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It will never change. Ever.

The bent priorities men have when they should have straight ones, the lofty place where people of power, who otherwise may be good people of power, put the outcomes of college football and basketball games over something more important.

It's always been that way, and, sadly, it always will.

It almost happened under Rick Majerus at Utah in the 1990s and it happened, most recently, under Dan Mullen at Mississippi State on Thursday. It's probably happened a thousand other times at a thousand other places, too.

The example Mississippi State set a couple of days ago when it announced that it would allow five-star recruit Jeffery Simmons to enroll at the school was another discouraging one. Given the many instances of violence against women that has happened at Baylor and other universities, Mississippi State had an opportunity to make a statement for good, to put up real resistance against what is wrong.

And it whiffed.

Simmons, a 6-foot-3, 277-pound defensive end, was arrested in March when a video showed him repeatedly hitting a woman on the ground. He is awaiting trial and has been charged with misdemeanor simple assault.

But Mississippi State let him in, anyway. The school suspended him for one game and put conditions on him, including an evaluation to be performed by the school's Student Counseling Services and Simmons working through whatever program recommended by those evaluators.

Athletic director Scott Stricklin said Thursday: "We may get feedback when he goes through this evaluation that makes us adjust [the penalty]." Stricklin also said: "Does five seconds of a bad decision that happened to be caught on videotape when you're 16 or 17, does that change the trajectory of your life?"

Well, it should.

An athletic scholarship shouldn't be automatically guaranteed because a program is in competitive need. How about if real and appropriate consequences come first, before privileges are granted?

Mullen, Mississippi State's coach, told ESPN: "Beyond just the part of the video that's been in media, we felt like he deserved [a] chance in life."

Especially since Simmons is a great football player. That's when chances in life are more liberally given.

The sad circumstances at Baylor are already evidence of that. And, as mentioned, it's fair to suppose that the course taken in Waco has been taken at other universities — because everybody wants to win games, and too many are eager to forgive perpetrators, considering that forgiveness a new chance at life.

But that speedy forgiveness comes at the expense of standing up to this horrific violence and setting in stone that it will not be tolerated.

There's been too much easy forgiveness in such matters through the years.

It almost happened at Utah when Majerus was the Utes' basketball coach. He was recruiting a touted high school player out of New York City, which seemed a good idea on every count, except for one: the kid had pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl, forcing her to perform a sex act on him, under a stairway at school.

Majerus gave all kinds of justifications for bringing the player to Utah. The coach told the New York Post: "Everyone I've spoken to in New York says he's a great kid. What you plead guilty to and what transpired were different things from what I've come to believe. At what point should the punitive measures end?"

Fortunately, administrators at Utah stepped in to stop the recruitment, sparing Ute fans the difficulty of standing and applauding for someone who had done what this player had. Majerus later said: "I led with my heart, not my head. I went into that home, met with the family, and got emotionally attached to the situation."

It's much easier to fall for that when a player averages 30 points per game or is a defensive end who can immediately help change a program's fortunes on the field.

No matter how anyone rationalizes quick second chances for great athletes, an awful truth remains: Their victims still feel the pain, even as the crowd cheers and the games are won.

GORDON MONSON hosts "The Big Show" with Spence Checketts weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone. Twitter: @GordonMonson.