So should Wolfpack baseball coach Elliott Avent for allowing it.

The Atlantic Coast Conference produces television commercials promoting sportsmanship. Mocking a serious injury, one that could have been even worse had Hansbrough been knocked unconscious and hit his head on the floor, should not be acceptable. And if the head coach of a sport isn't enough of an adult to understand this, the league should step in and explain it to him.

Henderson may not have intended to break Hansbrough's nose last year, but he had every intention of delivering the blow. That is clear from watching the film.

It's bad enough that some people focused on "poor Gerald Henderson and his reputation," rather than the athlete who was injured.

Now, for an athlete from another school to mock the situation and to have an arena of people laugh as if this injury had been a minor incident is not a good thing.

Because it concerned Carolina and Hansbrough, it's fine, though, with many. "They get all the breaks. ... The refs never call anything on him." The rationalizations could go on forever.

Let a UNC player break someone's nose in that fashion, let alone mock the victim, especially if the injured party was a Duke or N.C. State player, and there would be no end to the demand for action.

Mike Krzyzewski once talked about a double standard in the league. This appears to be an ugly example of a double standard.

And before all you Duke and State fans bother writing hate mail, just save your fingers. If you have an ounce of human decency, you know that baseball player acted wrongly.

If all this were reversed, and it were Carolina in the wrong, this column would be directed at the Tar Heels. If you do not believe that, then you have not been reading through the years.

What went on in Raleigh has nothing to do with a rivalry or rooting for one side or the other. It has to do with right and wrong and the dehumanizing of violence.

When we dehumanize an incident such as this, we condone it.

When we give the perpetrator victim status, we condone it.

Forget the color of the uniform. There are human beings inside each jersey, and those teenagers deserve all the protection from this kind of unnecessary violence that society can provide.

So, save your breath if you're going to talk about toughness or write some other such nonsense. There is not a tougher college basketball player in America today than Hansbrough, but what happened to him has nothing to do with toughness, and celebrating it has nothing to do with toughness.

It was simply wrong.

Shame on Avent for allowing one of his players to celebrate it, and shame on the N.C. State administration, and I mean the chancellor, for not publicly apologizing on Thursday.

For goodness sake, if the director of athletics is not going to recognize the indecency of what happened, the people who operate the university should.

Think about that one for a moment.

Yeah, one can brush this off as a cute episode and attribute it to the rivalry, but the message just rubber-stamped by an institution of higher learning is that, within the arena of athletics, harming an opponent and mocking the injury is no big deal.

A university, a state university, nonetheless, should have better morals than to teach children -- and there were children in that crowd -- that it is perfectly OK to sanction this kind of behavior.

What's really sickening is that many of the same people who ignored this would be the first to proclaim the need for family values.

Explain then, please, the value for any family in what happened at the RBC Center on Wednesday.