Sadly, uplifting stories don't always make cut

The top 10 sports stories of 2011, as voted on by members of The Associated Press, soon will be released.

If not actually outmoded, picking the year's biggest sports stories is an exercise in redundancy, especially this year when anybody with a pulse and a TV knows that No. 1 is the sex scandal at Penn State that implicated former assistant Jerry Sandusky and brought down Joe Paterno.

Everything else is a distant second. Very distant.

The NFL lockout. The NBA lockout. The scandals involving Syracuse and Miami. These are the other less-than-uplifting stories that will make the top 10.

The list also should include a sampling of the biggest winners: Green Bay Packers, St. Louis Cardinals, Dallas Mavericks and Boston Bruins, and in college, Auburn's football team and the UConn men's basketball team.

Let's hope, too, that there's a place for VCU's inexplicable charge to the Final Four.

Astonishingly, the Rams reached the national semifinals, where they lost to Butler, another mid-major outlier.

VCU's success, surprising as it was, constituted a conventional basketball story. The team pulled together and, behind scorching 3-point shooting, reached new heights behind young coach Shaka Smart.

But farther West, before the start of March Madness, college basketball offered a scenario even more surprising and resonant. Inspirational even.

When Brigham Young University officials suspended Brandon Davies for the remainder of the season for violating the university's honor code, ruining any chance the team had of advancing far in the tournament, it forced a jaded world to sit up and take notice of a place that remained true to its principles.

Little wonder that people not associated with the Mormon school were bemused by the swift, clear decision. The idea that a college would not alter its rules or even temporarily relax its standards under pressure of succeeding at big-time sports is so foreign to our modern approach that it seems almost weird.

It was originally reported that Davies was suspended for having sex with his then-girlfriend but was later revealed that he was being punished for getting another young woman pregnant.

At other schools, such behavior wouldn't affect the basketball team, but at BYU, it's a code violation. Davies knew it and owned up. Although he was the team's No. 3 scorer and best all-around athlete, BYU didn't waver.

School officials offered him forgiveness and said he could return to the squad the next season, but the rules didn't change because he was a valuable part of a highly ranked team. The rules weren't even bent.

Sports Illustrated reported this year that more than 200 players on the rosters of several elite college football programs have had run-ins with the law.

How many led to suspensions that delivered as clear a message as BYU sent to Davies and the country? Athletes in general are given so much wiggle room that lengthy banishments are rarer than a Rhodes Scholar in the football weight room.

After the basketball teams for Xavier and Cincinnati got into a dangerous, bench-clearing fist fight recently, the maximum suspensions for the worst offenders topped out at six games.

Only six games for violence that would have gotten a person arrested on assault charges had the free-for-all taken place outside the arena.

Anybody who follows college sports is resigned to the fact that honorable principles are sacrificed too easily to the warped expediency created by an overemphasis on winning.

At BYU in 2011, they weren't.

Whether or not its story makes the top 10 isn't important. BYU is on a list all by itself.

Bob Molinaro, (757) 446-2373, bob.molinaro@pilotonline.com