I know how Butch Davis feels. No matter how one tries to stop the rumors, they continue. In his case, it's this darned rumor about the University of Arkansas giving Davis, the football coach at UNC-Chapel Hill, a come-hither look while dangling million-dollar bills out of its pockets. Arkansas, goes the rumor, is basically eager to have Davis come up and see it sometime.

Dick Baddour, athletic director in Chapel Hill and a man who was looking forward to a committed, long-term relationship with Davis when he signed Davis as football coach, knew he needed to show Davis how much he loved him (though he denied the Arkansas rumor had anything to do with it). So he gave Davis, after one season, a $291,000 raise and a one-year contract extension. Butch Davis now will be getting something over $2 million a year in compensation. He says he hasn't talked to Arkansas, of course. Rumors, y'know.

All the while, some critics have noted that Davis' first season was a loser. And that his salary raise alone could hire more than two full-professors or perhaps 10 part-timers who typically do a lot of teaching. And that he makes more annually than the financial reward that comes with the Nobel Prize.

As I said, your correspondent knows how this goes. The CBS rumors continue, despite my best efforts to dampen them. A story has been going around that the network, desperate to rescue itself from the ratings problems with Katie Couric's evening news, is seeking a person with star quality to replace her. My name, it is said, surfaced early. Then -- just as with the backstories on Davis about how outsized pay for coaches is sending distressing messages about priorities and the seriousness of the academic mission in Chapel Hill -- so the critics started in on me.

One reckoned, for example, that my hiring would send a distressing signal about the network emphasizing rugged good looks and sex appeal in its anchor rather than serious news judgment. It hurt, I gotta tell you. And then there was the story that I was using the flirtation from CBS to improve my N&O incumbency. Ridiculous, though some colleagues' eyebrows were raised when I received a new telephone cord and two bright yellow highlighters. There is nothing to these rumors, I tell you.

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For all the potential laughs that are there in this peculiar and outrageous tale of bad judgment in Chapel Hill, there's very little that's really funny about it. UNC-Chapel Hill presumably wants to be taken seriously, by its peers and its constituents. Contrary to what even some trustees are arguing, building a behemoth of an athletics program has very little to do with the standing of an academic institution in the places where standing counts.

Quick: Anybody know how Harvard did in football this year? Yale? Princeton? Are their trustees spending tens of millions of dollars on football facilities? Paying coaches in seven figures? Panicked that if they don't start winning big they won't get a bowl game and TV revenue?

Highly doubtful. And, yes, it's true that some top academic private and public institutions such as Stanford and Michigan and Notre Dame also have high-flying football programs. But there tends to be ebb and flow even then, and such cases are few and far between.

Chapel Hill trustees Chairman Roger Perry said of the raise and all: "It's lamentable that that's what it takes to compete. Unless we unilaterally disarm our program, we are going to have to stay competitive. ... This is an issue that's much, much bigger than just us."

What? Oh, yeah, the standard line that, gosh, we sure hate that we've gotta do it, but we're going to do it. But Perry followed that with something about "unilateral" disarmament. Aw, c'mon. We're playing Clemson, not invading it.

UNC system President Emeritus William Friday, whose good sense, national reputation and well-known personal integrity drive the sports boosters crazy when they get in a tussle like this, noted that the raise was "an increase far in excess of that presently provided the president [of UNC] or any chancellor and substantially greater than the yearly compensation of an English professor."

Friday, former co-chairman of the Knight Commission that urged reform in college sports, believes universities remain infected by the big money from television and shoe contracts for coaches and the like.

So, no. This is not funny, not when academic leaders who ought to know better allow athletics officials to do whatever they want to in the name of the people's university. They don't own the place, although no one is apparently willing to tell them that.