Crime and punishment. Sort of.

Missed out on the great Republican yahoo revue last night, so I couldn't tell you who won, who lost and who most blatantly prostrated themselves before the kill-the-monster torch-and-pitchfork mob that seems to be the party's core constituency these days.

I can pretty much tell you this, though: None of them had as good a day as Rutgers football coach Kyle Flood.

Odd thing to say, perhaps, about a man who just got suspended for three games and fined $30,000, but let's go to the tape, shall we? And make it a surveillance tape, because, you know, that's how Flood's program rolls these days.

Over here, to begin with, we have cornerback Nadir Blackwell -- or, rather, we used to have him. Blackwell and five other scholars were booted from the Scarlet Knights program recently for their involvement in a crime spree that involved arrests for everything from home invasion to assault. Rumor has it another Scarlet Knight was also involved initially, but redshirt freshman J. Dillinger was deemed not to have been sufficiently lawless enough, so the Scarlet Six cut him loose.

Barnwell, however, stuck around long enough to get his coach in trouble. Shocking as it is to believe, he was having some academic issues last spring, and so Flood went to bat for him. Of course, in keeping with the general theme of things around the program, Coach wandered out of the batter's box in doing so, making "minor changes" in a paper Blackwell submitted, inappropriately contacting a member of the faculty on Blackwell's behalf and doing it on his personal e-mail so he wouldn't be detected.

The cherry on top of all this?

Not only did Coach knowingly violate protocol on behalf of a kid he'd later dismiss from the program ... not only did he wake up one day to find himself presiding over Police Blotter On Parade ... but on top of the six players he cast into outer darkness, he was also compelled to suspend indefinitely one of his team captains, All-Big Ten wide receiver Leonte Caroo, who got nicked in a domestic violence beef.

So, to review: Kyle Flood's program is your basic forest fire. And he's the guy lugging the gas can.

And he only gets a three-game sitdown and a fine?

For all of the above, he should be looking for gainful employment today. But Rutgers chose not to fire him. And so, yes, the man had a very good day yesterday.

Better than the country, apparently. Or so I hear.