Brawl game a new low

Phil Mushnick

EQUAL TIME

The scam is so pervasive, so perverse and so damned obvious, any other business would have been closed down decades ago.

Big-time, TV money-driven college football and basketball are so greedy and unethical — our colleges serving as hotbeds for financial, social and academic corruption — that few Division I college presidents (read: fund-raisers) could successfully defend their actions.

Saturday, on and for ESPN2, there was another NCAA indoor street fight, one that even included a stomping, the kind now seen in prison yard turf brawls and on convenience store surveillance videos.

AP

BLACK EYE: The melee against Cincinnati Saturday not only left Xavier’s Kenny Frease bloodied, but college basketball as well, says The Post’s Phil Mushnick.

Judging from the unfiltered comments of Xavier players following the Cincinnati-Xavier same-city basketball game and riot — including Hempstead’s Tu Holloway proudly telling a postgame news conference he regards himself and his teammates as “a whole bunch of gangstas” — this game was played by young men with no good reason to be enrolled in any college.

Do you suppose Xavier tells the parents of applicants their kids will have the opportunity to share the campus with a basketball team comprised of “a whole bunch of gangstas?”

On the other side, Cincinnati’s recent basketball history, starting with the Bob Huggins days, has shown a strong, steady disposition for recruiting full-scholarship criminals to its college team.

College? Did I just write “college?”

This in-town rivalry was scheduled for Dec. 10, the first day of final exams at Xavier, the last day of finals at Cincinnati.

The schools’ presidents issued statements claiming to be appalled by the malevolent conduct. After all, that’s not what they expect from their student-athletes!

It isn’t? Why not? Why would they expect better? Their “college men” even did the “gangsta” thing and swapped trash-talk days before the showdown, er, game.

Does any college’s charter include words that even hint that it is essential to win ballgames?

But the only immediate change we can expect is Xavier won’t again allow Holloway anywhere near a microphone.

While Cincinnati played Xavier, Duke played Washington on/for CBS at Madison Square Garden. Washington, where finals begin today, was in the last game of a road trip that began in Nevada, then to New York, for nearly a week.

Which trustee of a college, TV executive or NCAA administrator would encourage their kid to leave school just before or during finals?

Has there even been a Heisman candidate in the last 40 years who said, “Sorry, I can’t make it to Manhattan. I’ve got finals?” Or an NCAA boss who insisted awards not be presented during exam periods, even if just for the sake of appearances or for the one, odd player who’d prefer to be a legit student-athlete as opposed to party to the scam?