Dan Wetzel's piece on the Cam Newton investigation is yet another chapter in his long jeremiad against the BCS, the NCAA, and the code of amateurism--or as he would write it, "amateurism"--that yields little payout for athletes and huge windfalls for athletic departments and the bowl system:
In the end this is the same old story. College football’s power brokers write a bunch of lip-service rules in an effort to maintain the sports’ "amateurism" so they can continue to beat federal, state and local taxes. When you pay neither taxes nor the players there’s a lot more cash laying around to line your pockets.
True enough in this Cam Newton case, though the great majority of football programs don't run at nearly the financial speed you'll see in the SEC, Big Ten, or Big 12. When Wetzel writes about corruption in the NCAA, we are talking about every school, but most especially about a group of 30 or so schools of a magnitude greater than their surrounding competition.
Major conferences are really their own Premier League at this point, and serve as a semi-pro training league for the NFL. They also happen to be attached to and sheltered by universities, and that's where the trouble really starts in the conflict between the avowed non-profit status of universities and the large profits college football can yield.
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