Bush League

Washington football coach Steve Sarkisian said it best.

The former BYU quarterback made news, this week, when he said Reggie Bush “just looks like an idiot again” for returning his Heisman award but not admitting guilt or apologizing.

The remark, made to ESPN’s Shelly Smith, was right. Bush needs to find a good p.r. advisor. You don’t give back the highest award in college football and then say it’s not an admission of guilt. Otherwise, why give it back?

STEVE SARKISIAN

The public relations chief of an NBA team once told me that the way to quell an unflattering story is to face it head on. Admit the mistake, spill the details, apologize quickly and completely, do some sort of reparations and move on. People are pretty forgiving. Just look at Kobe Bryant. At least in L.A., he’s enormously popular, despite the scandal that threatened to ruin him. Now a lot of people view him as a good guy.

If Bush had just said he did the wrong thing by taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from two sports agents while in college, he might have been able to, as Sarkisian put it, “look like the good guy.”

Instead, he looks like just another arrogant, unrepentant athlete.

Why is this such a hard concept to understand? Often when an athlete does something dumb, he ends being the subject of numerous laudatory stories about redemption. But often they don’t bother to apologize or admit making a mistake.

Sports fans love comebacks. They love redemption, too. What they don’t love is arrogance and denial.

How long will it take some of these guys to figure that out?