Ralph Nader attacked what he calls the “myth of amateurism” among college sports and cited a need to “de-professionalize” today’s student athletes.

Nader would get a chuckle should he gaze toward Kentucky Lake this weekend. There, outside Paducah, Ky., he’d find Falls Church’s Joe Wilkerson and Ryan Ingalls of Fairfax representing Christopher Newport University among a veritable school of university teams trying to land a $100,000 prize in a… college fishing tournament?

Yup. And while competing against 24 other college teams in the College Fishing National Championship, they’ll be dressed up like a NASCAR fender, wearing the logos of all sorts of rod and reel manufacturers and— oh, right—a patch for Christopher Newport University.

Along with the 100 large, the winners also get to compete at the 2011 Forrest Wood Cup, the professional world championship of bass fishing.

God bless ’em.

Yet when Cam Newton‘s family asks for a teensy cut of the tens of millions of dollars he ended up making for Auburn while toiling for the school, that’s put out as a “character issue” that will be used against him in the upcoming NFL draft.