Fraud, un-frauded

Gotta say it. The world must look pretty interesting from the angle in which the NCAA views it.

You know, upside-down. Through squinty eyes. With the head cocked at a verrry precise tilt, because only at that tilt does the inexplicable look explicable, the patently false look true and what's black-and-white to the rest of us is not, you know, black-and-white at all.

For instance: Can anyone explain to me, a mere mortal, how a university can commit blatant academic fraud for almost two decades in the service of its basketball program, and not get turned into a smoking crater by the NCAA's enforcement wing?

The ruling body for collegiate athletics will hammer schools (mostly not the big revenue producers, of course) for all manner of silliness, up to and including dinging athletes for selling the bowl swag the NCAA itself says is OK for them to get. (But don't buy that kid a cheeseburger, Coach! Improper benefit!)

Yet here we have the University of North Carolina, which ran the long academic con with such breathtaking gall, getting a free pass because ... well, because why?

Because the phony courses many of its basketball players were taking were open to all students, thereby removing the "improper benefit" tag?

Because the students taking the fraudulent courses were assigned papers, did turn them and were graded according to the professor's guidelines, fraudulent though they were?

Well ... yes. Or so the NCAA Committee on Infractions said when it refused to penalize the North Carolina basketball program for its involvement in this decades-long scam.

In other words, in the NCAA's world, you can now commit academic fraud that benefits your athletic programs (because the "papers" invariably received high grades) as long as the assigned work is completed. By whom, of course, is a question the NCAA prefers you don't ask.

You want to know how insane is this?

It's so insane that the NCAA investigators who uncovered this mammoth scam wanted to throw the book at North Carolina. They were, quite properly, appalled. But they were overruled by their own COI -- even though, in its own report, it admitted that the "courses" involved classes that never met, nonexistent faculty oversight and papers that were graded by a secretary who herself admitted she sometimes didn't read all of them.

Are you kidding me? Are ... you ... kidding me?

The nut of all this, of course, is that by not laying a glove on North Carolina, the NCAA is finally admitting that what it oversees is purely a business. This comes as no surprise to those of us who for some time have been watching the emperor prance around naked. But now the NCAA itself has admitted its garments are nonexistent.

Its argument against paying the hired help, after all, has always been that it isn't hired help at all. Its athletes are students pursuing college degrees. That their labor generates billions in revenue for their schools is offset by a higher purpose: They're getting a free education as a tradeoff.

A grand notion. And one totally undermined when a member school is allowed to funnel its "student-athletes" into fraudulent courses without a twinge of conscience, thereby rendering that education worthless. That's what the University of North Carolina has been doing for 20 years. And the NCAA let the Tar Heels get away with it.

Can there be a more blatant betrayal of college athletics' alleged mission? Or a more stark example of just whose tail is wagging what dog?