Let’s not forget who has been wronged

Now we have these arrests, football players at Sayreville War Memorial High School, the Sayreville Bombers, arrested and charged with terrible crimes against their own teammates, perhaps one more example of young men being both stupid and mean, and thinking that somehow the strong are allowed to be predators of the weak. Once again we would be talking about cowards pretending to be tough guys.

Before these arrests, as the full picture of what is alleged to have happened inside the team’s locker room was only beginning to emerge, the superintendent of Sayreville schools, Rich Labbe, had already cancelled the remainder of the team’s schedule. It was then reported at NJ.com that some of the “hazing” rituals on the team included younger members of the team being held down while their teammates — this band of brothers at Sayreville War Memorial — penetrated them in a sexual way with their fingers and then stuffed the fingers inside the victims’ mouths.

At this point some parents in Sayreville seemed more outraged about the loss of football for their sons than they were about these alleged crimes, as if their sons were more the victims than the boys on that football team who were held down.

All in the name, presumably, of boys being boys.

We quoted one Sayreville parent, the father of a senior on the team, this way in the Daily News after a loud and angry meeting about all of this in the school’s cafeteria the other night:

“Nobody is saying terrible things may not have happened, but look at the collateral damage. Our kids are the collateral damage.”

Then the same parent told The News: “My son has been consistent from the beginning. He did not see anything. He did not participate in anything. He denied knowing anything at all, up one side and down the other.”

And sometimes in these situations, with this kind of brutality occurring on their own team, they know what they want to know and see what they want to see. At Sayreville War Memorial, the home of the Bombers, it is impossible to believe that the only ones who knew what was going on with the younger kids inside that locker room were the predators and the victims.

When this is all over, when all the facts have come out and we know everything we need to know about what happened inside that locker room, it is likely that we will find out that it wasn’t only the ones violating those kids who were the real cowards at Sayreville War Memorial.

The coach of the team is George Najjar, 20 years at the school, Hall of Famer in Jersey, formerly the coach at Lincoln High in Coney Island, always a famous capital of high school sports in our city. Everybody says that Najjar is some high school coach, you bet, only now it comes out that hazing — including paddling, just to make this story even sadder and dumber — was a part of his preseason program back in the 1980s at Lincoln. Maybe Najjar can explain what he knew about what was going on inside his locker room, sometimes in the dark. Or why he didn’t know.

It was Roger Goodell who once said, and famously, that “ignorance isn’t an excuse” when he was suspending coach Sean Payton of the New Orleans Saints because there was a bounty program going on inside his own locker room for big,

bad hits on opposing players.

On Friday night the Sayreville Police Department took the whole thing out of the darkness of that locker room and made it official: They announced one minute after 10 o’clock that six members of that team had been arrested for crimes that allegedly occurred at Sayreville War Memorial in a 10-day period between Sept. 19 and Sept. 29, when there was still a football season for the Bombers; did this a few hours after Sayreville was supposed to have played a game against Monroe at 7 that night.

There are all the predictable parts of this narrative now, a vigil in Sayreville on Sunday night, all the predictable rhetoric about how the town needs to heal. No, it’s not the town that needs to heal, it’s the boys who the cops now officially say were brutalized by some team leaders. At a time when we have spent important time in this country talking about domestic violence in pro football, here comes a story like this out of high school football. So you know, the various charges include: Aggravated sexual assault, aggravated criminal conduct, conspiracy to commit aggravated criminal sexual contact, criminal restraint, and hazing for engaging in an act of sexual penetration upon one of the juvenile victims. For now, we don’t know the names of the accused. They are protected by the law even though no one could protect their teammates from them.