The NCAA's new identity

Returning to the reservation after squeezing the last possible drips of vacation from the summer of 2012...

It's been a week since the NCAA announced its scorched-earth punishment of Penn State, and by now most of you are probably tired of talking about it.

From this corner, it's still fascinating to discuss it in the context of the NCAA's changing identity. I wrote about it late last week in this column, and in hindsight I didn't cover a conclusion that seems to be the most interesting part of this whole thing.

As we've documented, the NCAA is attempting to take significant chunks out of its monstrous rulebook. It's attempting to be a kinder and gentler governing body as it faces the possibility of powerful football programs breaking away, forming their own conglomeration and making their own rules.

So how do we interpret their rapid, withering penalties in the Penn State case? My initial conclusion, as articulated in the aforementioned column, was that the NCAA reacted so strongly in part because public opinion was so heavily in favor of crippling penalties and the NCAA thus didn't have much to lose.

Surely that dynamic played role, but here's a theory that might help further explain it:

The NCAA will be more lenient with minor rule-breaking but will eviscerate perpetrators of major rule-breaking.

This theory was articulated to me a few months ago by a coach who was interpreting the NCAA's efforts to trim its rule book. And now, in the wake of the Penn State disaster, it seems more coaches are concluding the same thing.

Here was Tom O'Brien's take last week at the ACC media gathering:

"We're in a new era, obviously. One of the things the NCAA did when they came to our meetings was they showed what penalties in the past were and what penalties were going to be in the future, and penalties in the future were multiple times what the penalties in the past were."

Man, it's going to be really interesting to see what happens at Chapel Hill. Because the transgressions committed in the academic-fraud scandal are nothing if not major.

A few Monday links:

-- Speaking of North Carolina, this thing gets uglier and uglier with more stuff that's uncovered ... and more stuff the school tries to cover up.

-- Ralph Friedgen, we know you did some really nice things at Maryland. But dude ... releasing a statement to the media because your boxers are in a wad over something Randy Edsall said? Jeez.

-- Interesting piece in the Seattle Times, which documents Emmert's previous experience with athletics departments that go "horribly awry."

-- Michael Dyer kicked off yet another team. What a waste of talent.

LW