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Playola: how cheating has changed.

Article Excerpt
It's not often that I have acid flashbacks to the old Southwest Conference--that shady enterprise about which our own Gary Cartwright once wrote "one of its member schools was usually on probation and the majority of its players free on bond." But this summer, while savoring the latest bit of college-football chicanery, I found myself at a loss for words. The University of Oklahoma--which itself has an illustrious history of cheating--was hauled before the NCAA. As had been revealed last year, three Sooners players--including starting quarterback Rhett Bomar--had accepted money from a Norman car dealership for work they hadn't performed. The dealership, the felicitously named Big Red Sports and Imports, was owned by one of the school's boosters. This was a big no-no, and though OU's punishment was hardly as draconian as some of the sentences handed out in the old SWC days (the Sooners lost a few scholarships and forfeited all of their 2005 wins), it provided no shortage of satisfaction for the schools in the lower half of the Big 12 peninsula. For it had been made official: The Sooners, the reigning conference football champs, were cheaters.

Its been some time since...

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