Nov 3, 2014 3 min read

The accounts of the beating of Lewis Campbell III are stomach-churning.

After apparently getting into an altercation of some sort at a restaurant in California Borough with a member of the football team fielded by California University of Pennsylvania, Campbell was savagely assaulted on the street outside in the small hours of Thursday morning. Five football players were arrested later that day, and a sixth turned himself in to police Saturday.

After the players allegedly finished their gruesome task, police say they left the 30-year-old Campbell on the sidewalk. He was vomiting and having seizures. As they drove away, the alleged assailants are said to have chanted “football strong.”

As of this writing, Campbell remains in critical condition.

College football has suffered its share of hard knocks and bad publicity this fall, as we noted in this space two weeks ago after some students at West Virginia University embarked on a spree of hooliganism in Morgantown after the school’s football team pulled off an upset win over Baylor University. A report found that some athletes at the University of North Carolina, an institution with a reputation for academic rigor, were gliding through no-show courses that were laughably undemanding so their eligibility could be maintained, and there have been additional stories in the media of wretched behavior and misdeeds.

Now, the odor surrounding college football has drifted to our own doorstep. Cal U. has landed in national headlines in one of the most horrific ways imaginable.

University officials made the correct call to forfeit the game that had been scheduled Saturday against Erie’s Gannon University. Going ahead with it would have conveyed exactly the wrong message. It might hinder the team’s postseason prospects, but there are some things vastly more important than football and trophies.

It’s now up to the justice system to determine the fate of these athletes, and like all offenders, they deserve the presumption of innocence. It also shouldn’t blacken the reputations of other football players or student-athletes at Cal U. who want only to test themselves in competition and get an education. But this is an undeniably bleak moment for the football program and the community that roots for the team. As Joe Tuscano, a sports columnist with this newspaper, explained in a Saturday column, the university’s football program will likely endure, but it will just as certainly never be the same.