Yes, they play in Idaho and their home field is covered in Technicolor-blue turf that has long had football fans wondering if something was wrong with their television. Sure, they won a Fiesta Bowl in which they were hefty underdogs thanks to a perfectly executed Statue of Liberty play.

But Boise State really hasn't felt like a Cinderella team in college football for some time now. It's probably most accurate to compare Boise State's football program to Gonzaga's basketball program, if only because both have been too successful for too long at playing with the big boys to be considered true upstarts. But it was still startling when the NCAA accused Boise State of playing like the big boys  that is, of committing numerous recruiting violations. The NCAA delivered its sanction on Tuesday, stripping the football team of nine scholarships and three practices and putting the football team on probation until 2014. The school, which admitted wrongdoing, had proposed forfeiting three football scholarships. The NCAA delivered more serious punishments to the school's women's tennis and track and field teams, and things surely could have been worse for the football program. But given the nature of the charges against Boise State and the NCAA's perennial bigger-fish-to-fry issues, the whole spectacle has raised some questions.

While these allegations never entered Nevin Shapiro territory, the NCAA's initial charges included the words "lack of institutional control," which college sports fans know as a syntactic sign of imminent punishment akin to an angry dad removing his belt. Those words didn't make it into the final report, which was good news for Broncos fans. But even when read in the NCAA's characteristically stark language, the charges against the football program don't jump out as particularly shocking. "Translation [from NCAA prose]: Coaches asked current players if recruits could crash at their place during recruiting trips, current players said 'Sure,'" Yahoo's Matt Hinton explains. "Occasionally, a recruit rode in a car with a player without offering gas money. Every now and then, a player would pick up a recruit's check at IHOP or something. Over five years, the documented 'improper benefits' amounted to $4,934."

That's a light week for college football's heavyweight malefactors, but Boise State hasn't taken the charges lightly. The school fired long-tenured athletic director Gene Bleymaier and reorganized its compliance department. And school president Bob Kustra has said the right things  while not ruling out an appeal, he told the Idaho Statesman's Brian Murphy that "we certainly do understand the process and were focusing on the future and weve made some key decisions here to make sure this doesnt happen again and we dont find ourselves in this position." The school has said that its greatest criterion in the search for a new A.D. is compliance experience, although social media savvy would also help.

But the question of how everyone got here in the first place lingers. "Those violations pale in comparison to what other schools across the country have been charged with," ESPN's Andrea Adelson writes. "Boise State does not dispute that it broke some rules and should be held accountable. But why were the proposed three scholarship losses not enough for the NCAA?" It's not a rhetorical question, although it's probably wisest to expect it to be treated as one.