It's not my intention to usurp this space with a daily discourse on sports. I tired of sports-related message boards years ago when I discovered that they all degenerate into your-school-sucks palaver.

Nor do I make it a habit of making sports predictions because if I were any good at that, I'd just become a gambler and put my money where my mouth is. Sports are a hobby and a release for the millions of fans who follow them; however, there is no question that sports at the players' level -- pros and college -- have become nothing more than big business.

When one examines what big business is to the people who work for it, one cannot help but surmise that sports affects lives. No, games should not adversely affect fans in anything but perhaps our collective psyche. However, it is a fact that when the University of Oklahoma does really, really well in football, the state's economy -- at least at a cursory level, perhaps quantified in tourism dollars -- does really, really well, too.

However, jobs are tied to teams. Coaches. Trainers. Beat writers. Referees. Broadcasters. Ushers. For some people, the mistakes made in Saturday's Oklahoma-Oregon game do adversely affect their livelihood.

Most of all, replay official Gordon Riese received seven menacing calls this weekend before he wised up and shut off his phone. One of those calls, as reported by The Oregonian, was a death threat. Several news outlets, even some in Oklahoma and including ESPN.com (Pat Forde) have presumed that the death threat came from an OU fan.

However, The Oregonian article never even intimated that nor did Riese.

Riese was part of two other very controversial plays over the years -- the 1982 Stanford-Cal kickoff return, known as "The Play," and the 2002 Apple Cup (Washington vs. Washington State) overtime mess in which Cougars fans pelted their Pullman field with bottles after Riese made a controversial call resulting in a 29-26 Huskies win.

There is no evidence whatsoever that a Sooners fan made even a menacing call to the man. It reminds me of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing when pundits automatically presumed that the tragedy was the work of an Arab when sheer mathematical probability told us otherwise. Logic won out. It was the work of a dastardly Buffalo, New York, native by the name of Timothy McVeigh.

My point is simple relative to the situation Riese is in: It's a sad state of affairs in our society when people resort to harrassing a fellow who umpired a ball game. However, typically, what I'd classify as an act of insanity is usually perpetuated by somebody who is off-kilter, and there are plenty of folks who qualify across this country.

My hunch says the jerks who resorted to harrassing Riese were more than likely either gamblers, whose booty was lost as a result of the extra Oregon score (plausible depending on the over-under of the game), or assholes. For example, take a Texas fan who might think it cute to harrass Riese and claim to be an OU fan, knowing damned well that the press would make the entire Sooner Nation look bad.

Truth be told, if Oklahomans had wanted to threaten Riese directly by phone, I would estimate he would have already received hundreds of calls by the time he returned from church on Sunday.

When OU President David Boren decided to write a letter to the Big 12 conference seeking respite against the Pac 10, he was branded a baby, a grandstander by the national press, when all he was doing was taking a little heat off OU coach Bob Stoops, athletic director Joe Castiglione and appeasing the hundreds of thousands of hard-working Oklahoma fans across the country.

As Boren told one local reporter, "You'll never know unless you ask," in response to a question about his request that the game's result be vacated. Oklahoma stands to lose between $14-17 million if it doesn't make a BCS bowl game because of this loss.

How does that dollar figure equate to the real world?

Studies have shown time and time again that university academics do not sustain tangible benefit from big-time athletic programs. Sure, there is prestige; however, the success of a major football or basketball program doesn't buy a book, doesn't fund a salary, doesn't do squat except go back into the athletic program.

However, losing $14-17 million potentially would affect academics negatively because the anticipated monies would have to be recovered somehow, which would more than likely lead to a reallocation of resources that directly impacts the budgets of academic programs.

The pyramid of affectation with regard to an egregiously blown call, such as Saturday's, is actually rather large economically, and hence "really."

Now, if we're looking for a meaningful social commentary, this is it. When sports analysts, such as ESPN's Pat Forde writes on about what a shame it is that Boren spoke out about the officiating, how OU is emanating nothing but the sourest of grapes, methinks he should examine his own house.

ESPN is the very institution that has perpetuated the rise of athletics into our very social fiber to the point where its outcomes can affect lives. ESPN and its broadcasts were the very reason, it turns out, that Riese and his team were rushed into making a decision on the call in order to keep the network on time for its prime-time Nebraska-USC matchup.

In a roundabout way, ESPN is very much to blame for the sports-is-life mentality that Americans hold. However, for Forde or AP writer Richard Russo or for MSNBC's Michael Ventre to proselytize to Oklahomans about gaining some perspective is disingenuous at best.

Oklahomans have a very healthy perspective when it comes to sports and life. Note, I didn't say sports and academia because as even I would admit, we Okies value too much the athletic experience of university life over its scholastic benefits.

However, life?

Oklahoma suffered the first great domestic terrorist act (unless you count Pearl Harbor, which happened while Hawaii was a territory in 1941) in United States history, killing 168 and ruining the lives of thousands.

Just four years later, nearly 50 Oklahomans were killed in one night by the largest tornado this country has ever seen, and yet Oklahoma's National Guard was the very first military entity to deploy troops to the Gulf Coast when Hurricane Katrina invoked its wrath on New Orleans and Mississippi.

My professor friend certainly would love it if Okies would get a grip on the separation that truly needs to happen eventually between college athletics and post-secondary academics. However, to suggest Oklahomans don't have a proper life perspective relative to those things that are "truly important to the world," as penned by a bunch of sportswriters is not only disingenuous, it's insulting and damn near libelous.

In actuality, the tragedies Oklahomans have endured over the years have helped us to appreciate our teams more. Sure, we bitch and moan from time to time, but I would challenge anybody who suggests that an OU fan threatened that replay official's life to prove it and to prove that he or she is clinically sane, not some random wacko.

And, until you step into the shoes of the 3 million or so people who have chosen to call the Sooner State home, garnering not only some empathy for what this state has been through from time to time but also proving yourselves in the world of humanitarianism, like this state's people have, while examining the very role your institutions have played in the disproportionate rise of athletics in society (not to mention the very outcome of Saturday's game, Mr. Forde), you can frankly shut the hell up.

Our perspective, like our state, is OK.