Friday the El Kahir Shrine of Cedar Rapids welcomes some of the summer's Shrine all-star football players and coaches to its club on Blairs Ferry Road for what has become an annual luncheon to salute the participants from this part of the state who will play in the game on July 21 to benefit the Shrine hospitals.

It's a great pleasure to welcome Jerry Hoffman, who is the statewide head of the Shrine Bowl, to our city again. And it's worth noting there will be a change in the Shrine Bowl venue in the future, thanks to the NCAA.

It has been deemed by that organization that holding Shrine high school games in college stadia is now a no-no. The reason being, too many scouts and agents have been browsing around.

The contract for the use of Jack Trice Stadium in Ames and the ISU dorms and food service have already been signed for this year's game, so Iowa is going to do what Nebraska has already done and ask for a one-year waiver on this rule.

But now on the plus side comes the fact that once again Kingston Stadium, which has hosted the Shrine game in the past, can now bid for one of these contests and hopefully the Shriners could use the Coe dorm facilities for the high school teams.

We will do a little more investigating at today's luncheon with Mr. Hoffman.

Since we're talking high school athletes, I sit here and wonder what the effect of the blowups of Ozzie Guillen and Bobby Petrino proportions does to a high school athlete's outlook. In years gone by, stories like this would have been shunted from the sports page and kicked under the carpet.

A high school athlete of years ago probably had little or no idea of the things that were going on in those days. Today, they know it all.

So, the story of the future will be whether it's best to know all or know nothing. In many ways, with Guillen and Petrino, I think they have demonstrated it's better to know nothing.

(Bob Brooks is sports director at KMRY and has been one of the leading voices of college and prep sports in Eastern Iowa for more than 65 years. He is a 10-time winner of the Iowa Sportscaster of the Year Award, and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana in 2004. His sports reports can be heard weekday afternoons at 4:30 and 5:30, and Saturdays at 6:40 for the Hawkeye football wrap-up.)