OPINION: Never mind boys behaving badly.

Right now, at the pointy end of Australian sport, it seems we've gone well beyond that.

Seen in isolation, the dumping of vice-captain Shane Watson, James Pattinson, Mitchell Johnson and Usman Khawaja from the third test team for failing to submit their homework in time seems more worthy of detention than suspension.

But it's much more worrying as part of a bigger picture.

Skipper Michael Clarke says there have been a number of issues on tour where team standards haven't been met. Morale appears to be at rock bottom in a test squad getting flogged on the pitch by India and ridiculed off it.

The major football codes are faring even worse.

Cronulla are feeling most of the heat from the ongoing Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority investigation, with Shane Flanagan stood down as coach and four club officials sacked.

Many of the Sharks players are on tenterhooks as they wait to learn just what ASADA might have uncovered.

Then there are the other five NRL outfits and AFL powerhouse Essendon who are also being closely looked at by ASADA and the Australian Crime Commission.

The NRL's biggest star in 2012, Ben Barba, is serving an indefinite club-imposed suspension due to behavioural issues, believed to include gambling and alcohol abuse.

Relations between Collingwood and their highest-profile player Dane Swan are strained after he defied the AFL club and did a recent TV interview where he denied he had a drug problem.

Rugby union is also in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Wallabies winger Digby Ioane was dumped from Queensland's upcoming match against the Western Force for his involvement in a scuffle at a Melbourne hotel on Saturday night.

The incident occurred just hours after a "gangster-style" photo of Ioane, fellow rugby headline acts Quade Cooper, Kurtley Beale and James O'Connor and Hawthorn star Lance Franklin posing in a spa was posted on the internet and quickly went viral.

This is the same Cooper who last year caused uproar when he described the culture in the Wallabies as toxic and was subsequently fined $40,000.

Cycling is trying to claw back its battered reputation in the wake of the Lance Armstrong doping scandal, although it's still far from clear whether former racers Matthew White and Stephen Hodge will be the only Australians taken down.

Then there are the disgraced members of the Australian Olympic men's swimming team.

The behaviour of James Magnussen and friends is now the subject of two separate inquiries into a sport which has long traded on its lilywhite image in this country.

In short, everywhere you look in Australian sport right now, the boys are being boofheads.

So in the search for role models, thank heavens for the girls.

In an Olympic team which largely performed below expectations in London last year, it was hurdler Sally Pearson and cyclist Anna Meares who provided the best stories.

That the golden girls did so without attracting a whiff of controversy almost goes without saying.

As does - regrettably - the news that they have attracted precious little support from sponsors in the ensuing months.

And it's worth noting that as Michael Clarke's disjointed outfit bumbles its way around India, only last month the Australian women's cricket team was celebrating victory in the World Cup in the same country to follow their World T20 triumph months earlier.

And doing so without feeling the need to behave like prats in the process.

- AAP