Last night, Ian O’Connor posted a column about the Brady Flat Balls scandal. It’s the sort of meat-head nonsense you get from sports columnists these days. The thing is, it contains a lie that has now been obscured with careful editing. The current opening graph is this:

Under his oversized ski cap, Tom Brady could not hide from the fact he was convicting himself in the court of public opinion. The quarterback of the New England Patriots admitted that footballs pumped up to 12.5 pounds per square inch are “a perfect fit for me,” yet swore he did not notice a difference in the AFC Championship Game when most of the balls had significantly less pressure.

The original paragraph and the basis for his entire rants read this way:

Under his oversized ski cap, Tom Brady could not hide from the fact he was convicting himself in the court of public opinion. The quarterback of the New England Patriots admitted that footballs pumped up to 12.5 pounds per square inch are “a perfect fit for me,” yet swore he did not notice a difference in the AFC Championship Game when the balls weighed two pounds lighter.

If you read the comments, people caught it quickly and mercilessly mocked the idiot for not understanding grammar school science. This guy actually thought footballs weighed 12.5 pounds, one pound of weight for every pound of air pressure. Therefore, a fully deflated football would weigh zero and float away.

I’ve had experience with sports reporters in press boxes and interview rooms. Most reporters are surprisingly obtuse. Sports reporters are uncommonly stupid. The only skill they possess is a willingness to spend their lives on the road watching ball games. That and the ability to avoid noticing anything prohibited. These are the same people who failed to notice the use of steroids in baseball, when it was obvious to most fans.

The other thing with this story worth noting is that Ian O’Connor pretends to be an intellectual on TV. Television is entertainment so all of the chattering skulls play a role, like comedians. Larry the Cable Guy is not actually a cable guy and his accent is entirely contrived, along with his act. O’Connor pretends to be the cerebral guy on the stage, despite having a two-digit IQ.

The difference between a comedian and the fake intellectual is the former is honest, while the latter is dishonest. Pretending to be an accountant, dispensing advice for a fee lands you in prison for fraud.  Pretending to be an accountant on a news program, dispensing advice for a fee wins you an Emmy. The parade of fake military experts is a good example of how lucrative fraud is on television.

The reason stupid people, like Ian O’Connor, are so common in the news business is narrative journalism. The news business has been dominated by the Cult for decades. Instead of reporting the facts of a story, it is a race to jam the facts into the narrative, which is always based on some left-wing fable.

O’Connor embraces this philosophy and flatters his bosses by pretending to be an intellectual, who embraces their philosophy. That means rising quickly to the top.

Multiply this a million times and you have the modern American news media.

Way back in the olden thymes, the assumption was that blacks were too dumb to play quarterback. Amazingly, people said this while Terry Bradshaw was leading the Steelers to championships. Before Super Bowl XIII, Cowboys linebacker Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson famously ridiculed Bradshaw by saying, “He is so dumb he couldn’t spell ‘Cat’ if you spotted him the ‘c’ and the ‘a’.” Whether or not Bradshaw was really that dumb has always been in question, given is long run of success after his playing career.

Still, it says something about the view of the position that people thought blacks could not play quarterback. It was not just racist white people either. Blacks generally thought this too. In the movie North Dallas Forty, there’s a line about it and no one was picketing the movie theaters over it. This idea has become so dangerous today that sports people have created a meta-language to describe it without ever actually saying it. Chattering skulls will just nod at one another whenever the subject is broached.

For a long time now the goal of football at all levels is to prove that blacks are better quarterbacks than whites. It is an obsession going on at least a twenty years, starting with Donovan McNabb. He was the first black QB to come along who allegedly had the intellect to do all the things white guys could do, but also possessed the special black magic that is so highly prized in the cult. McNabb’s inability to win the big game and become the great chocolate savior was frustrating for the Left. It is why they attacked Rush Limbaugh for noticing it.

In the last decade we have had Michael Vick held up as the new model quarterback, even after he was found to be a sadistic sociopath with a taste for torturing animals. The latest crop includes Cam Newton, Colin Kapernick, Russell Wilson and Robert Griffin III. None of these guys is very good at being an NFL quarterback. Wilson is the best of the bunch, but he acts white and votes Republican so the Left has trouble lauding him as their chocolate savior.

Newton and Kapernick are obvious dumbbells who will never be great at their position. Both were just big fast guys who can run like the wind, but that’s not a great skill for quarterback. The NFL has loads of big fast guys. The shortage is with smart guys who can run a modern NFL offense. Dummies that move their lips when they read can play other positions, but not quarterback. That’s why both of them are fading from the spotlight.

Robert Griffin III was going to be different. He is smart, charismatic, has the special black magic the Left values and he was not acting white like Wilson. The Left could look past Griffin’s politics because he had dreadlocks, which the Left associates with black culture. RG3 was the poster child for the “new” NFL and the “new” quarterback. I put “new” in quotes because this is about the tenth time we have gone through this. Now, Griffin’s career may be over.

Griffin has made close to $20 million and has millions in sponsorship money coming his way so no one needs to feel sorry for him. NFL careers are short and most guys find themselves as salary men before they hit their 25th birthday. Griffin is doing just fine and will probably have a long career in sportscasting after his football career. Even after his troubles in Washington, some team will give him another shot next year and maybe he can extend his career.

In many ways Griffin is emblematic of how the Left treats blacks as ornaments, not people. Griffin is a special athlete, but he was not trained to be an NFL quarterback in college. His college ran a system that allowed him to run around as a tailback, rather than as a NFL-style quarterback. Griffin should have sat and learned for a few years before getting on the field. Instead, the pressure to have the next great black quarterback put him on the field when he was not ready and he got his legs broken up trying to be a runner in a league unkind to runners.

Griffin is emblematic of the Left ‘s view of blacks. The Left does not see them as real people and instead treats them like ornaments to decorate their halls. When a black person is useful they get to sit at the big table, but as soon as they’re no longer useful, they are dispatched. You can see it happening with Obama as the Left distances themselves from a black guy they no longer find useful. Griffin will get the same treatment now as he is balled up and thrown away by the Left of Modern Liberalism.

A business person I know recently found out that a couple of his employees were stealing from him. It was petty theft and he never would have detected it, except one of them bragged about it to another employee. One thing led to another and he was informed by a loyal employee of what was happening. He fired the thieves and that was the end of it. It was not the first time and it will not be the last time. Every business has policies and procedures in place to handle theft.

If you talk to cops, they will tell you that they solve most crimes with a lot of help from the criminals. The crooks leave physical evidence that is easy to trace. They brag about their exploits to friends. These days, they post about their crimes on Facebook and Twitter, which is amusing at a certain level. There’s something about humans that leads them to give themselves away when they are breaking the rules.

The point I’m leading up to is the recent report on the North Carolina academic scandal is based on assumptions that contradict the human condition. The official story does not comport with what we know about people breaking the rules. For instance, former UNC Athletic Director and current ACC Commissioner, John Swofford, claims he was wholly unaware of what was going on all around him.

John Swofford, the ACC commissioner, said that during his final years at North Carolina he saw no warning signs, sensed no red flags, about bogus independent studies courses that for nearly two decades inflated athletes’ GPAs and helped keep them eligible.

Swofford, who spoke Wednesday at the ACC’s annual basketball media day, was the athletic director at UNC from 1980 through 1997, when he left to become the ACC commissioner. By the time he left, a long-running “paper class scheme,” as it has been described recently, had been ongoing for four years.

Kenneth Wainstein, a former U.S. Justice Department official, last week announced the results of his months-long investigation into suspect courses in UNC’s African- and Afro-American Studies Department. Wainstein concluded that, from 1993-2011, 3,100 hundred students — nearly half of them athletes — passed through bogus paper classes in AFAM.

Among the athletes who were enrolled in the classes, which had no professor oversight, nearly half were football and men’s basketball players. Overall, athletes received higher grades in the courses than non-athletes — often As and Bs for papers that were found to have been heavily plagiarized.

Asked Wednesday if he sensed “any red flags” about the AFAM courses during his final years at UNC, Swofford said, “I don’t think so.”

“I think if you look at (the Wainstein) report there, in my last few years there, there were some, in terms of numbers, very relatively minimal, independent study classes and AFAM,” Swofford said. “But that really took off in about 2000.

“So it never came up while I was there as an issue from any source. If it had, obviously, we would have addressed that with the appropriate people. But it never arose as any issue at all.”

When Swofford was UNC’s athletic director, the academic support program for athletes was, for a time, housed within the athletic department. He changed that, though, and moved the academic support program — formerly called the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes — to the College of Arts and Sciences, where it has remained.

Now, I suppose it is possible that not a single student talked to anyone about the fake classes. It’s possible the adults running the scam said nothing. I suppose no one at the school ever wondered why so many athletes were taking and acing these classes. All of that could be true, but is so unlikely that it borders on the laughable. In all these years not a single person bragged? Blabbed? Accidentally let slip with something?

According to the report, this was a miraculous crime spree. For almost two decades, a handful of low-level flunkies and one professor orchestrated an elaborate fraud without anyone in charge ever noticing. They were so good, they were able to elude detection by dozens of coaches, several directors and a couple of presidents. Not only does this contradict common everyday experience, it is one of the all-time great crimes.

That’s all nonsense, of course. What we are seeing is another example the how we no longer punish the people in charge. The report was commissioned so the people in charge of the school could pretend to be doing the right thing, while not actually blaming anyone who was in charge at the time. Instead, it is some low-level flunkies left holding the bag. Much like how Janet Reno “took responsibility” for killing all of those people at Waco, being responsible means never having to answer for your actions.

It is the problem that plagues our age. The people in charge have no respect for the rules, they don’t abide by them and they never face any consequences for breaking the rules. Walter Russell Mead calls what happened at UNC a moral collapse. That true, but it misses the larger issue. The UNC scandal is emblematic of what has happened to American society. The utter and complete moral collapse of the ruling class has reduced to a transactional society run by sociopaths.

The North Carolina academic scandal has put the spotlight on the way athletes are handled by money grubbing colleges. Two decades of systematic grade enhancement is about as bad as it gets. You can’t pretend it is a rogue employee or an unscrupulous coach when the problem spans generations. Like the Penn State scandal, it can only happen when there is a culture that tolerates, maybe even encourages, the behavior in question. It is systemic, not isolated corruption.

The evil right-wing extremists are having fun with the fact the center of the corruption was the Afro’d American Studies Department. As some tried to point out, schools have a range of fake majors where they can stash jocks. A great one is probably the Fashion major at Virginia Tech. One of the classes for that major involves attending a fashion show in New York. The person behind that has a sense of humor.

The point being missed by all of this is it is not much of a sports story. If you look at a school like North Carolina, you will find that the “jocks” do better than the regular students in the class room. They get better grades and graduate on time. Like all state colleges, close to half the entering freshmen fail to graduate. Some lose interest, while others realize it is just a racket and get on with their lives.

The schools take in kids that have no business on a college campus just to get their government loan money. There’s also federal dollars and state dollars. The colleges know these kids have little to no chance of graduating, even with a nonsense degree like sociology or African-American studies. Athletes, of course, are not all that interested in school, so these fake majors serve a purpose.

The scam basically involves dumbing down the 100 and 200 level courses. The “core” studies are also dumbed down so kids can make it through freshmen year taking remedial math and English. NC State, for example offers Algebra and Pre-calculus. In the old days, you had to finish calculus to graduate high school. Colleges fill up the first year with coursework that should be covered in middle-school. The second year they start taking some real college course and that’s when the attrition begins. By the third year these kids are overwhelmed and drop out.

The problem is much worse as the dilution of college cannot be checked once it starts. It is simply too profitable. Browsing the NC State catalog, I see they have a major in Landscape Architecture. At the risk of sounding like a meanie, there’s no reason for the gardener to have a college degree. When I was a kid I did “landscape architecture” for school money in the summers. An old black guy taught me “Site Planning” and “Landscape Construction Materials.” He had different names for them and they were pass/fail, but the results were the same. I admit that designing a golf course takes skill, but these guys are going to be running lawn mower gangs at the municipal golf course.

As is always the case, there is a natural limit to the corruption. There’s only so much money to steal. Seven in 10 college seniors (71%) who graduated last year had student loan debt, with an average of $29,400 per borrower. From 2008 to 2012, debt at graduation (federal and private loans combined) increased an average of six percent each year. That’s according to these people. According to the Fed, 11.5% of the $1.2 trillion in school debt is delinquent. By way of comparison, the peak of the mortgage crisis saw a 9% delinquency rate on roughly one trillion in loans. Those loans were backed by an asset of some value. Student loans are backed by nothing.

But, it should work out just fine. Just keep pumping out landscaping majors and Afro’s America Studies graduates. What could go wrong?