Punishment phase

So now we arrive at the intersection of Discipline Avenue and the Expedience Expressway, and, man, is it a busy place. Wouldn't want to be Steve Alford or the rest of the folks out there at UCLA, trying to figure out which route to take.

The Blob, if it had to guess, would say the Bruins jump on the expressway.  Discipline is a more congested path, and frequently squeezed down to one uncomfortable lane that exacts a toll on everyone. And there are the financials to consider here, top-drawer college buckets being the straight-up corporate enterprise it is these days.

By now you've heard the saga of  UCLA freshmen DiAngelo Ball, Cody Riley and Jalen Hill, the three knuckleheads who got themselves pinched in China for shoplifting a pair of sunglasses. Given their status -- elite recruits at an elite college basketball factory -- it would have been a dumb thing to do in any circumstance. Doing it in a foreign country which once tried to run over college students with tanks made it dumb cubed.

The Three Knuckleheads could have gotten 10 years down a hole in China for what they did, but neither the United States nor China wanted to make an international incident out of it, particularly in the immediate wake of Our Only Available President's Asian tour. So OOAP called and the Chinese released them, and now it's on to a wholly different court for the Knuckleheads.

And now it gets interesting.

Now UCLA has to decide just how long to sit the three, who were all high-end recruits expected to contribute mightily to the corporation this year. As ESPN's Arash Markazi points out here, the school could suspend them for half a season, which means they wouldn't miss the conference schedule. Or it could suspend them for the season, in which case all three might bail and transfer elsewhere, since they'd have to sit out this season if they did, anyway.

And so: Discipline Ave vs. the Expedience Expressway.

Half a season would mean you've taken the latter, because suspending them for a lot of non-conference tilts against Whatsamatta U. and Directional Hyphen Tech is no skin off UCLA's NCAA Tournament hopes. You get 'em back for the conference, the Bruins win it or come close, and they're in the Dance.

A full season, however, and you greatly risk never seeing the Knuckleheads again. Which, if they can play (and apparently they can), would not be the blessing it seems to be on its face.

What to do, what to do.

The Blob?

The Blob would bypass both and tell the Three Knuckleheads to go with God to North Carolina or some other place that makes no pretense of being an institution of higher learning when it comes to basketball. But it's never been entirely rational when it comes to a kid getting arrested in a foreign country while representing his school.

Oh, the crosses we bear.