SAM MELLINGER
The Kansas City Star

Gene Marsh lives and works in the ugly den of college sports. There may be no one alive who knows the NCAA’s enforcement process from as many angles. He was Alabama’s faculty representative during one investigation, served nearly a decade on the NCAA infractions committee for many others, and is now representing former Ohio State coach Jim Tressel.

Marsh talking about the infractions business is something like Will Smith talking about the entertainment business, so you listen when he speaks of The Cycle: Reporters find cheating, administrators promise reform and fans think the whole system is corrupt.

None of this is new, he tells you, and none of it will ever be old. All of it will only continue. Wash and rinse. Repeat.

“It’s never going to stop,” says Marsh, an attorney for Lightfoot, Franklin and White in Birmingham, Ala. “I wouldn’t want to be dean of chastity for a high school, and I wouldn’t want to be head of enforcement for the NCAA for the same reason.”

This particular Cycle isn’t quite over, but before Marsh says how these things usually end, you should know that this is the message coming out from an increasing number of college sports insiders: Rule breaking isn’t a problem as much as it’s the status quo.

Cheating is a tradition in college sports as old as fight songs, and it’ll be around as long as there is competition on the field. Enough people now profit that any solutions become complicated at best and impossible at worst.

What used to be a niche extracurricular activity is now an industry worth billions. The scope of cheating only grows along with the stakes of college sports.

Confidence in the NCAA model has rarely been this low. In the wake of wild allegations around Miami’s program, The New York Times wondered if this is the worst stretch in the 150-year history of college football.

Reggie Bush gave back his 2005 Heisman Trophy, USC was stripped of its BCS championship, Jim Tressel was forced to resign, the recruitment of Heisman winner Cam Newton continues to be investigated and probes or punishments have reached the campuses of at least 10 other schools — North Carolina, Michigan and Georgia Tech among them.

It all fits into The Cycle.

NCAA president Mark Emmert is making grand proclamations, six years after then-president Myles Brand created the official-sounding Presidential Task Force on the Future of Division I Intercollegiate Athletics, almost exactly a decade after the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics made proposals, and so on.

So far, the actions haven’t backed it up. Schools continue to play with a deck stacked entirely in their favor. Coaches and executives get rich. Players don’t.

The schools and NCAA administrators always win.

• • •

Whatever stereotypes you might have about schools that cheat, stop. This is not just the realm of USC and its national title pressures, and Miami with its rogue boosters, and the SEC with, well, each other.

Did you know that Army cheated? At least once. Back in the 1980s, the NCAA cited Army for improper recruiting contacts, inducements and holding tryouts.

The NCAA opened its enforcement division more than 50 years ago, meaning college football’s Tom-and-Jerry game between crime and cops is older than Joe Paterno’s career. A report by CBSSports.com found that only BYU and Penn State had won national football titles since 1936 and not been cited for major violations.

Nobody involved pretends that cheating is being curbed by the threat of punishment.

“People who cheat aren’t weighing the consequences, they just want to win on Saturday,” says Steve Morgan, a former NCAA staff member now working with an Overland Park law firm that assists schools in infractions cases. “There may not be a magic number (of enforcement officers) where you’d actually increase the chances of people getting caught.”

So much disagreement exists about the NCAA’s rules and the very notion of amateurism that part of the problem is the people involved — the athletes, the ones the NCAA theoretically protects — don’t believe in the rules.

Former athletes write blog posts or editorials poking holes in the structure of college sports. Ed O’Bannon was college basketball’s player of the year in 1995 and now is suing the NCAA for the use of former players’ images for commercial purposes, including in video games.

There is an inherent hypocrisy at work in the NCAA. Amateurism implies an M.O. independent of money concerns, but five conferences now have billion-dollar TV contracts, dozens of schools pay coaches seven-figure salaries and there is reason to believe that NCAA punishments take into account the financial impact on rivals.

Schools often cite missed class time as an argument against a football playoff system, but basketball players miss up to three days per week during the NCAA Tournament, which is broadcast with a $10.8 billion contract.

The disconnect is impossible to miss.

• • •

Embarrassment is a heck of a motivator. This is why restaurants tend to react quicker when health-code violations go public. In that sense, the chances of significant reform went up drastically from the time Emmert made his bold promises to the day Yahoo dropped the bomb on Miami.

The shame only grows the closer you look. The Miami booster who claims to have funded that school’s violations had official ties to the athletic department and owned part of a sports agency.

In itself, that should’ve sounded alarms within the school and NCAA. But wait, it gets worse. Miami athletic director Paul Dee was chair of the infractions committee and slapped down other programs while perhaps the some of the most salacious violations in college sports history were happening at his own school.

It also can’t be ignored that former Miami football coach Randy Shannon had the third-best Academic Progress Report score of any coach in the country but was fired after a 7-5 season because, as then-athletic director Kirby Hocutt put it, “our expectations are to compete for championships and return to the top of the college football world.”

There are any number of seismic shifts being discussed among college sports executives, from creating a fourth division (most likely the six BCS conferences) to allowing student-athletes to profit off their own marketability, to blowing up the system and starting over.

Part of the inertia thus far has been that too many people have too much invested in the current system. This includes the obvious (enormous TV contracts) and the institutional (the very people who would create a new system have jobs in the current one).

Three different college sports insiders, speaking for this column independently in separate conversations, argued that major changes would come only if and when the people in charge felt enough embarrassment that they had no other reasonable choice.

In this way, the NCAA would be acting in line with an element of human psychology that argues if all other things are equal, people ultimately act in their own self-interest.

• • •

So we know that college sports have long been dirty, rules have always been broken and the system exists because it benefits those in charge. That means change will only happen if that last part changes.

This is where you come in.

The surest way for the NCAA to take on major reform is to make the people in charge fear their product will no longer be worth rising ticket prices and billion-dollar TV contracts.

That happens if enough fans are turned off by the ugly side of college sports to no longer spend their time and money watching the product.

Care to guess how that will turn out?

For the answer, we return to Marsh, and The Cycle. He says The Cycle typically changes this time of year as people turn their focus away from scandals and toward the games.

In other words, the system moves on.

© 2011 Kansas City Star and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.