Absurd, comical, over the top: Hey, if the Gov fits ...

College football has already been bloated beyond belief, what with universities building $60 million palaces for coaches earning $3 million, but its obesity knows no bounds. If ever there was a doubt about the most out-of-whack sport in this country, let that doubt be done. College football has gone over the cliff.

West Virginia and Hawaii have led the freefall. With the governor riding shotgun.

Gov. Linda Lingle wouldn't want to focus on, you know, the Hawaii economy, right? No, let her worry about football. (Getty Images)

In West Virginia, Gov. Joe Manchin comes off as a jock-sniffing meddler -- issuing self-important statements regarding the school's former coach, being involved in the selection of the future coach, maintaining close and personal relationships with potential coaches and all the while having a reserved parking space outside the football stadium.

Those are the sort of misshapen priorities that normally might bring giggles from the more diverse people of Hawaii. Only Hawaii can't laugh at anyone in college football these days. That's a state in financial crisis, its world-class beaches providing a thinning layer of mascara over its impoverished infrastructure, yet the governor of Hawaii got involved in the school's efforts to keep Warriors coach June Jones. Not only did Gov. Linda Lingle put in calls to Jones and to his agent, but her state government promised to spend tens of millions of dollars -- money that is needed far more by those far less fortunate -- if only he would stay and coach the college football team.

I love college football, but this s--- has gone too far.

It's not going back to where it was, of course. That ship sailed in the 1980s when football coaches began earning more than their school president and governor combined. Now the average BCS coach is a millionaire, while the average governor earns little more than $100,000 per year. Coaches who live in mansions and fly in private jets strong-arm their community into opulent facility upgrades -- an Olympic-style weight room for the players, Berber carpet and a fancy fish tank for the coach's office -- while the average fan who adores his football team can't find a ticket.

That's the way it has been for decades, and maybe we've all grown immune to it, even me. The previous paragraph was written with no outrage, only indifference. That's progress, and you can't beat progress.

But the absurdity of college football's importance has grown in the last few weeks with two different governors getting involved monetarily or emotionally or both with their state's flagship football program. What's completely shocking is that neither state is Texas, which saw an ugly coaching change at Texas A&M, the alma mater of Texas Gov. Rick Perry. If Perry was involved in Dennis Franchione's firing or Mike Sherman's hiring, he stayed behind the scenes -- unlike in August when he was on the sideline for a team practice. Because being governor of a small state like Texas means all the free time in the world.

Any of us working stiffs should have the free time of West Virginia's Gov. Manchin, who vacations with Alabama coach Nick Saban and speaks frequently with Florida State coach Bobby Bowden and held job interview-like discussions with WVU coaching candidates Doc Holliday, Terry Bowden and Butch Jones while pushing unsuccessfully for the hiring of Jimbo Fisher. When Rich Rodriguez, another of Manchin's good friends, took the Michigan job, Manchin decried the bad news with a 320-word statement -- more than twice the 144-word statement he released 11 months earlier after a fatal explosion in Raleigh County.

Manchin is a former WVU football player, and while he has tried to deny his involvement in the WVU search, he was outed from behind the curtain by none other than WVU athletics director Ed Pastilong, who told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "Any time (Manchin) pays attention to an issue like this, it's welcome," Pastilong said. "Did he conduct the search? No. But, quite frankly, we ran some things by him. He knows our athletic department and our football program."

How much influence does Manchin have at his alma mater? The school itself is taking a look. Just this week WVU appointed a three-person panel to investigate claims that the university awarded Manchin's daughter a 1998 master's degree she didn't earn. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the school rewrote university records that initially showed Manchin's daughter, Heather Bresch, had barely done half the work required of a master's.

That stuff is comical, but what's happening at Hawaii is borderline criminal. College football doesn't matter a great deal in Hawaii. Don't even go there and tell me it does. Hawaii cares about college football when its team is undefeated and baring down on a BCS bid, which is about as often as scientists care about Halley's Comet. Otherwise, it's a small thread in that state's exotic fabric.

Gov. Lingle has shown a skill for hitching rides with others -- she hijacked a 2003 news conference of 14-year-old Michelle Wie -- and Lingle hopped aboard again last week when she got involved in the school's attempts to keep June Jones. Even as Lingle's administration has been warning Hawaiians of poor revenue projections that will restrict state spending on crumbling areas like public schools and public housing projects, state lawmakers tried to keep Jones by offering to partner with the university toward $25 million in athletic upgrades.

Jones wasn't swayed. He left for a bigger salary at SMU, where football has been irrelevant since getting the NCAA's death penalty in 1987. Football is starting to matter, apparently, considering Jones will make almost four times the $500,000 annual salary of his predecessor, Phil Bennett.

The last time football mattered this much at SMU? The mid-1980s, when illegal payments to players were approved by the school's trustees. The chairman of the SMU trustees at the time was Texas Gov. Bill Clements.

Nope. You can't beat progress.