"O" No! Part III -- End Of An Era. Can We End The NCAA Too?

The vaunted Ohio State football program is in tatters. The Tressel Era has come to an ignominious end. Pryor is outta here. Other players may follow. Central Ohio's former fountainhead of self-esteem has now left us embarrassed and crying in our beer. At its root, the "scandal" was about trading trinkets and t-shirts for tattoos and cash. Hardly illegal, but the NCAA has decreed (somewhere in the depths of its inscrutable 9,000 page rule book) that all our young student-athletes must be absolute amateurs, paragons of virtue, playing only for love of the game, and unable and unwilling to receive value or make money in any way, shape or form, other than full-ride scholarship. Thus, trading your smelly socks for a shitty tattoo is against NCAA rules. It's a trivial, silly rule (tattoos, for Chrissakes!), but they should've known better.

The real problem, of course, was that Tressel knew about all of it but pretended he didn't. Like Watergate, it ain't the crime, it's the cover-up. And once The Vest got caught in his convoluted cover-up, that was all she wrote. He's a good man, but he really should've known better. A shame.

The NCAA will come down hard on OSU for these indiscretions. Life, and big-time college football, will go on. But should the NCAA, as we currently know it, go on as well? Buster says no. The NCAA is archaic in its approach, and its countless and often contradictory rules virtually ensure violations. (All you libertarian Tea Party types: If you think the federal government is big and confusing, beware the NCAA. It'll make your head explode!)

So let's kill the NCAA and have a do-over, creating a kinder, gentler, more realistic governing body for college sports. Remember that big-time college football and basketball programs are big-time because we want 'em that way. We, the public, create the demand for all the TV exposure, the huge stadiums, the polls and all the other media hype. Our slavish devotion means that big-time college sports is awash in money on all sides. Everybody's getting rich. Except the players.

The new NCAA would recognize the obvious differences between Ohio State football and, say, Ohio Northern football. The new NCAA would still have its rules and it wouldn't allow anything near true professionalism, but it would finally recognize that allowing players in the big cash-cow programs to somehow share in the wealth just a little bit would not be the end of the world.