Remember the old sports joke about a guy who went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out?
Yeah, well, Big Ten college basketball just told the NHL to hold its clipboard.
Michigan Coach Juwan Howard took a swing in the postgame handshake line at a Wisconsin assistant coach Sunday afternoon. And if you spent all weekend drowning out your lack-of-football sorrows or bemoaning the pain of an Olympic skier from Finland suffering a frozen appendage and missed the exchange, well, here's the recap.
Howard's team got thumped. Howard took umbrage at Wisconsin Coach Greg Gard for calling a late timeout while up double digits, even though Howard's Michigan team continued to press in the final seconds. So if one team is going to go 100% to the final horn the other team/coach doing so is bad form?
In the ensuing handshake line, Howard told Gard he would not forget the timeout, to which Gard tried to explain. Physical interactions - Gard putting his hand on Howard's chest, Howard responding with finger-pointing and chest-poking - followed and it became a scrum with multiple peacemakers trying to calm Howard down. Wisconsin assistant Joe Krabbenhoft entered the fray, and Howard slapped Krabbenhoft across the face with an open hand. Then players started swinging.
It was ugly. And it was made uglier by Howard's postgame news conference. There was no remorse. No apology. No mea culpa about the big-time stakes of late-season conference games.
Nope, Howard pointed this back at Gard, who Howard said, touched him "unnecessarily" and added that "at that point, you know, I thought that was the time to protect myself."
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Forget that Howard's slap/face push was a few heated minutes after the initial contact for a second. Howard, a 6-foot-10 former NBA all-star power forward, feeling the need to "protect" himself against Gard is akin to an NFL lineman keeping his head on a swivel waiting for his bread bowl at Panera.
So there's the back story. And yes, on the trending stories on USAToday sports, this was No. 1 for a good part of Monday's news cycle. Want to know No. 3? A minor league hockey player who has been banned for life for punching a referee.
So the USPHL - the league that banned 20-year-old Paul Halloran - has more teeth, backbone and standards than the Big Ten or the college basketball bigwigs, both leading the game and covering the sport.
Because the kid gloves with which Howard has been treated in this whole ordeal - a complete debacle that he holds a lion's share of the responsibility - is downright laughable.
CBSsports.com's original story on the game had a headline of "Many deserve blame for shameful Big Ten fight."
ESPN's morning roulette of talk shows featured more excuse-making for a Howard since Stern's early radio days in NYC.
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Heck, multiple people - from ESPN commentators like Dick Vitale - are now saying the handshake line should be done away with. How does that make sense?
Why, because Juwan Howard can't keep his emotions in check or his hands to himself? Would that not be the same thing as demanding Hostess stop churning out Twinkies because as a chubby child I'd eat them three at a time?
In a bigger sense, doing away with the handshake line - and any pretense of postgame sportsmanship - is such a 2022 American reaction that who wants to bet against it. Forget addressing the problem or fixing the problem, let's find an excuse or a tangential blame agent rather than confronting the real issue and demanding that issue be changed.
Late Monday evening it was announced Howard was suspended for the final five games of the regular season. Should Howard have been fired? I don't know the answer to that, but termination certainly should have been in the serious conversations being had by Michigan leadership. Especially since 24 hours after the series of unfortunate events, there still was no apology - not even a ham-handed, "I'm sorry if you were offended by my actions" kind of offering.
Because when we are holding the 18-to-22 year-old athletes to higher standards or professionalism and sportsmanship and accountability than the coaches making seven figures to be the face of an eight- or nine-figure program, well, that's especially disconcerting, even for a hierarchy as fractured as college sports.
This feels like a good time to remind everyone this is not Howard's first run-in with an opposing coach and having difficulty controlling his emotions, something that has been noticeably absent in most of the national conversation about the event.
Last year Howard threatened to kill another coach during a game before being ejected.
Good thing that event was before the all-enraging handshake line, huh?
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6273. Follow him on Twitter @jgreesontfp.
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Jay Greeson