I was watching one of the few great sports movies Sunday, "The Bad News Bears," in which the Bears are hammered so badly (26-0) in the first inning of their first game that manager Walter Matthau calls it off before his team even has a chance to bat, and is quickly encouraged to disband the team, for the good of the kids and the sanctity of little league and so forth. He refuses, gets himself a couple of ringers, enthusiastically accepts at least one victory by forfeit and guides the Bears within an inning of an unlikely championship. Other than the triumphant, beer-swilling finale, it was an appropriate matinee, on the same day that a girls' basketball coach in Dallas was fired for refusing to apologize for his team's 100-0 humiliation of a rival high school on Jan. 13. The "victim," completely hapless Dallas Academy -- a small private school for students with learning disabilities that hasn't won a girls' basketball game in four years -- quickly dropped out of the league and has subsequently become a sort of cause celebré for pity. They were on "Good Morning America" today and were personally invited by Mark Cuban to attend a Dallas Mavericks game.

Yeah, whatever, right? Getting waylaid in some fashion by someone bigger, stronger and faster than you is an ages-old part of growing up in a competitive society, I think (I'm Steven Pinker could trace the evolutionary necessity of adolescent humiliation), but in many circles, of course, such a massacre is just another sign of a ruthless society that's lost its heart and its humanity and only cares about winning at any cost, etc., and won't someone please think of the children? That kind of reaction is to be expected, as is the backlash by Objectivist types defending obliteration in the name of talent and honest competition. This kind of argument is bound to grind on between two integral and diametrically opposed ethics in any field (in business, for example), and especially in sports.

With that vast spectrum at its rhetorical disposal, though, for some mysterious reason, the Dallas Morning News felt compelled to point to one very specific bogeyman:

Unfortunately, college football offers a poor example. High margin of victory has been a factor with teams looking to vault up the Bowl Championship Series rankings, which are used to determine the national championship. That encourages some to pile on.

This is, of course, false: Margin of victory was officially stricken as a factor in the BCS; a one-point counts exactly the same according to the computer polls as a 100-point win. Ridiculous, but very sportsmanlike. Coaches in college football react to lopsided matchups the same way as coaches in any sport. I very much doubt that Micah Grimes, now-deposed coach of the 100-point warriors at the heart of the recent firestorm, was thinking, "Yeah, I'm gonna be like Bob Stoops!" during his team's merciless romp.

If the Morning News wanted to target college football, it had very solid grounds to do so, and they have nothing (directly, anyway) to do with the BCS. Instead, it should chide the tendency of the sport -- and of all sports -- to align such lopsided contests to begin with. Oklahoma doesn't race out to a 50-plus-point lead on Chattanooga because it wants to impress the pollsters; OU is just that much better than Chattanooga, and the Mocs are willing to take it because they get paid. The crowd comes to watch a brutal beating, and so Oklahoma gets paid, in addition to earning a win that counts toward a bowl game, where it can get paid again.

The real insult to the spirit of competition is that these games happen at all. Obviously, Oklahoma should not be playing Chattanooga, just as the girls on the winning team a few weeks ago obviously had no business playing a group of learning-disabled opponents who had no hope of keeping pace. If you really want to implicate college football for fostering a sense of ruthless, competitive imbalance, look not at the BCS but at "bodybag" games that inflate win columns and coffers all over the country -- and have since the dawn of the game, as famously demonstrated by John Heisman's petty, vindictive massacre of a group of kids that didn't even qualify as a real team 100 years ago. The BCS has nothing to do with it. Going in for the kill is just human instinct, when given the opportunity. So don't point fingers at the instinct, which is part and parcel and integral to everything that makes sports great in the first place. Point them at the abundance of opportunity for its abuse in these lame schedules.

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Hat tip: Cliff.