I’ve never been hugely enthusiastic about the popular idea of instituting a playoff system for the college football season in the manner of the NCAA playoffs in basketball (as recently endorsed by Barack Obama).

Part of the problem is that football is a dangerous and destructive game, so adding intense, hard-hitting playoff games against the best opponents to the best players’ college seasons will just cause that much more wear and tear on players who aren’t getting paid (at least not paid above the table).

If the average NFL running back has maybe four good pro seasons in him, adding playoffs to the college season could end up reducing a running back at a top college’s NFL career by a year, which is a lot. If you have an 8 team playoff instead of bowl games, a USC or Oklahoma running back might wind up playing six or seven more games in his college career, which is pretty close to the equivalent of a full season against mediocre opponents in which stars sit out the fourth quarter of blowout wins. If you have a 16 team playoff, that’s more like ten or eleven hard games across four years.

Also, I’m not crazy about how college football has added two or even three games to the season during my lifetime. It’s not like the college athletic directors sat down with the College Football Players Guild representatives and negotiated a bigger paycheck for the players in return for more work.

The direction this case is taking has been a small but welcome victory for American laws protecting public health and endangered species. (For more background, see my 2007 blog item Monkey-Eating Diversity on Trial.)

A Liberian immigrant and mother of nine children, Mamie Manneh, smuggled a substantial quantity of bushmeat to America, and then played the diversity card as her legal defense. The judge wasn’t buying it [Judge rejects faith claim in NY monkey meat case, Newsday, Jan 3 2009].

Manneh was charged with smuggling the meat of two endangered species. As her case moved toward a trial, her lawyers argued that she and other immigrants in Staten Island’s thriving community of Liberian Christians ate monkey meat for spiritual reasons, particularly during holiday celebrations, and were thereby protected by the First Amendment and federal religious freedom law.

U.S. District Judge Raymond J. Dearie rejected that defense on Wednesday and refused to throw out the charges.

In a 31-page decision, Dearie acknowledged that it was plausible for the consumption of monkey and other types of “bushmeat” to have religious significance, but said Manneh’s claim lacked sincerity.

He also noted that it didn’t address the main point of the criminal charge: That she hadn’t applied for the permits needed to import such exotic foodstuffs and had misled border officials about what she was shipping into the country. [...]

Manneh is already serving jail time in an unrelated a case in which she was convicted of trying to run down a woman she suspected of sleeping with her husband.

Apparently the case can now go to trial. There’s no rush because the accused perp is currently decked out in jailbird stripes, or maybe orange.

Mickey Kaus writes:

1) Immigrants are leaving Southern California. 2) Crime is falling in Southern California (contrary to criminologists’ ‘hard-times=crime’ predictions).

Is there a connection? I don’t know. But don’t expect the Los Angeles Times to even ask. … :2:07 A.M.

In related news, blogger Patterico reviews a year of Los Angeles Times bashing, and finds that the LA Times is so deeply in love with Obama that they’ve lost all sense of proportion. For previous LA Times coverage, check out New LA Times Strategy: Taunt Readers, Urge Them to Leave Town, by Joe Guzzardi.

With the Democratic governor of Illinois’ pick for the U.S. Senate getting much publicity, the Democratic governor of Colorado has made sure to appoint the most exquisitely genteel individual imaginable to the U.S. Senate: Denver school chief Michael Bennet, age 44, the former editor of the Yale Law Review. His brother Jim is the editor of the Atlantic Monthly and his father was head of National Public Radio and president of Wesleyan U.

After Michael Bennet got rich, he then decided, in the mode of the time (e.g., Bill Gates), to fix the public schools. After all, how hard could it be?

A couple of years ago, in an article Across Difficult Country summarizes here, The New Yorker profiled Bennet’s travails in trying to close a gang-infested Denver high school with terrible test scores, Manual. It turned out that the all-Mexican student body and their families kind of liked their terrible school, didn’t appreciate poor Bennet’s meddling, and, not being indoctrinated in the theology of the overclass, didn’t expect to do much better at a different school just because it had enjoyed higher test scores before they arrived.

Yet, much in the manner of Barack Obama’s unsuccessful chairmanship of the lavishly-funded Annenberg Chicago Challenge, Bennet has managed to fail upward.

Evidently, the point of being a public school reformer these days is to become known as a public school reformer, not to actually reform the public school. What matters is that you publicly proclaim that you believe the public schools can be fixed. Nobody actually expects you to be able to do anything with public school students, at least not enough to hold it against you when you fail, as the skyrocketing careers of Obama and Bennet demonstrate.

Connoisseurs of overclass social markers will enjoy his New York Times‘ 1997 wedding announcement:

Susan Diane Daggett, a daughter of Patricia B. Palmer of Little Rock, Ark., and Jesse B. Daggett of Marianna, Ark., was married yesterday to Michael Farrand Bennet, a son of Douglas J. Bennet Jr. of Middletown, Conn., and Susanne K. Bennet of Washington. The Rev. Arnold W. Hearn, an Episcopal priest, performed the ceremony at Crystal Lake in Marianna.

The bride, 33, a lawyer, is to join the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, formerly the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, in Denver next month. Ms. Daggett, who is keeping her name, graduated magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, and she and the bridegroom received law degrees from Yale University.

Her mother is a painter and an instructor at the Arkansas Art Center’s Museum School in Little Rock. Her father is a partner in Daggett, VanDover, Donovan & Perry, a Little Rock law firm.

Mr. Bennet, 32, was until recently a counsel to the Deputy Attorney General of the United States. He graduated with honors from Wesleyan University.

His father is the president of Wesleyan; he was the Assistant Secretary of State for international organizations in 1993 and 1994 and the president of National Public Radio from 1983 until 1992. The bridegroom’s mother is an art historian specializing in Roman antiquities.

This is exactly the kind of background that lets you understand the minds of Manual High School students.