You have to hand it to the Miami Hurricanes and their football program.  A constant source of controversy for 30 years, the most recent allegations are by far the most serious.  Before we touch on the latest mess, lets review the past 3 plus decades of scandals at The U.

• 1978 – Miami players throw a man in a lake which results in the coach, Lou Saban, getting fired.  The players threw the man into the lake because he was wearing a yarmulke.
• 1980s – Luther Campbell, a member of 2LiveCrew, had an alleged “pay-for-play” system that rewarded players for touchdowns and big plays.  It was also in this period the team showed up to the National Championship game wearing camouflage, adding to their ‘thug’ personality.



• 1995 – An athletic department councilor for the football team  raided the Pell Grant program, which provides money for students who need it to attend college.  The employee used the money to fund his cocaine habit.  This latest scandal caused Sports Illustrated to write an open letter to Miami to shut down their football program.
• 2002-Present – A known criminal, Nevin Shapiro, used funds obtained in a Ponzi scheme to pay out over $2 Million in illegal benefits to players.  The benefits ranged from “pay-to-play” to getting underage athletes into club and buying them prostitutes.

Enough is enough.  Writers, fans and others are now asking if University of Miami should get the death penalty.  The NCAA handed one of these out before to SMU, and the football program has not been the same.

What if the NCAA decided to take a different approach and allow the players to get paid and recruited at any time?  At this point what difference would it make?  College football is one of the bigger hypocrisies going.  Players get paid nothing, colleges make millions, the colleges turn a blind eye when players or coaches cheat as long as the money roles in.  At the rate these scandals and violations keep happening, there is a chance that bottom feeder football programs like Syracuse may actually be able to compete with the cheaters. 

Let’s be honest, Planet Earth has issues right now, and its citizens are not happy.  Droughts, floods, debt, corruption, its no wonder why the riots we have seen in the UK, Arab Spring across the Middle East, and other protests in Greece, Spain and even in the US in the state of Wisconsin, people are fed up and scared.  Places and people that are seen almost apathetic about their governments have been anything but in 2011.

People are generally concerned, and based on data I have seen, people are wondering when the riots, protests and peaceful activism are coming to their backyard.  Here in the United States just in the past week we have had curfews in Philadelphia and cell phones blocked in San Francisco’s transportation system both designed to protect people from protests.

All of this got me wondering if protests can happen in the UK what stops them from coming to the US?  We are only 9 months away from the 20-year reunion of the Rodney King protests in LA that resulted in numerous businesses being looted and people being hurt or killed.  The tinderbox has always been in place in this country, but hopefully we don’t get the spark to trigger what we are seeing in the rest of the world.