Friday column: Crazy week, but it’s BYU that makes it memorable

So.

Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez blame the U.S. for the uprising in Libya while Moammar Gadhafi himself points the finger not at America — the usual villain of choice in much of the Arab world — but at America’s arch-enemy, Osama bin Laden.

Makes sense.

At least as much as anything emanating from the speaking orifice of one Charlie Sheen, who despite having “tiger blood and Adonis DNA,” wasn’t able to stop his 2-year-old sons from being removed from his custody Tuesday. He did, though, later summon the chi to tweet, “My sons are fine. My path is now clear. Defeat is not an option!”

Apparently neither is sanity.

But Sheen hardly has the market cornered on the bizarre — not even with Castro, Chávez and Gadhafi thrown in.

How crazy is our world recently? Crazy enough that Bernie Madoff’s insistence that he’s a “good person” (he learned that from prison psychiatric sessions — your tax dollars at work) hardly makes a ripple in the news cycle.

But for a story that’s off-the-charts unusual we have to turn to the world of sports, specifically to Brigham Young University basketball.

BYU on Tuesday suspended starting forward Brandon Davies — the Cougars’ leading rebounder — for the rest of the season. Yes, that includes the NCAA Tournament, which BYU was given a fair chance of winning.

Before the suspension, I mean. In the Cougars' first game after the suspension they were clobbered by the Lobos 82-64.

I know what you’re thinking: That must have been some violation to get a key player booted off a team so close to tourney time.

So what are we talking about with this miscreant? Attempted murder? Dealing drugs? Knocking over a 7-Eleven?

No, actually; according to the Salt Lake Tribune, Davies had premarital sex.

Yes, you ask, and then what?

And then, nothing.

Premarital sex is a violation of the school’s honor code, a code that’s in place for all students — 98 percent of whom are Mormon, including Davies. The code “requires students to live a chaste and virtuous life, be honest, abstain from alcoholic beverages, tobacco, tea, coffee and substance abuse, and attend church regularly.”

One may or not want to argue aspects of the code, but it’s one that all BYU students know about and are subject to.

Thus, a contender for the NCAA basketball trophy and all the cash that kind of success can bring cripples its chances over a player violating an honor code?

That honor code?

Well, yes.

See why it’s the story of the week?

It’s one thing for a school to profess any honor code of any kind; it’s another to actually expect student-athletes to comply with it; it’s yet another for a school to deal out consequences that will hurt it in the pocketbook.

As entertaining as they might be, drug-fueled rants by celebrities are a dime a dozen. So are pronouncements by tin-horn dictators losing their grip.

Universities living by what they profess? As a story, that’s something we in the news business call man-bites-dog.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.