God bless you, Bryant Gumbel, for being the voice of reason.  From the close of Tuesday night’s Real Sports on HBO:

Finally tonight, a few words about crime and punishment.  I’m no legal expert, not by a long shot, but I do believe that driving drunk, robbing a convenience store, and hitting your girlfriend are all worse offenses than dealing with an agent.  Most people would agree with that I think, except, it seems, the folks in charge of college football.

How else to explain the fact that the USC Trojans are currently on NCAA probation while the Florida Gators are not, even though Florida’s program has seen 27 different players arrested during the short tenure of Coach Urban Meyer.  That’s right, by NCAA standards, 27 arrests merit not so much as an official reprimand.  But dealing with a prospective agent prematurely, as former Trojan Reggie Bush did, gets your program punished for four years.

It’s not just about USC.  NCAA investigations are ongoing at the Universities of Georgia, Alabama and North Carolina for the same kind of premature conversation with agents that Bush had.  And it’s not just about Florida.  Players at Pittsburgh, Missouri, Tennessee, Oklahoma State, Southern Mississippi, UCLA and elsewhere have also been arrested this year.  But all of those programs are, by NCAA standards, in full compliance.

Look, no one’s naïve enough to think football’s ever going to be played by a bunch of choirboys.  It’s not.  But you’d think that NCAA officials could, at the very least, give coaches and athletic directors a reason to be as diligent about illegality as they are about eligibility—and right now they don’t.  Until and unless they do, the NCAA’s idea of institutional control is anything but.