There is so much that can be good about sports.

Whether it comes in the form of the Super Bowl, a high school basketball game or a race between two second-graders to determine which one is the rotten egg, physical competition is simply one of the greatest measures that humans have for our accomplishments and our progress.

When I first got into sports writing, that is what I was most excited about: the chance to put into words how meaningful and affecting sports can be.

I’d spent my entire life learning the rules of the various games (even, amazingly, cricket), guzzling down the highlights, memorizing the statistics and reading the histories. I felt that I might finally have found an outlet for all of that previously useless knowledge.

I imagined writing about athletes breaking unbreakable records, surmounting insurmountable odds and striving, always, to take human triumph to the next level.

After a couple semesters of writing, I’ve been a bit disturbed to realize that I can’t find many topics to write about that concern any of those things.

You see, while I was reading “Bill James’ Historical Baseball Abstract,” renting “The Bad News Bears” and watching “Sports Center,” it turns out that I should have been reading law textbooks, renting “Eight Men Out” and watching Court TV.

Because, more than any player’s stats or any team’s strengths, what you need to know if you’re going to follow the Rae Carruth/Dwayne Goodrich era of sports is what the difference between a felony assault and a misdemeanor battery is.

Just take a peek at the front page of ESPN.com on any given day; you’ll be lucky to find that there are half as many stories covering competition on the playing field as there are covering competition in the court room.

Perhaps the most disturbing trend in sports is how many of the stories being written by courtroom reporters are now coming from college campuses.

The University of Colorado football team happens to be the story of the week, having not only seemingly committed every crime this side of murder, but having, in fact, done so under the supervision and protection of head coach and all-around horrible human being Gary Barnett.

But the Buffaloes are only the latest in a string of unfathomable college sports stories. Last July, Nebraska offensive lineman Junior Tagoa’i pled no contest to an assault charge for hitting his girlfriend. She was holding their 18-month-old child at the time.

One month earlier, Florida linebackers Channing Crowder and Taurean Charles both pled no contest to misdemeanor battery. Crowder beat someone up outside of a nightclub; Charles slammed his girlfriend into a computer desk and pinned her to the floor of a dorm room.

Willie Williams — Miami’s top recruit and the nation’s most highly regarded high school linebacker — kicked off next year’s freshman-class hi-jinks early. On a recruiting trip to Gainesville on Super Bowl weekend, Williams (allegedly …) set off three fire extinguishers in his hotel, grabbed a woman against her will and got into a bar fight. He was charged with misdemeanor criminal mischief, misdemeanor battery and felony malicious damage (for the extinguishers); Willie has now been arrested 11 times.

And then of course there is Boo Wade, who in court has somehow managed to trump the rather lofty accomplishments of his teammates on the court this season by allegedly choking one of his (many) girlfriends. For this he served quite a lofty two-game suspension.

Sports are the pursuit of the ideal, the triumph of the will. I’ve wanted to write about those things for a long time — to write about how much there is good about sports.

It’s just unfortunate to realize that not much is.