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Rant: For NCAA, fairness irrelevant

The NCAA was never going to reinstate Mike Williams.

Once you've attempted to - heaven forbid - ply your athletic trade at the next level and you've hired an agent to help you with the details, you are scarred. Ruined. No longer a pure amateur competing for the love of the game.

That's one interpretation for the NCAA's ruling Thursday refusing the former Plant High standout's reinstatement to college football. After two years as a wide receiver for Southern Cal, Williams tested the NFL draft waters, watched them dry up in a court ruling, then tried to return to his college team.

No such luck.

During the three months after an appeals court upheld the NFL's right to bar players who had been out of high school for less than three years, Williams made a convincing argument that he wanted to return to college life. He remained in Los Angeles, taking summer classes. He filed all the paperwork (a progress-toward-degree waiver required by the NCAA) and took the required steps (severing ties with his Tampa-based agent) to make a credible case for reinstatement into the college game.

(Compare this with his partner in history, former Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett, who is living in Texas, focusing on the 2005 NFL draft while showing no interest in returning to a college field or classroom.)

The NCAA still slammed the door in Williams' face, shortly before the Trojans boarded a plane for Maryland and their opener against Virginia Tech. It was another one of its classic moves: devoid of all common sense and fairness, just straight by the book.

The voice takes you back to fall Sundays, to classic games like Cowboys-Redskins in the 1980s and countless Thanksgiving afternoons.

It seems like Pat Summerall has been missing from the NFL for longer than two years. Yet it also feels as comfortable as your favorite recliner to have him back, even if just for meaningless summer exhibitions.

Summerall, 73 years old and four months removed from a liver transplant, is filling in on ESPN's preseason NFL coverage while regular play-by-play announcer Mike Patrick recuperates from triple bypass surgery.

Thursday night one should have had little reason to watch Pittsburgh at Philadelphia, but hearing Summerall brought my late-evening channel-surfing to a halt. As the game wound down, I almost expected him to remind me to stay tuned for 60 Minutes.

His heyday was with John Madden for all those years at CBS and then with Fox, until 2001 when he was removed from Fox's No. 1 broadcast team. Summerall retired a year later, then this year had to fight for his life when years of alcoholism led to liver failure.

Madden, of course, moved on to become larger-than-life John Madden and after two years in the Monday Night Football booth it seems like his two decades with Summerall were a century ago.

But let's hope Summerall hangs around awhile. Preseason work is certainly the bottom rung of the NFL ladder, but on ESPN with Joe Theismann and Paul Maguire, Summerall sounded as smooth as ever, almost as if Theismann were still playing and this was 1984, not 2004.

Hopefully it is the first step to a comeback. That voice and the NFL still feel perfect together.