This has been a foolish year in sports — and today is the day to celebrate foolishness.

Oh ... where to begin?

Choosing Sports Fool of the Year for the past 12 months is challenging indeed.

The NFL certainly comes to mind. Owners and players quibbling over billions of dollars while grinding America’s most popular sports league to a halt is pretty foolish.

Then there’s all of the NASCAR drivers who crashed into each other enough to allow a 20-year-old kid to win the prestigious Daytona 500.

How about the Penguins’ Matt Cooke, who managed to land himself two lengthy suspensions with his team already scrambling for healthy bodies to put on the ice.

Brett Favre must be considered a candidate. Talk about a foolish decision. The guy stretched out his on-again, off-again retirement one year too long.

Pitt’s Nasir Robinson fouled a guy after a missed free throw with less than a second remaining in a tied NCAA Tournament guy. That’s foolish enough on its own.

He let Butler’s Shelvin Mack — who committed his own foolish foul with 1.4 seconds left and his team

leading by one — off the hook. Mack scored 30 points in that game and may go from prime Fool of the Year candidate to MVP of the tournament, courtesy of Robinson.Officials can’t be ruled out, either.Umpire Jim Joyce called a guy safe when he was clearly out at first base — the 27th out of what should have been Armando Galarraga’s perfect game, only the 21st in major league baseball history.The officiating trio of Jim Burr, Tim Higgins and Earl Walton botched the end of the St. John’s-Rutgers Big East Tournament game so badly that they bowed out of the rest of the tournament.Clint Hurdle left his position as batting coach for the American League champion Texas Rangers to become manager of the Pirates, who haven’t won since Barry Bonds was just a regular guy.Fools, fool, fools.Any of these and others could have won Fool of the Year in another year.But not this year.The University of Pittsburgh football program trumped them all with a quartet of gaffes —a foolish foursome, if you will.First, the Panthers failed to win the Big East outright during the conference’s weakest field in years — and this conference has sported some weak fields.Second, the school totally botched the removal of Dave Wannstedt as coach, a resignation so forced that nobody bought into it.Third, athletic director Steve Pederson acted on his own and hired Michael Haywood, then had to fire him after Haywood was arrested on domestic violence charges only weeks after he took the job.Finally, Pitt’s football program lands itself at the top of a Sports Illustrated list of most players getting in trouble with the law.Fellow fools, we are in the presence of greatness.Pitt football is Fool of the Year.John Enrietto is sports editor of the Butler Eagle