MORGANTOWN — Got to thinking over the past couple of weeks about the good guys versus the bad guys and how it is that we are living in an era where the bad guys usually win.

For whatever reason, we have adopted this win-at-all-costs philosophy on the highest levels of sports, a level that has taken the games people play and turned them into something they aren’t, having adopted Vince Lombardi’s credo of “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing” and taken it to a level Lombardi himself never could imagine.

Oh, he would put up with having some people on his team who weren’t exactly model citizens. Max McGee was a Super Bowl hero who did his best work in the bars long after the games were over and Paul Hornung was a running back who found himself a way to get a ban from football for a year for gambling on games.

But, for the most part, if you were really trouble in those days, you were gone, even Lombardi wanting nothing to do with you.

Today, however, a couple of items close to home make you wonder if sports should maintain what had been a high ethical and moral influence upon our society and the kids who are growing up within that society.

We refer here, in part, to the fate of West Virginia University’s own Kevin Jones and the NBA draft.

In truth, there was no one who was a better citizen, more dedicated to his game and his family, his school and his schooling, in the NBA draft. We realize that this alone doesn’t elevate you to NBA status, but KJ was also one of the most successful players in the draft.

Notice, we don’t say most talented, even though he did earn second-team All-American honors last season, scoring 19.9 points per game, grabbing 10.9 rebounds and shooting 50.9 percent from the field in the rugged Big East.

It came about because of his work ethic as much as his natural athletic ability, but today’s professional talent evaluators don’t seem to value that in the least.

He was played along like a fiddle by his agent, Bill Neff, who tried to create a market for him by suggesting he had procured promises from NBA teams to draft Jones, when it was quite obvious that the man was acting somewhat delusional.

The truth is that Jones is the type of person who will be able to make himself into an NBA player through that work ethic and dedication that he possesses, a player who will spend his off hours in a gym rather than late-night cabaret.

The NBA, however, would rather idolize the Dennis Rodmans and Ron Artests of its league.

The NBA, of course, is not alone.

Patrick White really never had a true NFL chance because he didn’t fit their mold even though he was the type of person they could have used in all those NFL Charities advertisements they use to highlight the good in a league where there is far more bad going on.

If White couldn’t make it, Adam “Pacman” Jones did and, of their backgrounds, the path Jones took was as predictable as was the one White wound up taking.

No one argues that there isn’t a spot in the big leagues for the bad guys, whoever they should be, as a professional team can’t be asked to pay out the millions upon millions of dollars to people whose ability to perform is limited. At the same time, though, they shouldn’t be making that kind of investment in players whose ability to perform may be limited by the way they behave.

The result of the philosophy we have adapted in our sporting world reached its pinnacle, of course, with the Jerry Sandusky fiasco, a point where a heroic figure as a coach, a school president and who knows who else in the Penn State institution opted to protect the football program and the school over the children of their area.

They allowed a molester whom they knew about to continue as a predator upon young children rather than cast an ugly shadow upon their program.

It was, in some ways, no different at its core than the NBA snubbing Kevin Jones in its draft or team after team giving second and third chances to players who do not deserve them.

It’s time that sanity return to the games we play, that a conscientious effort is made to see that citizenship, ethics and morality have an increased role so that our athletic heroes can again be idolized by a society whose children are turning more and more in other directions and having the line blurred between what is right and what is wrong.

Email Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com. Follow on Twitter @bhertzel.