I’ve had it with college football.

There! I said it! I make no apologies for it, and if that places me out of the mainstream of sports fans and sports thought, so be it.

I have nothing against football, per se,. I like football. I just don’t love football, or at least not the way I love baseball and basketball. I do have NFL Sunday Ticket for this season, but only because it’s free. You best believe that the day after the regular season, I will be calling to have Sunday Ticket disconnected.

My affection, however, ceases where college football begins. I find it often to be a sport that wallows in tradition to the detriment of both the players and the fan base. College football was one of the last sports to desegregate. Its coaches conduct a quiet, but still effective war on women’s athletics.

And it wasn’t until last season — more than 100 years after the first organized game — when Division I football finally got with the times and came up with a viable way to declare a champion on the field. Even so, there’s still chicanery that keeps all of the more than 100 teams from having a real chance to win, but with college football, you have to settle for incremental progress as you can get it.

One other thing about college football: If you can run faster, throw a ball further or knock the snot out of another guy harder, you’re seemingly welcome to play, even if you have a demonstrated record of hurting someone.

That appears to be the case at Baylor,  where the faithful hope this will be the season their Bears lead them to the promised land of a national championship.
Baylor was aced out of a playoff last year and returns virtually its entire roster. The Bears are ranked fourth in the preseason Associated Press Top 25 poll released Sunday. They could be headed for the best season in school history.
That is, provided their coach, Art Briles, survives the kind of scandal that seems to be part and parcel of college football these days, one where a star player ran afoul of the law.
The offending party, defensive end Sam Ukwuachu, was found guilty late last week of second degree assault for an attack on a former Baylor women’s soccer player last week.
Ukwuachu was sentenced to six months in jail and placed on probation for 10 years by a Texas judge, which, in many places would be a scandalously light sentence, but in others would be the end of the matter.
However, Baylor president Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor, has ordered an internal investigation to find out what Briles knew about Ukwuachu, and, just as importantly, when he knew it.
You see, Ukwuachu, a Texas native, began his college career at Boise State, where he was an All-American in his freshman year in 2012.
But he was dismissed from the team for violating team rules that were not specified at the time by then coach Chris Peterson, who is now at Washington.
During his recent trial, a woman who dated Ukwuachu at Boise testified that he choked her, punched her in the head and kept her from leaving an apartment, though she didn’t file charges against him.
Briles has maintained as recently as Friday that he knew nothing of Ukwuachu’s problems at Boise and that Peterson only told him that the player was depressed and needed to come home.
However, Peterson told ESPN last week that he called Briles two years ago and told him everything about Ukwuachu. And even if Peterson didn’t say anything, why wasn’t Briles or Starr, who famously tried to drag the nation into Bill Clinton’s bedroom, curious about why Ukwauchu was suddenly available?
Ukwuachu sat out the 2013 season in accordance with NCAA transfer rules and did not play last year at Baylor because of a violation of team rules. But, until his trial and conviction, he was expected to play this year.
On the surface, this may seem like a “he said, he said” squabble between two coaches.
But, below the water line, this may be yet another example of the power that star talent has to cloud the judgment of college football coaches, university administrators and local police.
College football, more than any other sport, is rife with stories of otherwise sensible people granting unwarranted chances to young men who have been in repeated trouble with the law.
The irony is that coaches try to cloak their greed in hoarding talent under the guise of attempting to reshape the player’s character. These molders of men pretend to be father figures, when all they really care about is a kid’s 40-yard dash time and how much he can bench.

Now comes word that the Big 12, Baylor’s conference, wants to join the SEC in barring schools from accepting athletes who have gotten into trouble in other places. What a crock! It sounds like “please take the spoon away before I devour another tub of ice cream.”

In other words, the numbers of people associated with college football who seem capable of demonstrating self-control are dwindling. I’m going to show some self-control this year by avoiding college football entirely.

Who’s with me?