A troubled sport?

For years, we've proceeded under the quaint assumption that impropriety and shadiness aren't nearly as rampant as they were in the 1970s and 1980s before the age of NCAA reform.

Maybe that's the case. But the scandals that've unfolded over the past year show us that things haven't really changed all that much.

The "resignation" of Ohio State coach Jim Tressel was hastened by some fantastic investigative reporting from Sports Illustrated reporter George Dohrmann.

In this era's version of "Pony Excess," SI uncovered a far more systemic pattern of rule-breaking than Ohio State initially disclosed. As a result, the two administrative clowns who inexplicably stood by their man and had such a feeble grasp of the problems -- president Gordon Gee and AD Gene Smith -- should follow their man out the door.

Ohio State alumnus Kirk Herbsreit weighed in on the fiasco yesterday on Colin Cowherd's radio show, wringing his hands over the troubled state of college football.

"If there's anything that gives me heartache, it’s the direction our sport is going. It's easy to point the finger at the NCAA and say all the things they don’t do right. I don’t know if there’s ever been an era where the NCAA and college coaches have been challenged more so than the way they’re being challenged right now."

Undoubtedly, it's tremendously difficult for a coach to know of everything that goes on with his team these days. NCAA rules limit their interaction with players, yet coaches are supposed to have a firm grasp of their whereabouts and actions 24 hours a day.

But let's not pretend that the NCAA's 20-hour rule (maximum of 20 hours per week on "football-related activities") is actually adhered to at major college programs. Football is why these kids are on campus, and anyone who believes otherwise probably also believes in the tooth-fairy notion of "voluntary" workouts.

Coaches talk a good game about the importance of academics, but the bottom line constitutes just two letters of the alphabet (W's and L's). That probably explains why former Clemson offensive coordinator Rob Spence, as the Tigers were preparing for the Music City Bowl in December of 2006 while also going through final exams, was overheard at a practice saying this to his running backs:

"You have the rest of your life to worry about academics. You have four years to play football."

The exhortation was a bit surprising coming from Spence, who was among the more studious and intellectual coaches who've come through these parts over the past seven or eight years. But how can we blame these coaches for taking a cold, bottom-line view when that's how they're ultimately judged?

Tommy Bowden did a good job of graduating his players, and he was commended for that at various points during his career here. But it didn't mean a thing when he began the 2008 season with a disastrous 3-3 record that included a loss at Wake Forest in his last game as the Tigers' coach.

Back to Herbstreit: If the former Buckeyes quarterback has condemned the actions of Tressel, I haven't seen it. In fact, Herbstreit blamed everyone but Tressel yesterday on Cowherd's show.

Herbstreit appeared to place all the blame on the pervasiveness of "third parties, 7-on-7 camps, street agents and the AAU-type of mentality." He said the NCAA needs to get "proactive" with these influences.

"They need to set some ground rules and prevent these mentors, 7-on-7 coaches, street agents. We need to find a way to keep them from being so involved with high-level football players.

"By the time they show up in college, they have a sense of entitlement. They have an attitude, and at that point it's hard to really change their mentality. So you've got to get them when they're juniors or seniors in high school."

I am a fan of Herbstreit, but this comes off as relentlessly naive and maybe even embarrassing in view of the current situation at Ohio State. Because Tressel, as underscored in the SI report, has a long and damning record of fostering the very type of entitlement Herbstreit blames others for perpetuating.

Perhaps the last vestige of amateurism rests in the fact that college athletes cannot be paid beyond scholarship, room and board. When you introduce rampant commercialism and greed, and the status of college football as a generator of ridiculous amounts of money, and the fact that passionate and obsessive fans care about winning more than anything else, it should be no surprise when stuff like this happens.

It's not as though Tressel and North Carolina's Butch Davis invented the "I didn't know" defense; the art of plausible deniability goes back a long way. If you're a head coach and you want to cheat, the first rule is to tell everyone around you never to apprise you of said cheating.

And heck, the "I didn't know" defense seems rather smart these days in light of the fact that such a stance has actually worked in Chapel Hill and Auburn.

In the 1970s and 1980s, college football coaches basically ran universities and then the NCAA imposed measures to shift the balance back in favor of academics and presidents and the higher education ethic.

Recent developments indicate the campus power base has shifted back to the football office. Or maybe it never left and we've been naive all these years.

LW