Over the past several months, Florida State University has been preparing to face the music in its latest athletic scandal. Now that the NCAA has made its ruling, FSU officials don’t seem to appreciate the tune. However, there is little doubt that many FSU athletes, with the proper academic counseling, could name that tune, although it might take more than three notes.

In late March of 2007, the story of academic fraud involving athletes and the Department of Athletic Academic Support Services (AASS) began to surface. The initial alarm came when a student athlete came forward and admitted that at the direction of a learning specialist in AASS, he took an online quiz for another athlete, and the learning specialist provided the answers to the quiz.

From here, the information moved up the chain of command on the academic side of the university, over to the athletic side of the university, up to the athletic director, and finally to the president’s office. As FSU’s internal investigation proceeded, it became apparent that this was not an isolated case. Many athletes had been provided answers to quizzes. Some had papers written for them in the online course, “Music of World Cultures.”

By mid-summer, 23 athletes with eligibility remaining were caught up in the fraud, and it was determined that each of them should lose 30 percent of their remaining athletic eligibility. At the end of 2007, the athletic director’s contract was not renewed, and three of his assistants had resigned. Several tutors and employees of AASS were also gone.

In February of 2008, FSU sent its investigative report to the NCAA, noting that FSU had taken putative actions on the case, placed the athletic department on two years probation, and reduced some scholarships in several sports. At this point, the NCAA took up the investigation.

Two weeks ago, the NCAA announced its findings: An academic advisor, a learning specialist, and a tutor had, over the course of three years, advised 61 athletes — 25 of them football players — to cheat in an online course. FSU will lose six scholarships in football over a three-year period, and the athletic program has been put on four years probation.

The university must now determine how many of the offending athletes in several sports participated in competition. When that is determined, any victories won will be vacated.

When you look at these penalties, they are remarkably mild. There is no loss of TV revenue, no loss of post-season competition. The loss of scholarships is minimal. This is a case that the NCAA termed “egregious,” “extremely serious,” and “intentional.” The violations were characterized as “widespread academic fraud perpetuated purposefully” by three AASS staff members.

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This is always a difficult time of year for me. I am never sure which leaves me with a greater numbness of the brain — the NFL draft or grading final exams.

This is a question that will have to be resolved by greater minds than mine, particularly in my current mental state.

The NFL draft is clearly the biggest non-event on the sports calendar. ESPN created this monster with its ill-advised decision to televise the draft and oversaw its growth with incessant hype. If I had a dollar for every minute that ESPN has expended on it over the past decade, I would retire in luxury. If I had a dollar for every word uttered by Mel Kiper over the same time frame, I would be a billionaire.

Sports talk radio has picked up on the draft and compounded the cacophony geometrically. Never has so much been said by so many about so little.

The other day a colleague asked what could become the most feared question at ESPN: “If Mel Kiper is so good at draft analysis, and capable of critically grading the performance of the New England Patriots who seem to do fairly well drafting, why is Mel not working in the NFL?”

Once the draft ends and the analysis subsides (although it never ends), then it is time to look ahead. Not to the actual football season, but to next year’s draft. I believe it was Tuesday that ESPN.com was already asking if three top college quarterbacks would be first round picks next year. Only an air strike on Bristol, Conn., can save us.

In an effort to trump this madness, the NCAA last week approved two new bowl games. One is the Congressional Bowl, which reports say will feature Navy against a team to be determined by the most effective lobbyists in D.C., or an ACC team. I am not certain which.

The only thing to top this is that St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia) is also getting a bowl game. Because the weather is so bad in Florida in December (lovely, warm, beautiful), the game will be played indoors in the facility affectionately known as The Can. I assume they will set the air conditioner to 20 degrees and pump in some snow to maintain the proper bowl atmosphere.

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When dealing with the NCAA, you can be certain that there will never be a shortage of hypocrisy. As March Madness gives way to April Sadness, two wonderful examples came flying out of the NCAA cupboard.

The NCAA has, over the years, condemned the practice of scalping tickets at their events. Now the folks at the NCAA have found that they, too, can be scalpers, while still pretending they are not in such an unsavory business. But make no mistake about it — there is no difference between scalping online and street hustling at the arena.

The NCAA has an exclusive agreement with RazorGator, as its official “ticket reseller,” to handle the online resale of its tickets to high-demand NCAA events. Final Four ticket strips with a face value of $140 to $220 were selling online for $2,500 and up. There is also an official NCAA travel agency, which offered Final Four packages, including game tickets, for as much as $4,495 per person, according to the Los Angeles Times. Oh, those beautiful revenue streams!

The NCAA also has a long standing policy against the sale or advertising of alcoholic beverages at NCAA sponsored events, with one loophole: Alcoholic beverages of less than 6-percent-by-volume can be advertised on telecasts of NCAA events. There is a time limit of 120 seconds per telecast, but that limit was exceeded by 150 seconds during the recent NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship game.

Drew Faust, president of Harvard, and 100 other university presidents, signed a letter calling on the NCAA to revise its policies and initiate a ban on all alcoholic beverage advertising. According to industry reports, beer companies rank second in advertising at the NCAA tournament.

None of this is particularly surprising, as we have come to expect these forms of avarice from the NCAA. What is surprising is a change that was made at West Point in what has been described as a desperate attempt to resurrect its football program.

Until recently, the long-standing policy meant that such star athletes — such as Roger Staubach and David Robinson — served for five years before joining the ranks of professional sports. Now, however, the star athlete at West Point has a very different career path to follow.

As reported in SI and the Dallas Morning News, the new “alternative service option” implemented in 2005 for cadets blessed with “unique talents and abilities” means that the five-year commitment that cadets make to the Army will no longer be equally applied to all cadets.

The first two years of the five-year obligation will now be spent recruiting and working in public affairs. Cadets playing professional sports can then buy out the remaining three years with six years in a reserve unit. While classmates go off to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, star athletes will avoid the front lines and be able to take up their professional sports careers three years earlier than under the previous policy.

It is believed that this change will enhance the recruiting appeal of West Point for blue chip athletes and contribute to an upgrade of the football program. This is certainly a reassuring step by the powers that be at West Point, and it bookends nicely with an admissions policy that has a special track for recruited athletes.

The power of intercollegiate athletics has become irresistible and the need to win on the field grows stronger with each passing day, even at the service academies. In some ways it is reminiscent of the sports powerhouses that were created at army and navy bases during World War II.

David Zang, in his brilliant analysis of sport in the ’60s, saw a link between the overemphasis on winning in sport and the growing awareness that the nation was not winning the war in Vietnam. It was Vince Lombardi who offered the antidote to the war protesters and the long hairs. It was the football teams on many campuses who were encouraged by their coaches to attack the war protesters — their fellow students.

Could it be that we are faced with a similar situation as the nation stumbles on in the Iraq morass, seemingly far from what anyone could call victory? Is the Army itself being seduced into the pursuit of victory on the gridiron, while being frustrated in the conduct of Bush’s Folly?

Or is it a more simple matter than that? Could it be that the powers that be at West Point are still steeped in the traditions of the “Playing Fields of Eaton,” and Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s faith in the lessons of football? The vocabulary of football might also suggest the persistence of such a linkage in the hearts and minds of those who train leaders at West Point. One can only wonder how Gen. MacArthur, who was so fond of the West Point Motto “Duty, Honor, Country,” would feel about the new policy.

In a world in which athletes are routinely described as warriors, in which an athletic event becomes a war, where sides clash and teams do battle, and where “whose number one” is a national obsession, nothing should surprise anyone. Intercollegiate athletics is in danger of truly becoming a mirror of our world in which there seems to be no bottom.