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I wish you’d all known Pete Carril. Or maybe not. 

Carril, the wildly successful “my-way” Princeton basketball coach for 29 years, died Monday at 92. 

He was a required taste. He could be nasty to refs, and occasionally to his own players. He could make courtside ear-witnesses squirm in discomfort. And he didn’t suffer reporters who asked questions he didn’t want to answer. 

Despite an impressive Eastern Pennsylvania college education — Lafayette grad, then a master’s from Lehigh — and a coaching gig at an Ivy League college, there was an indiscreet incongruity to Carril, who stayed craggy around the edges. 

The first time I met him, he snapped at me and was about to snap more — until I snapped back. That, I was told, was the key to his well-concealed heart. In February 1980, I was assigned to cover the Columbia-Princeton game. It wasn’t much of one. Princeton won, 77-50. 

But as the teams were leaving the floor at halftime, I caught a break: Near center court Carril and Columbia coach Buddy Mahar, neither taller than 5-foot-6, brought middle-age bantamweight boxing to the Ivy League as they stood swinging at the other. 

It was a no-decision. Neither connected. 

After the game, I naturally asked Carril about the halftime hassle. He shot me a glare and demanded to know who sent me. When I told him he spit fire: “You came all the way from New York to write about that?!” 

I spit back: “You just won by 27, what the hell would you write about?” 

Carril glared, thought about it, then nodded. We were good. 

Afterward, I was in Conte’s, a legendary Princeton pizza-and-pitcher joint. Carril was holding court at a corner table when I was invited to sit in. One of his confederates whispered, as if I shouldn’t look around, “I think Pete likes you.” 

Above and beyond that, Carril’s teams taught me a lasting lesson on how the media mangles statistics. 

Princeton played deliberate, brilliant offense. Half a minute to throw a one-touch pass off a baseline screen for an easy 2. Poetry in slow motion. 

Consequently, Princeton created final scores that looked like dangerously low blood-pressure readings. The media took those numbers added them, divided them, then determined that Princeton, based only on points allowed, annually play the best defense in college basketball! 

Such unexamined, simple-headed stats are still pitched by TV as essential “facts.” NFL telecasts still credit all points scored to the offense, all points allowed to the defense — rarely, if ever, the case in any game, yet it’s must-know sophistry transmitted by and for the simpletons. 

I don’t know how much time, paper and ink I’ve spent trying to make such points over 40-plus years, but it started with watching Carril’s Princeton teams. Still working on it, Coach. 

How, beyond shaking our heads, do we demonstrate our inability to understand what now passes as social engineering and altruistic activism? How do we distinguish a genuine conviction from a con? 

The NBA made it easy this week, announcing it will play no games on Election Day in order to give NBA fans a better chance to exercise their regard for American democracy. 

In other words, the NBA, until this week, was under the impression eligible voters did not vote on Election Day because NBA games were being played that night. 

The NBA is either engaging in a cheap public relations stunt or regards its fans as a collection of morons. Has Adam Silver been unable to vote because NBA games were played that night? 

Yet the NBA now schedules five made-for-national-TV games on Christmas Day, forcing thousands of low-paid, per-diem workers from celebrating with their families. 

Then there’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday the NBA exploits by playing a full schedule of games as a hollow, cynical reflection on the legacy and martyrdom of Dr. King. It all seems like a con. 

Renown NFL misanthrope Aqib Talib now stands accused of charging the field to incite a fight that led to charges that his bother, Yaqub, a kids’ football coach, shot and murdered an opposing coach, Michael Hickmon, Saturday at a game in Texas played by 9-year-olds. 

But who now doesn’t carry a loaded gun to kids’ games? 

Aqib Talib, as an NFL cornerback for a telltale five teams, was one of the worst acts in league history, perhaps best demonstrated by two episodes in which he ripped the chain off the neck of Raiders wide receiver Michael Crabtree when Talib was with the Broncos. The second episode began a brawl leading to the ejection of both. 

Before he played an NFL game, Talib had a fist fight with a Buccaneers teammate. Later he was shot in the leg in an early-morning episode outside a Dallas strip joint. Police later concluded the wound to have been self-inflicted and that he’d lied to cops. No charges, play on. 

Three years later he was accused of beating a cab driver in Florida and was jailed after allegedly resisting arrest. One-game suspension, play on. 

Next he was issued a warrant for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after he was accused of firing at his sister’s boyfriend. Charges were dropped for insufficient evidence, play on. 

And plenty more where they came from. 

But under pandering Roger Goodell, and Machiavellian GMs and team owners, such players are indulged, free to bring the NFL into further disrepute until “National Felons League” has become less cheap sarcasm than reality. 

Last year, after retiring, Talib was hired by FOX as a game analyst. This year he’d been hired as an analyst on Amazon’s NFL “Thursday Night Football.” 

Both networks didn’t know what kind of guy Talib is, or didn’t care? Or selected him because he met their requirements? 

And now he’s accused of instigating an episode in which his brother is charged with the shooting murder of the opposing coach at a game played by children.

This week Serena Williams was blown out in Cincinnati then left the court, unable to share a few words on the court microphone with the indiscriminate yahoos who came to cheer her during her presumed Farewell Tour. Always the gracious loser, she then bolted before her scheduled post-match media conference. 

Same old Serena. Perhaps she’ll again declare that her behavior was on behalf of women’s rights, to which pandering media again will certify her baloney. And her televised commercial endorsements will continue because everyone loves Serena! Even if that’s hardly the case. 

Over at the ice cream stand, Dairy Queen endorsement man Fernando Tatis Jr., was suspended for 80 games for PEDs. Another Dairy Queen TV ad beneficiary, White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson — a vulgar, N-word-spewing braggart and provocateur — was suspended for a third time in the past two seasons, this time for head-to-head contact with an ump. 

Tatis, by the way, an excessively immodest showboat, was selected by MLB as the sales star of the league’s video game “The Show.” Of course, he was. 

And now he’s suspended for half a season for what he claims was a case of ringworm he treated with a topical ointment that entered his bloodstream as an anabolic steroid. 

Then there’s Roger Goodell favorite, Snoop Dogg, who has parlayed a life of crime, vulgarity, N-word-spewing, crotch-grabbing, drug-loving, police-hating and gutter misogyny into fame and fortune as a commercial endorser of anything from beer to Chryslers. He now has a kids’ cereal on the market. 

Reader Dano Butta suggests he sell the cereal as “Weedies.”