The beauty of football - and on sports' landscape, no game is more beautiful than football - lies in its deviousness.
Each play is a wondrous chess match, one coach trying to outsmart the other. A new play. A new formation. A new play out of an old formation. An old play out of a new formation.
The coaches get to do it once, stop for 20 or 30 seconds, and do it again. More than 100 times in each game.
The bigger and better the bag of tricks, often the better the coach.
Money, however, should never be part of that bag - not in college, and certainly not in high school.
That's why the Morrisville School District did the right thing the other day when it quickly launched an investigation and then accepted the resignation of defensive coordinator Jason Bresnen after he was accused of placing a bounty on an opposing player.
The Morrisville Bulldogs were playing New Hope-Solebury last weekend in a small-school, Bicentennial Athletic League game in Bucks County. As ugly rivalries go, this one is not even a pimple. Rivalries come with time. New Hope-Solebury's varsity program hasn't even celebrated its third birthday yet.
But the Bulldogs never led in falling, 29-6, and at some point on the sideline, Bresnen offered Morrisville players $100 to take a New Hope-Solebury player out of the game. Either parents within earshot of the field heard the offer or they heard about it from their sons, and some of them relayed the information to New Hope-Solebury officials.
Wednesday, the Morrisville district issued a short statement, saying that the incident was reported "by officials of the New Hope high school. Immediately, Morrisville administrators, football coaches, and staff began working with New Hope-Solebury to assemble the facts and ultimately resolve this issue.
"Subsequently, our assistant football coach offered his resignation today, citing personal reasons. We believe this matter has been resolved in the best interest of all parties. . . . Because this is a personnel issue, we are not permitted to make further public comment."
Bresnen, who was not identified in the statement, didn't deny the money offer. But he denied it was a bounty.
"I did mention $100, which was bad judgment on my part, but it was not in the context that those parents said it was," he told my colleague Rick O'Brien. "We wanted to get him out of the game. Getting him out of the game doesn't mean taking him out. It means wearing him down. You want to stop their leading rusher."
