The wages of sin ...

 ... are apparently not all that high these days, at least in college basketball.

There are miscreants galore manning the benches out there, and we're not even talking about Kelvin Sampson, the repeat offender who turned Indiana into an outlaw program in two years and then was kicked out of college buckets for five years.

Sampson now coaches the University of Houston, which is probably going to win the NCAA Tournament because the gods are cruel and love practical jokes, the nastier the better.

But look around, as the Madness kinda-sorta opened last night with the first play-in games. Infamy loves company.

There's Bruce Pearl, the egregious cheater at Tennessee who underwent the standard makeover and is now a rehabbed Official Genius down at Auburn, whom he coached to the Final Four not long ago. There's Chris Beard, fired at Texas after being accused of choking his fiancee and almost immediately hired by Ole Miss. 

There's Rick Pitino, whose watch at Louisville included an assistant turning the basketball dorm into a brothel, and, having been made over at Iona, now is being floated as a frontunner for the St. John's job. And then there's Will Wade ...

He's a piece of work, old Will is. At LSU he got caught on an FBI wiretap blatantly trying to buy a player back when that was still illegal. Then the NCAA began investigating a whole laundry list of violations in Wade's program, which ended in his firing when the NCAA handed down its official notice of allegations.

But, wait, there's more!

Far from being regarded as a pariah, Wade was hired by McNeese State a year to the day later. What's hilarious about that is McNeese hired him on the condition he be immediately suspended for the first five games of next season -- a condition McNeese hopes will stave off any further penalties stemming from the continuing investigation into Wade's Wild West show at LSU.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Why would McNeese hire a guy so tainted they had to put him in basketball Shawshank to keep the authorities from doing it?"

Well ... maybe because Will Wade won a pile of basketball games at LSU. That matters more than anything in a world where wins equal tournament bids equal stackable cash. It matters in a world where stackable cash matters more than anything else.

"But what about integrity, Mr. Blob?” you're saying. "What about standards? What about a university's reputation as a bastion of high ideals and academic excellence?"

Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha. Ha.

None of that matters, you charmingly naive twits. It's why the Sampsons and Pearls and Beards and Pitinos keep getting plum jobs. It's why, on Friday, Indiana is playing a Kent State team coached by former IU assistant Rob Senderoff, who was banished from a head coaching job for 30 months for his role in Sampson's cesspool.

No worries. He was immediately hired as an assistant at his previous stop, Kent State. Two years later Kent made him its head coach.

Now comes McNeese State, out-ridiculous-ing all of them.

"We got us a winner in Coach Wade," the school's official announcement read. "And he'll be a fine role model for our student-athletes and a credit to the university as soon as he serves his time."

OK. So the announcement didn't say any of that.

But it might as well have.