James Madison football kids need a talking to, not criminal charges

At Brooklyn’s James Madison High School, new JV football players face a ritual — the older players surround them, de-pant them and softly hit them.

One parent tells The Post it’s been going on for years. He shared a video of one of the incidents, where the “victim” was laughing the entire time.

Except this year, one student who was de-panted told his parents, and it set off a firestorm. Some players now face criminal charges and have been suspended from school. The coach has been fired. And the football season is on the verge of being canceled. 

What a stunning overreaction. What a terrible lesson. 

Times have changed, we understand. Hazing, no matter how light-hearted, is no longer acceptable, and too often gets out of hand. But the answer to that is: Ban hazing.

Suspending the students for something generations have done before? Cancel football games and punish the entire team for these actions? Have we lost all perspective?

And most ridiculously: Calling the cops over this?

This is a teachable moment for kids on the team, and at the school more broadly, if ever there was one. 

Suspend the pansters for a game. Have them write essays explaining why what they did was wrong. 

Have the coach give them a talking-to, making clear that even if it’s all fun and games it has to stop and that respect for your teammates is as big a part of athletic life as scoring touchdowns.  

Maybe even throw in a little community service time. 

But rushing to criminalize them is insane. 

Especially since it sure sounds like this was very likely a team-wide roughhousing game, of a kind extremely common among adolescent boys. 

Not a violent gang assault, a robbery, a shooting or a real sex crime. 

And yes, Madison has had major problems in the past. 

The school is being sued for an actual alleged assault by a former football coach, who viciously slammed a kid’s head into a wall and was correctly later arrested and charged with felonies. 

But a theatrical crackdown against an entire team of kids — who are guilty largely of just being kids — in the service of bolstering administrators’ rep to help win a lawsuit seems supremely ill-considered. 

Kids will be kids. They need to learn to be adults. 

Ruining their lives over trivialities won’t help them do that.