Minutes after a disheartening loss to Boise State in the highly anticipated kickoff to the college football season on Thursday night, Oregon running back LeGarrette Blount threw a punch that sent an opponent to his knees and placed an exclamation point on what has been a tawdry month for big-time college athletics.Skip to next paragraph
ESPN.com/Associated Press
In this television image, Oregon running back LeGarrette Blount, left, is seen punching Boise State's Byron Hout.
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Blount, who was suspended Friday for the rest of the season, apologized. “I just kind of lost my head,” he said after the game. “A couple of players started pushing, and that’s when I lost my head. I lost my temper. I apologize.”
Throughout August, the scandals trickled in. Rick Pitino, the coach of the men’s basketball team at Louisville, admitted to having a sexual encounter in a restaurant with a woman whom he later gave $3,000 once she told him she was pregnant. The N.C.A.A. announced it was stripping the Memphis men’s basketball team of its trip to the 2008 Final Four after investigators concluded a player had competed while academically ineligible. And there was Rich Rodriguez, the Michigan football coach, who is attempting to rebuild the Wolverines’ program while facing an investigation into whether he exceeded limits on practice times.
As the Oregon-Boise State game got under way Thursday, the opposing players shook hands as part of a pregame sportsmanship initiative, and it seemed the focus was back on the game itself. But as ESPN, which televised the game live, replayed clips of the Blount punch throughout the day Friday, the incident renewed debate over the price of success in high-stakes college sports
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