OSU, New Mexico St: Big payoff for a loser

ALTHOUGH YOU don't have to look that far to find travesties in the scheduling of college football games, rising to the top of the current culture is Saturday's game between the forever Olympian Ohio Sate Buckeyes and a forlorn team called the New Mexico State Aggies , which had lost its last two games by a cumulative score of 79-10. You couldn't have missed it. It was on all of the sports bar monitors as patrons toyed with their swizzle sticks or thumbed their cell phones. For their efforts in agreeing to a hopeless scrimmage in Columbus as 44-point underdogs, the Aggies were paid $850,000 - plus, you would hope, second helpings from the visitors' buffet. By the end of the third quarter, the home team was up 45-0 with the game's radio analyst exclaiming "45-0, 45-0, how about that Buckeye fans?" (It occurred during the 2 minutes that I tuned in.) Mercifully, the score didn't change as the Buckeyes decided not to pile it on their guests. That was about $19,000 a point. I went for a walk wondering whether people really paid for their tickets.