Given how sternly we’ve been warned against taking athletes as role models for their sporting prowess in the past, where’s the outrage against falsely idolizing them for their mating habits now? If the past few months have taught us anything, it’s that the pros are anything but when it comes to their game with the ladies.

Consider Tiger Woods. He’s rich, he’s famous. He could’ve landed the jumpoff of his choice in a sentence or less. Yet when time came to close the deal, he opened not his mouth but his cell phone; in one especially dispiriting instance he whipped it out to holler at a shorty sitting right next to him. Instead of going with the tried and true lean-in-and-whisper approach—which probably would’ve gotten the job done—he went with the head-bow-and-sext, which eventually spawned a cottage industry.

Tiki Barber’s no smoother. A real player keeps his “other” women at arm’s length from his workplace. But Tiki? He not only hooked up his sidepiece with a gig at his employer, NBC, but he also made sure she was working thisclose to him. In February he brought her to a network gig at the Vancouver Games and introduced her as his assistant. Two month later came a much splashier public introduction—as his “bombshell mistress”—and news that Tiki was abandoning his wife, who is eight months pregnant with twins.

And then of course there’s Ben Roethlisberger, the poster boy of the simpish set. In the past two years he’s been blitzed by two separate sexual harassment allegations. In the first, raised in 2009 in Lake Tahoe, Big Ben supposedly kissed on a 31-year-old hotel employee after luring and trapping her inside his hotel room on the pretense of a broken television. In the second, raised just last month in Milledgeville, Ga., he supposedly got a 20-year-old woman drunk at a bar, trapped her inside a bathroom and had sex with her. (Neither case is expected to be prosecuted.)

It’s enough to make one long for the days of Joe Namath (pre-Susie) and Derek Jeter (pre-Minka) when jocks played “the field” as skillfully as they played ball. Unfortunately those past flights of fancy have given way to a much harsher truth: Just because your favorite athlete can dunk a basketball doesn’t mean he can raise YOUR game.

TAGS: Andrew Lawrence, Ben Roethlisberger, Derek Jeter, Dwight Howard, Joe Namath, Royce Reed, TIGER WOODS, Tiki Barber