A resignation too far

 Some people deserve what they get in life, even if they once were President of the United States. And some people do not.

I'm including Cale Gundy among the latter.

Gundy, the younger brother of Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy and an Oklahoma assistant coach for more then three decades, resigned Sunday. He was the longest-tenured coach in the Big 12, and you can say his resignation was a noble act of falling on his sword for the greater good.  You can also say the reason he did it seems to be pure nonsense.

He did it, apparently, because he read a word off a player's tablet he shouldna oughta read.

The story is, Gundy was conducting a film session, and noticed that one of the players was not, shall we say, paying attention. What he was supposed to be doing was taking notes; what he actually was doing was playing with his tablet.

So Gundy did what coaches have done since time immemorial: He snatched the tablet in a classic "Let's see what's so damned interesting you can't pay attention" move, and began to read what was on the screen.

Unfortunately for him, what was on the screen included a word euphemistically described as "racially charged." And Gundy, who was likely reading without paying much attention himself, said it out loud. 

Sunday he resigned, expressing "great anguish".

"The unfortunate reality is that someone in my position can cause harm without ever meaning to do so," Gundy said in a statement. "In that circumstance, a man of character accepts accountability. I take responsibility for this mistake. I apologize."

Everything in that quote is exactly why Gundy should still be coaching at OU. 

Everything that compelled that quote, if it happened exactly the way it's been described, is straight Big Silly.

Look. I get it. You can't say certain words in polite society anymore  -- and thank God for that, because you never should have been able to.  Decent people who were brought up right know this. Indecent people who weren't (including a certain ex-president, and some of our more strident demagogues in Congress) do not. Instead they cry persecution and tyranny when they're called out on their indecency and/or criminality.

And yet. 

And yet, there is abundant evidence that Cale Gundy is not one of those people.  Most of that evidence comes from players of color he coached. Both Adrian Peterson and Joe Mixon, former running backs at OU, issued statements saying, basically, that the reason for Gundy's resignation was total BS.

"If not for Coach Gundy I would not have attended OU, survived at OU, stayed at OU and succeeded in life after OU," Mixon's statement read. "I owe my education and professional career to him and most importantly I owe who I am as a person to him."

He concluded by saying Gundy was demonstrably no racist, and should be immediately reinstated.

It won't happen, of course. This is no longer a world that tolerates missteps, and God knows this apparently was as innocent a misstep as it gets. But proportionality is as extinct as triceratops these days. If OU allows Gundy to keep coaching, it calls down the wrath of the zealots who seem to run every show these days. The PR nightmare would be gruesome.

Gundy understood this, and so he stepped aside. I don't know if he was forced to. I don't know if one of the players in the room last week blew the whistle on him. I do know, though none of them would ever say it publicly, that officials at OU think the inevitable blowback would be grotesquely overreactive. 

In any case, Gundy is gone. And will the OU football program be better for it?

Think you know the answer.