Given the long and sordid tradition of college sports scandals and the hypocrisies that keep piling up all the time, the Brandon Davies situation late last season at Brigham Young University wouldn't even rise to many folks' definition of a "scandal."

Davies, then a sophomore for the BYU basketball team, admitted he had premarital sex. He had violated the part of the BYU honor code that requires students to live a "chaste and virtuous life," and he told the truth when school officials confronted him about it in a private meeting.

That was on a Monday. By Tuesday, March 1, BYU made national headlines when it announced that Davies had been dismissed from the team, effective immediately -- even though the basketball team was 27-2, ranked No. 3 in the country and in the full throes of Jimmermania. The NCAA tournament was just two weeks away, and the Cougars, behind Jimmer Fredette and Davies, seemed in line for a possible No. 1 seed and a serious run at the national title.

As it turned out, none of that happened.

Davies' presence in the middle was a key factor for BYU last season. Now it can be again. Ethan Miller/Getty Images

We'll never know whether the 6-foot-9, 235-pound Davies' presence in the middle would have taken BYU deeper into the tournament than its Sweet 16 overtime loss to Florida. ("He means everything to them," Colorado State coach Tim Miles has said.) But that's really not even the point right now.

The really, truly remarkable thing about what happened between Davies' dismissal eight months ago and the easy-to-miss news on Friday that BYU has reinstated him is how everything about his case flies smack in the face of the way most discussions about college sports' problems are trending these days.

Haven't we pretty much surrendered to the idea that big-time college sports supposedly are impossible to control? Aren't we constantly fed this idea that trouble or corruption is the inevitable cost of competing at the highest level? Hasn't it become way more fashionable to take a sort of à la carte approach to enforcing institutional standards? Punt, for example, on punishing your star quarterback until your BCS game is over? It's en vogue to mock NCAA rules as stupid or unenforceable and shrug at the condoning that openly goes on when players grab money or gifts under the table.

Nothing Davies did even rose to that level. Yet, you know what the reaction was at BYU when Davies was suspended?

"You know what you get when you sign with BYU," Fredette said of the code.