Until the cheaters get punished, nothing is going to change

Its never been a secret that agents and their runners pursue the cream of the athletic crop at the collegiate level.

The goal? To build a good relationship with future professionals, strong enough that when those kids with the talent to make a living playing their sport -- generally football and basketball -- finally do turn pro, said agent will be the one picked to represent them. Agents make a living off of commission. The more players they represent -- and the better, and younger, those players are -- the more commission the agent earns.

Far too often, however, the way that agent forms a relationship is by showering a player with money and/or expensive things. (Personally, I don't have a problem with an agent being an adviser. They know the business -- how to maximize your draft stock, how to market yourself to teams and sponsors, essentially how to make the most money possible -- better than anyone. At times, it is actually a good thing.) Give any kid $20,000, or let him drive a luxury car, or fly him to South Beach to party, and odds are good that kid is going to like you. Represent that kid when he turns pro, and that agent can potentially make millions in commission off of a relatively small investment.

That's a bit oversimplified, I know, but its not that far off from what is actually happening. It has been that way for a long time, and for a long time it has seemed like the NCAA has ignored it, both in basketball and football. Why? As Gregg Doyel explains, its not because the NCAA didn't care. They did. But during the Myles Brand era -- 2002-2009 -- the focus was not on eliminating agents.

[Brand] cared about basketball and academics, and sought to clean up both. And he did. Brand indirectly shut down scores of seedy prep academies, storefront schools designed to turn academically indifferent stud basketball recruits into college-eligible scholars. And he oversaw the creation of the APR, which measures graduation rates in the real world -- allowing for transfers, early professional departures, etc. -- and ties those rates to scholarship reductions and other NCAA penalties.

Brand was great as NCAA president, but his office wasn't big enough to do it all. Something had to slip through the cracks ... But this is a different NCAA. Prep basketball factories have been eradicated. The APR is in place. So what matters now to the NCAA? Agents matter now.

Simply put, the NCAA didn't have the manpower to fight a war on two fronts. So they took on high school basketball factories first, wiped those out, and are now moving on to the next issue: agents and amateurism. And their coming with a full arsenal, guns blazing. They've beefed up their investigation staff, with eight full time employees doing nothing but, well, investigating.

It has paid dividends already.

Football players from Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Alabama are all being investigated for illegal benefits they received from agents. USC just had their football program leveled because of the Reggie Bush scandal.

The problem, up to this point, is that there has never really been repercussions for illicit dealings with agents. Amateur athletes get funneled five and six figures worth of cash and gifts that essentially allows the agent to have that athlete on retainer. Remember, these are 18-22 year old kids. Many of them come from impoverished backgrounds. The overwhelming majority of them having been brought up with a sense of entitlement, the right to get cash and gifts for free, the right to break the rules without punishment because of their athletic ability.

That's the point -- without a significant punishment, we expect these kids, out of the goodness of their heart, to pass all that up? Please.

USC pleaded innocence in their case. They said they didn't know that Bush was getting money thrown at him from all angles. The ruling that the NCAA handed down basically tells every other major program in the country that now knowing is not an excuse. For the schools, there is no more plausible deniability. If it happens on your watch, its your business. Find out about what is going on under your nose, or face severe consequences when the NCAA does.

Depending on the punishments that the NCAA hands down to the players being investigated, the same could be said for them. Take money from an agent while you are a student, and you will lose your athletic eligibility. If a player misses a year and drops from a first round pick to a sixth or seventh round pick, it will take a big chunk out of their bank account. When those punishments continually get handed down, eventually the players are going to get the point.

But for the problem of agents and runners to truly be eradicated, there need to be consequences for everyone involved. Agents supplying money to players need to be suspended or forced to pay an excessive fine. Coaches -- not just the assistants, the head coaches -- that look the other way need to be hit hard, whether it is a show-cause penalty or a fine. The NBA and the NFL players that were involved with agents in the past need to take a financial hit. Couldn't the NCAA force them to pay the money that is owed when a team has to vacate victories?

Right now, the only people that are truly punished when the hammer drops are the people that are still associated with the program once the cheaters leave.

The USC basketball team was on their to becoming the story of the 2009-2010 season when news broke that they were going to be banned from the postseason because of violations that occured when Tim Floyd and OJ Mayo were there, two years prior.

Its not fair to the Mike Gerritys and the Dwight Lewis' that graduated without the chance to play in the Pac-10 or the NCAA Tournaments their senior seasons. Its not fair to the Kevin O'Neill's of the world, a coach who took a chance on a team and a program that looked to be going no where and turned them into something.

Those are the people that receive the brunt of the punishment when entitled stars cheat.

And that won't change until the cheaters themselves start to get punished.