The Punch

By now you have probably heard or seen the sucker punch that Baylor women's basketball player Brittney Griner dished out to Texas Tech player Jordan Barncastle in a game on March 3rd. Everyone in the world has said repeatedly that there is no room for what she did in the game of college basketball blah, blah, blah. The problem is that no one at any level of authority is backing that statement up.

Baylor University suspended Griner for 2 games for the incident. Well, really they suspended her for 1 game. The NCAA has a mandatory 1 game suspension for behavior like this and Baylor tacked on 1 additional game. Neither the The Big 12 Conference or the NCAA tacked on any additional penalty to the one self imposed by Baylor University. Are you friggin' kidding me?

The university is supposed to come up with a fair and just punishment that takes into consideration the seriousness of the violation committed - Griner broke Barncastle's nose with the punch. Frankly, I think that Brittney Griner should be banned from the sport of women's college basketball for the rest of the 2009-10 season, maybe even for life.

For comparison, two other recent athletic suspensions have also caught my eye. Vermont suspended men's hockey player Justin Milo for the rest of the season on February 16, 2010. At the time he was the second leading scorer on the team with 21 points in 20 games played. He didn't commit an on ice incident, head coach Kevin Sneddon decided: "It was in the best interests of our program and (we) will move forward without him." The Catamounts dismissed one of their top players while fighting for their Hockey East and NCAA playoff lives.

The other recent suspension comes from my alma mater, the University of Maine. They recently suspended their starting men's hockey goaltender Scott Darling "indefinitely after violating team rules." Darling had a 15-6-3 record and the team's other two goalies were 1-9-0 at the time of the suspension. This was the third time that Darling has been suspended in his 2 years at Maine. It is suspected that the violation is related to alcohol but there is no official proof. Maine suspended Darling the weekend before the Hockey East playoffs began.

So one of the best players in women's college basketball punches an opponent in a game and gets a mere 2 game suspension while two equally crucial men's hockey players were both suspended indefinitely by their team for incidents that didn't even occur on the ice. Did Brittney Griner get special treatment because she is one of the up and coming stars in the world of women's college basketball? It sure looks that way.

Mood: Ashamed.

It's Ironic:

That St. Louis University is a member of the Atlantic 10 Conference since it is located 929 miles from the Atlantic Ocean.

Movie Quote of the Day:

"Why worry, each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on our backs." - Ghostbusters