Words with teeth, today's edition

And so the festering edifice begins to crumble, now that the FBI's probe into college basketball and all its corrupt support system really begins to ramp up. NBA agent Andy Miller won't be the only collateral damage. There will be more.

Maybe even, you know, a certain football coach over in Columbus, Ohio.

No, Ohio State's Urban Meyer isn't part of any of this business, nor will either he be or his fellow high-dollar football coaches. This is strictly a hoops beef right now -- although that doesn't mean it will stay that way. As Miller, whose connection to college buckets extends only as far as representing NBA clients who used to be college players, could attest, this octopus has some long tentacles, and they stretch in some wholly unexpected directions.

So it's not what Meyer did. It's what he said.

When asked about the FBI's investigation into college basketball yesterday, he went full nuclear zero tolerance, saying coaches who intentionally lie about committing violations should be banned from ever coaching again on the college level.

"If you intentionally lie about committing violations, your career is over," Meyer said during a call-in radio show on 97.1 The Fan in Columbus. "You're not suspended for two games (or) some of the silly penalties you have, you can't talk to a recruit for a week and a half or something like that. No. You're finished. That will clean up some things."

Which might or might not be true, of course. Coaches who have been banished to outer darkness by the NCAA, after all, always seem to wind up in cushy gigs elsewhere -- like, oh, I don't know, the NBA perhaps. What puts the teeth in the FBI's probe is not only will you be banished from college buckets for lying, you'll wind up doing a stretch in Shawshank. Which is why so many coaches and ADs are in full cringe mode right now waiting for their assistants to roll on them.

Facing prison time, the rats will talk. They will sing like canaries, to mix the animal metaphors.

Here's the thing about tough talk, though: It very often comes back to bite you.

This is not to say Meyer is going to wind up getting caught lying to the feds someday. Not at all. But his allegiance to zero tolerance in this case has a few holes in it, because he's not always been so fond of it. When some 30 players get arrested on your watch while at Florida, and several more have at OSU, whatever message you're sending about keeping your nose clean in Meyer's program would seem not to be getting through. Or at least isn't being delivered with the kind of tough zero-tolerance talk Meyer used yesterday.

Perhaps that's unfair. But it did make me sort of chuckle.

And in these crazy days, a chuckle's worth its weight.