The Auburn, Heisman and the BCS Cam Sham

Hi, my name is Max, and I’m a footbaholic.

Okay, so now, for the hard-core college football addicts and the rabidly infected SEC football fan, we enter into the wandering time of open pasture between last season and the next. Sure we can entertain ourselves momentarily with snacks of Super Bowls, though personally, I spend my NFL time looking up pro player’s school affiliations when I do watch, and of course we get a quick fix from the winter blues with a bit more favorable “high”, recruiting.

But go ahead and admit it: you’re a face down in the gutter junkie. Be you man or woman, player, alumni, or just plain vanilla on the buzz, you got tracks in your life like a long-time heroin needle user running straight to your team.

Your computer is infected with football history log-ins, your TV remote is stained, and you’ve got more shirts, hats, sweaters, jackets, cups, magazines, bumper stickers identifying your particular strain of this sickness. You’re a pitiful pile of disgusting, steaming, wretched, disintegrating bio-mass of your former self. You make me sick. You know why? ‘Cause you’re just like me.

Thanks for letting me share.

While we are being honest here, I have got to get something off my chest. Something that is eating away at me that I can’t fix, but perhaps I can purge it by throwing it up or perhaps get a priest-inspired exorcism. It’s one of those quiet terrors that lurk below that eventually yields to either a life-threatening disease or an ulcer, or a violent outburst to a undeserving innocent bystander. It’s this whole Cam Newton thing.

Cecil Newton’s (Cam's father) ethical and moral discretions were unforgivable in any venue. A moment that is inexcusable by any measure and absolutely worthy of our collective scorn. An act so vile from a man soliciting a favor from a used car salesman for steering his grandmother to buy a lemon car, let alone a minister soliciting money so his superbly gifted son will play a game on a certain plot of soil. So, we all agree, that ain’t right.

Now the reason I decided to share this now, after my previous confession of personal weakness and withdrawal shakes, is because I feel this is my safe place to share. Kindred soul connections of similar tendencies are more understood by those like you, than blurted out in a room of non-believers. I think you get it.

We all have our own opinions of our justice system as well as the purveyors responsible for its application (lawyers, courts and judges). We all share a collective sigh or gasp when it doesn’t go the way it obviously should have gone because of a typo or some other technicality. A common disdain for a system that is unequally vetted in the media and unnecessarily influenced by the same, on this, we can always agree. Whether it is the guilty allowed to walk or the innocent unjustly accused, when it doesn’t work, though it is the best in the world, it stinks.

Now I will address my point. The game, the competition, the man across the line, the athlete Cam Newton and all those that cheered, jeered, played with or against him. Football is the closest thing to hand to hand combat allowable in our society. It harkens to the inner human naturally occurring testosterone driven male emotion from days past when warriors battled for survival, turf and domination. It is pure man to man conflict.

There appears to be a cadre of sorts that is determined to continue to drink the Kool-Aid that Cam Newton, and by association Auburn University, will eventually lose all claims to anything associated with the 2010 season. They continue to scour phone records, flight schedules and bank accounts in a desperate, quivering and maniacal attempt to justify the quest to be healed. You may heal your own limp flaccid ego, but to those that play the game, the only thing that matters was what that final score flashed on the scoreboard, and thus history revealed.

Personally I don’t care if they put an asterisk by this season’s national championship. Even if they decide, years down the road, to strip the Heisman and the crystal ball from Cam and Auburn. I sincerely hope they don’t. But in the eyes of a former player, I know that would be just a technicality.

Do you think the faithful University of Georgia Bulldog will feel better about giving up a 14-point first quarter lead with an asterisk? Will the Tigers of Clemson take solace in blowing a 14-point halftime lead, or will South Carolina celebrate more for their momentarily unanswered 20-point run? Do you really think two goal-line stands, against the most high-powered running game in the country, both of which were dominated defensively, will feel better about losing the national championship, as men, with a well-placed reference mark?

Do you think an asterisk will act like a super-powered antacid and remove the lifelong taste of bile from the mouths of the Crimson Tide seniors as they succumbed to the biggest catastrophic collapse, in Bear’s house no less, in modern college football history? Let alone the storied Alabama tradition? Of course, it would not do any of that. And that, my friend, is the reason I don’t care.

You can add all the marks you want on paper, on the ground, and off the field, Cam was and is, the better man. So to all the technicians of reversals, the esquires of originally intended, specifically created yet contrarily subjective verbiage surrounding our game, to all the investigators running amuck in corridors and rooms of questionable repute, go and have your way. If you think an added ink blot bears any serious significance to an addict like me, you are wrong. If you’ll feel better about yourself, as a man, because you figured out a way to push back the heave in your throat by throwing punctuation at Cam, take your best shot. He'll beat you ... again.

I hope you do feel better, I really do. I certainly wouldn’t want to have suffered thusly as have you. And perhaps there is some solace to be gained for you and yours by accomplishing a technical victory, though I doubt its long-term satisfaction would be realized. Ask O.J.

The real fans, the players and coaches, the junkies that live for the rush of adrenaline when it’s a well-earned, by God, whippin’ that was won, they know. And you can never take that away. Nor the fact that one of, if not the most, talented football players of all time, held and kept his head high, played on that plot of soil, brought home that national title, and probably whipped your team along the way there. So you can maintain your Cam Sham if you would like … but you know in your heart of hearts … it just ain’t right.