Dan Daly: Not just incidental contact

There’s a lot of insanity - temporary and otherwise - going around football these days. The latest episode involves Brandon Spikes, linebacker for the top-ranked Florida Gators, who got caught by TV cameras sticking his hand inside the mask of Georgia running back Washaun Ealey last weekend. Spikes looked like a kid searching for the prize at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. (Ealey’s right eyeball, perhaps?)

Spikes’ Illegal Use Of A Three Stooges Routine came just days after another unsettling story hit the news: A high school player in suburban Boston was charged with assault and battery after knocking off an opponent’s helmet and head-butting him. All we need for our season to be complete is for somebody in Pop Warner to clothesline a receiver and put him in traction.

Yes, football is football - and adrenaline is adrenaline - but we seem to have had a rash of these incidents lately, enough to make you wonder whether something else might be at work. After all, the NFL was still in training camp when Raiders coach Tom Cable was accused of socking an assistant and breaking his jaw. The college season, meanwhile, kicked off with Oregon’s LeGarrette Blount sucker punching Boise State’s Byron Hout after the Ducks lost to the Broncos.

Here’s how crazy it’s gotten: A few weeks ago, Seattle Seahawks fullback Owen Schmitt banged his own head with his own helmet during pregame introductions - presumably to get himself in the right frame of mind (that is, homicidal). Blood began pouring down his face, and stitches were needed to close the gash.

Football has always had a cartoon quality about it. Players get flattened by a safe falling out of a fifth-floor window - or maybe just by a middle linebacker - and run back to the huddle as if nothing happened. Watch Ray Lewis chase after Adrian Peterson for a while, and it begins to feel like an episode of “Tom and Jerry.”

But you never see Road Runner on crutches with a torn ACL. No matter how many times Sylvester gets whacked with a frying pan, he never gets a concussion. Football players get hurt - and play hurt - all the time; it’s almost a permanent condition. So it’s hard to have much patience for these increasingly common extracurricular activities. I mean, it’s so easy in this game to injure an opponent legally, if you’re so inclined.

The attorney representing the high schooler who got head-butted (and spent 10 days in the hospital) said something interesting recently. “High school football,” Frank McGee told a Boston television station, “is mimicking the NFL in becoming more and more violent every week, it seems to me. … I’ve seen my fair share of high school games, and it really is getting to be violent. So there’s gotta be lines drawn - and lessons learned.”

There’s no question we’re seeing some extreme behavior out there. And let’s face it, nobody gets away with anything anymore, not even in a high school game. If you do something dirty, there’s a good chance a camera will catch you - be it a TV camera, a home-movie camera or a cell phone camera.

Then, too, there are rewards for overzealousness. Send an opponent’s helmet flying - or upend him so he comes crashing down on his head - and you might make the “SportsCenter” Top 10 or become a YouTube sensation. Of course, there’s always the risk of Eternal Infamy (e.g., Albert Haynesworth riverdancing on Andre Gurode’s head), but it’s a price plenty of players seem willing to pay.

Speaking of “lines drawn - and lessons learned,” the range of punishments handed out for these acts of madness suggests that some in football are less bothered by the behavior than others. Spikes was originally going to sit out just half a game for his attempted eye examination of Ealey. (It was only after Florida coach Urban Meyer got grief for the penalty that he increased it to a full game.) Blount, on the other hand, has been suspended for the last seven games for letting a fist fly, during which time Oregon has climbed to eighth in the BCS standings.

As for the high school player who couldn’t keep his helmet to himself, he was benched for two games and stripped of his captaincy, but his victim’s parents thought that was ridiculously lenient and pressed for criminal charges.

Should make for swell programming on truTV if it ever comes to that.