Colorado has had some real sweethearts on its athletic staff, like football coach Dallas Ward, basketball coaches Bebe Lee and Sox Walseth and sports info directors such as Fred Casotti and Wayne Duke.

They were good, they were fun to be around and they didn’t exude the slightest aroma of arrogance. You loved to go out there to be around them and enjoyed them when they came for some contest with Kansas. Worked hard, but never took themselves too seriously.

But time and people have changed. CU has acquired, rightly or wrongly, an aura of snobbery and abrasion, and others in the Big 12 Conference at least secretly snicker when things don’t go well for the Buffaloes. Too bad Kansas State wasn’t able to humble them the past weekend.

How worried are you Colorado will do just that to Kansas this weekend? Let’s hope it’s only a humbling rather than a thrashing. It could be bad.

All that said, I have to admit I’m sympathetic to the Buffs and football coach Gary Barnett because of the NCAA’s latest misdirection of punishment. The NCAA is getting progressively better at bungling. When is the high-and-mighty collegiate group going to begin laying the lash where it should be applied?

Colorado will lose five scholarships in the next two years because former football coach Rick Neuheisel, now trying to glamorize himself further at Washington, stepped outside the recruiting lines four years ago as CU coach. Further, one less Colorado coach will be allowed to recruit on the road.

Then, the NCAA in effect told Barnett and Co., “You better watch out, boy, because we’re gonna keep looking at you! You get too fancy again, and there’ll be real trouble!”

All the while, golden-boy Neuheisel is making millions at Washington and gets off with a wrist slap: He won’t be allowed to make recruiting visits during the important letter-of-intent period coming up and can’t recruit off campus until May 31. The good news is his program is faltering right now, he looked like a dolt with that 12th-man-on-the-field error that cost the Michigan game and his welcome is not nearly as warm as it used to be as he strummed his guitar and looked so “cute.”

The handsome, gregarious Neuheisel is a fine recruiter and that may lose him a player or two. It should be worse. But what about the mess he created in Boulder?

Again, I’m no Buffalo-lover, but why in the dickens should CU have to pay any penalty for things Neuheisel did four years ago? Washington, which hired Neuheisel away with a lucrative deal, should be hit, too, to show other schools that when you hire a crook you also get treated like a crook.

Any school which enables hoodlums to operate needs to pay heavy prices.

While Colorado should get a warning about what happened during the Neuheisel regime, it shouldn’t be penalized as it is, so long after the fox has fled the henhouse.

It’s also hard to feel too sorry for powerhouse Alabama, considering all the finagling it has done over the years. But current coach Dennis Franchione is having to cope with penalties created by preceding personnel. His club is out of bowl contention and has other restrictions.

Why aren’t the real criminals paying the price rather than the people who are left over? If ‘Bama is guilty as a school, all well and good. It ought to get hit. But if Franchione and his guys are paying penance for the malfeasance of earlier people, why not nail the forerunners to the cross, wherever they are?

To say that Franchione and Co. are measuring up well to the penalty challenge is greatly understating the case. Lord knows, Dennis is the guy  a native Kansan and former Pittsburg State genius, by the way  who should have been hired at KU when Terry Allen was brought in for a five-season experiment. And Dennis would have come.

So what he did was to build up New Mexico and TCU and move into the prestigious Alabama job, for all its penalties. Where’d Kansas be now if Franchione had been hired?

Be that as it may, the NCAA needs to make sure the right schools and the right crooks are nailed rather than allowing a situation where Colorado pays penalties created by a coach sitting on his duff at Washington.

 Speaking of recruiting, one of the problems Kansas has for football is that so few of its graduates are coaching anywhere, especially around the state. The KU program in a surge of elitism cut back on sequences that could produce coaches, and a heavy price is being paid.

One guy who might tend to guide some gridders is to the Jayhawks is David “Skip” Butler, a Lawrence High product now having big success at Solomon. Thanks to uncle John De Mott for tipping me off.

Butler played fullback and middle linebacker for the Lions in the late 1960s. Among his teammates were current LHS coach Dirk Wedd and Cliff Hadl, a nephew of the mighty John Hadl. David not only carried the ball and tackled, but he could block well. Several times his pancakes of opponents were compared to the kinds of feats the great Doyle Schick had done earlier at Lawrence and at Kansas.

David’s Solomon team won the league title last year and got off to a furious start this season. Adding to his load was an earlier triple heart bypass and then a diagnosis of a rare form of lymphona. Still, he’s laboring away keeping the Gorillas perking. It’s this kind of guy KU needs in the field, but seldom has due to its programs that no longer encourage people to coach.

Here’s hoping David Butler can iron out his health problems same as he did opponents, win all the rest of his games and send a few gems to be Jayhawks.