Last week the NCAA (or the Network of Criminally Absurd Asses) dropped the feather on Alabama athletics (read: football) when they forced Bama to vacate 21 wins and put them on probation for three years. The crux of the matter was basically this: From 2005-2007 some players on scholarship (football was one of many sports) were using their ability to get free text books for themselves, and instead of keeping the books, they were giving them to their friends. In the pantheon of great cheating exploits this falls somewhere in between Rick Majerus paying for a players’ meal the night he found out he lost a parent and Eric Crouch getting investigated for taking a ham sandwich at an event when he was at Nebraska. Sure, USC can have Reggie Bush’s family chilling out in a $750,000 house, but players giving textbooks to their friends? Now that deserves some punishment.

If this were a team like Nebraska, instead of Alabama, this would have never even come to fruition. Bama brings a lot of this petty stuff onto themselves with their liberal translations of the NCAA rulebook. The Tide has been on some sort of probation since 1995, so it’s not like they are going to stop doing what they do because Saban is running the show. Alabama flirting with serious rules violations is so much apart of football in the SEC that they wouldn’t know how to react if the NCAA came out and deemed the Tide clean. There are kids who, if born in 1990, have no idea what it is like to see Alabama not in some kind of trouble and they are on the verge of turning 20. So what does the NCAA do? Well, they aren’t going to come down hard on Alabama. They can’t afford to. The Tide is on its way back to national contention under Saban, so taking that away from them simply isn’t an option. Instead the NCAA slaps them on the wrist just to make a point that they will, at some point, eventually take notice of any team (check that; any team not named USC) acting somewhat shady.

I will give credit to the NCAA for moving quicker, for their standards, in doling out the punishment. Usually the NCAA likes to wait for five years before acting, thus coming down on players and coaches who had nothing to do with the issues that caused the investigation. USC will be a prime example of this four years from now when a new coach with all new players gets hit for Bush and Pete Carroll’s issues. But the NCAA just doesn’t get it. How a group of Ph. D’s can be this stupid is cause for an entire book, not a graph in this article, but man do they make themselves look stupid time and time again. On one hand you have Tennessee pulling some serious shenanigans during their run to the BCS title in 1998, and on the other you have student-athletes (oxymoron says what?) getting books for their friends. If you’re the NCAA, you go after the latter because the former would involve actual punishment. Much like a low-level mob member getting off of his crimes so he can get the big fish, the NCAA allowed Tennessee to do likewise when Philip Fulmer turned in to a stool pigeon against hated Alabama. The NCAA cracked down on the Tide in 2002, hitting them with a two year bowl ban as well as significant scholarship reductions.

This time, however, the NCAA simply sought to perpetuate their relevance, even if they have become the ultimate laughing stock in athletics (yes, even more so than Roger Clemens). College fans look at USC and see an ultimate cash-cow (the only one out west). Fans know that if USC goes down, college football west of the Mississippi goes with it, and the NCAA won’t allow that to happen. It’s hard – almost impossible actually – to feel bad for Alabama. They continue to bring the NCAA to their doorstep through stupidity, carelessness and a huge sense of entitlement. But what doesn’t make any sense is if the NCAA really wanted to get teams to stop the crap that they do it needs to hammer the repeat offenders – Alabama – and teams will learn that sort of behavior is not worth the payoff. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Of course we are talking about the NCAA, so who am I kidding?

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