What's worse?

Fans of a certain rival college who won their Homecoming game lit up an Internet chat board this week over the unsportsmanlike behavior of the visiting coach. Yet now they’re willing to dismiss the alleged criminal behavior of their star quarterback.

Hmmm. Isn’t that just a bit hypocritical?

The visiting coach, apparently, refused to shake hands with the winning coach after the beatdown. He might have also flashed a certain finger. There’s a lot of build-up to this event, but I’ll spare you the details. In the heat of the moment, details are dismissed as excuses.

I’ll concede the coach was guilty of unsportsmanlike conduct, but that’s hardly a crime.

It is a crime, in Iowa anyhow, to make “abusive epithets or threatening gestures which are likely to provoke a violent reaction by another.” At least that’s the section of code under with police charged the quarterback with disorderly conduct for yelling homosexual slurs at a fellow student.

Only a misdemeanor, sure, but a crime nonetheless.

These same poster boys up in arms about the unsportsmanlike conduct are all-too-willing to dismiss the alleged criminal activity as boys-will-be-boys (even if they’re legal adults) and “just a small town boy” caught up in a more “cultured” world. After all, it’s not like he used the “N-word.”

“Guess that’s just the world we live in these days,” one of them just posted. I guess so, in both cases.