It is time to take back sports from the Idiot Fringe.

Everywhere you turn, everywhere you look, everywhere you go, the idiots are taking over. They have infected our stadiums, infested our message boards and infiltrated every nook and cranny of sports with their filthy, crude, disgusting, idiot ways.

“Some idiot (fan) of ours, every time a KU cheerleader walked by, he yelled a sexual slur over and over to each and every one,” University of South Florida quarterback Matt Grothe told the Tampa Tribune in the wake of USF’s idiot-marred victory over Kansas last weekend. “Yelling at a cheerleader? Those poor girls don’t know why they’re getting yelled at. It’s like me going up to that guy’s mom and calling her (those names). Is he going to like that? They should just be happy with us winning games.”

But they can’t be happy because they’re idiots. And you know the idiots are getting out of control when a college football player starts ripping his own idiot fans.

The boorish behavior of some USF fans at the Kansas game became such an issue that the Tribune wrote an article about it, quoting several fans who said they were sickened and saddened by the behavior of the Idiot Fringe.

Pat Porzelt, a 1987 KU graduate, said she was accosted before the game by one drunken thirtysomething USF fan who stuck his finger in her face and yelled, “Go home, you (expletive) Jayhawk (sexual slur).”

“I expect to hear profanity, but it was the in-your-face hatred behind it that was different than any other stadium I’ve been at,” Porzelt said.

With all due respect to Porzelt, I don’t believe USF’s stadium is much different than UCF’s or UF’s or FSU’s. I believe every team in every sport has a growing number of drunken delinquents and noxious nose pickers who make up the Idiot Fringe.

I was convinced there were just a few of these idiots running around, but now I believe they are spreading like a computer virus. All you have to do is read the nasty, profane repulsive stuff these imbeciles call each other each and every day on Internet message boards.

Nobody’s immune from the verbal abuse. Not the coach’s wife who attends the game, not the quarterback who plays in the game, not even the sports writer who covers the game. A few weeks ago, on an Orlando Sentinel message board, one reader posted this comment after one of my columns: “I mean it when I say I hope you die of AIDs, Bianchi.”

Who are these people? Why are they so angry and miserable? Are their lives so sad and pathetic that their entire sense of self-worth is determined by a questionable officiating call, a sports column they don’t agree with or an opposing player who throws the winning touchdown against their team?

Do any of these people have children? I always get this disturbing mental image of a little boy looking over his father’s shoulder and saying, “Daddy, why are you writing such bad words and mean things in that e-mail? And, Daddy, why aren’t you using your real name?”

Daddy shoos his son away and keeps on typing his vile, vulgar garbage.

Let’s hope the kid doesn’t grow up like his old man.

One generation of idiots is enough.