasons.

There was the time a friend of mine was beefing with a teammate in practice, the guy rolled, my friend punched the ground and had to play the rest of the year with a broken thumb.

And then there are the figurative black eyes, the likes of which UH has sported in recent years.

And then there is the more immediate, concrete way to measure why this kind of stuff is a bad idea.

"I will not tolerate 30 yards in one drive from one player," UH defensive coordinator Jerry Glanville said yesterday, addressing the action at the end of the Michigan State game.

"I've never had a player that good," Glanville said.

But this is the good part about it. That, what he just said. Too often, this stuff is met with shoulder shrugging at UH. Boys will be boys. That's the way it is.

Hey, the other team started it first.

I even asked UH interim president David McClain, a few weeks ago, about a fan's public contention (at the "drinking ban" hearing) that the team's actions and attitude contribute to problems at the stadium.

And McClain, who I like (anybody who has protesters over to the office is OK with me), gave one of those shoulder-shrugging, side-stepping political answers that left my head swimming. Something about all of us having different ideas on what we like and what we don't like.

Apparently there isn't as much of a problem as some might think.

But what happened at the end of the Michigan State game clearly weighed on Glanville (who said it also clearly weighed heavily on the young man). That's good. It should weigh on somebody, when this stuff goes on.

"I talked to June this morning, and he knows me," Glanville said. "If I had to coach football that way, I wouldn't coach. We want to do everything we can to get after you and smack you around, and then when the play's over the play's over. And the players know that."

The players do. They always do. But last night in Atlanta, it happened again.

If only there were an answer, something we could tell them ...

"If you have a problem with a player," Glanville said, "you want to fight that player, tell him you'll meet him in the tunnel, I'll go, I'll be the referee."

Of all the nights for the former Falcons coach to be out of town.