Taboo talk

If you haven't heard the latest news on the Bulldog domestic violence front, Chris Lewis has been suspended for the fall semester for "violating the athlete code of conduct" — which Simpletext read once before and retained zero of the words written therein.

Probably because it was written with lots of words like "therein" therein.

If you read the Fresno Bee, which us media types stylishly call the FresBee (as opposed to the ModBee and, our personal favorite for obvious reasons, the SacBee), you know Lewis is one of two players embroiled in legal troubles surrounding nasty breakups with girlfriends.

Fresno State fans should be begging for some kind of opinion leader to come in here and tell us what to think. And since Matt James is on his whirlwind tour of the midwest, Simpletext will do it for you.

Why do we feel like everybody but the Bee is shoving this under the rug? Heck, even The Bulldog Bounce's position-by-position preview neglected to mention that Lewis is in hot water — and this after allegedly vandalizing his girlfriend's car and taking and/or selling growth hormones, according to a published report.

We were disappointed to scour the internet and find little commentary on two nearly identical criminal acts alleged to be commited by members of the Bulldogs football teams within the same month.

Our friends over at The Fresno State Football Blog tried to play off the Quaadir Brown offense as if it were none of our business what goes on between he and his girlfriend as long as he never hit her.

We all remember what it was like to be in college, the blogger "nsc" says, as if to wipe away the act under the glorious nature of boys will be boys.

One problem: nsc's let's-give-him-a-second-chance, he-made-one-out-of-character-mistake, damn-that's-a-lot-of-hyphens argument sounds a lot like the one a critically acclaimed sports columnist for The Collegian (Fresno State) once wrote about Terry Pettis.

Pettis began his troubles as a harmless intramural flag football kingpin who vandalized his girlfriend's car. People were quick to give him free passes, too, since he could penetrate and score on the basketball court. But within months, Pettis was pushing Jeff Passan and popping drug dealers in the Village Apartments.

So don't be so quick to dismiss these charges. In these cases of people getting their personal lives straightened out, don't criticize the punishments. Just hope they're the right ones.

Because there's someone rotting in a jail cell for murder right now wishing he didn't get the wrong one.