The capricious enforcement also extends to a failure to investigate certain cases that seem to cry out for an NCAA inquiry. For example, an internal investigation at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill recently revealed what a local newspaper called "the biggest case of academic fraud at UNC-CH in decades." Specifically, the probe discovered unauthorized grade changes by forged signatures and classes where no instruction took place in at least 54 classes within the Department of African and Afro-American Studies between 2007 and 2011; football and basketball players comprised approximately 40 percent of the students enrolled in these suspect classes. Shockingly, the NCAA and UNC issued a statement in August 2012 to make clear that any such cheating to boost eligibility of athletes did not violate any NCAA rules. No one's eyebrows should have been raised higher than those of administrators at the University of Connecticut, whose reward for honestly reporting its men's basketball players' poor performance in their college classwork was a ban from post-season play and scholarship reductions pursuant to a different set of NCAA rules. The NCAA's bizarre lesson, therefore, seems to be: We will not punish you for passing a fake college class, but we will punish your poor performance in a real college class (if you are naïve enough to report that failure honestly to us).

Finally, it is too early to know yet how deeply the NCAA will investigate extravagant jewelry purchases by the starting forward on Duke University's championship team in 2010. According to a lawsuit (which was quickly settled), Lance Thomas paid $30,000 up front for nearly $100,000 worth of jewelry during his senior season; the balance was payable within 15 days and allegedly went unpaid. Obviously, questions abound whether Thomas "legitimately" obtained the down payment for the jewelry and whether the jeweler extended him such a large credit based on his status as a Duke (and likely, future professional) basketball player. If the answer to either question was "yes," Duke would be forced—under a "strict liability" theory—to forfeit its national championship.

The NCAA's response to the moral failures by Penn State administrators only deepens the confusion. The horrible events in question were being addressed by the criminal- and civil-justice systems, and public opinion was almost uniformly denouncing the administrators' conduct. Yet the NCAA seemingly needed to add its own "amen" to this chorus of condemnation, so it suspended its usual rules of due process, relied wholly on an investigation conducted by outsiders, created an unintelligible new standard for liability (the exceedingly vague notion of a "sports is king" culture over-riding moral judgment), and extorted—upon threat of the "death penalty" for the school's football team for a period of years—Penn State into "consenting" to an onerous financial penalty, erasure of wins from the record books, and scholarship forfeitures that will further hobble the school's effort to recover from the administrators' misconduct. And for what—do these penalties based on the vaguest of standards serve as any realistic deterrent? Did the NCAA honestly believe that an administrator faced with a similar situation in the future (heaven forbid!) would be deterred by scholarship reductions and erased wins, as opposed to jail, universal public disgrace, and termination of his career? Rather, the whole process reeked of a desire by the NCAA to put itself on the right side of a moral issue to move the conversation, if only temporarily, away from its own moral failings.