By DAVID MOULTON, Scripps Howard News Service

A consensus seems to be building, finally, in college football that more is needed.

I'd like to think that after nearly a generation of determining the national championship with a Bowl Championship Series formula of pitting No. 1 against No. 2 that the powerful people who run the sport just felt it was time for a change.

No.

It is time for the mainstream media to stand up and say: "We are not TMZ or Deadspin. We stink these days, but we're going to start stinking less. We will not broadcast cellphone video of an athlete's spouse.

In sports, the past is often revered more than the present. In men's tennis, that should not be the case.

Beginning with the 2012 Australian Open in January, men's tennis has never been better.

You can make a lot of money betting against conventional wisdom.

All these years the thought went that it would be the Boise States of the college-football world that would dramatically change the sport. The sentiment was, "If only the Broncos could get into the national-championship game, then we would have a playoff in college football."

With apologies to Charles Dickens, 2011 in sports can be summed up, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

Most every sport seemingly had its worst aspects equal or trump its best.

How did Ohio State think it was not going to get a one-year bowl ban?

Buckeye Nation is largely miffed that the NCAA went this far in penalizing it because of the Jim Tressel-induced mayhem in 2010.

Ohio State University believed the problem was head coach Jim Tressel -- and Tressel alone -- therefore, since it fired him, why should it be penalized any further?

It was a slow Thursday.

Twenty years ago, on that Nov. 7, not much was happening in sports. Jack Morris had pitched the Twins to the World Series the week before. As a local sportscaster in Upstate New York, the big local story was the hockey team, but the AHL's Binghamton Rangers didn't play until the next night.

Not because the Big 12 is about to disintegrate and Oklahoma against Washington State will soon be a conference game. Not because too many players have decided a scholarship is not enough and they want their piece of a billion dollar industry, however they can get it.

With football upon us, baseball is about to get buried until the playoffs start.

The easiest thing NCAA President Mark Emmert can do is to give the University of Miami the death penalty. That takes no courage at all.

He would be universally praised as a leader. He could give an eloquent speech about "this is the beginning of a new day in college athletics." Emmert could go on and on, "this sends a strong signal to all our member institutions...."