King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Even if Reggie Bush cashed in at USC, it doesn't mean he's a bad guy. Some rules deserve to be broken.

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Sept. 21, 2006 | Let's say there's a superhighway right outside your town. It's flat and wide and straight, with no intersections and few on- or off-ramps. Traffic moves at about 70 mph with no problems.

Except one: The speed limit is 35.

The drivers on that road are breaking the law by driving twice the speed limit. Are they criminals? Are they even unsafe drivers?

I've been thinking about that road ever since Yahoo reported last week that New Orleans Saints rookie Reggie Bush and his family got about $100,000 in cash and benefits during his career at USC from marketing agents hoping to sign him once he turned pro.

Bush denies the allegations, which if proved could result in Bush losing his 2005 Heisman Trophy and USC forfeiting its 2004 national championship, among other possible sanctions. Yahoo's reporting on the story appears to be solid, but the NCAA has little investigative power and, historically, little stomach for overly vigorous pursuit of wrongdoing in its highest-profile programs.

I believe the allegations. I can't put it any more bluntly than that. What I don't believe is that Bush did anything wrong. In fact, at $33,333 a year, he was a stone bargain. One year later he's the same guy playing the same game in front of roughly the same size audience, and he's making about $4 million.

"I don't think Reggie did that, but if he did, I would have done it, too," his Saints teammate Joe Horn has said. "And guess what? Eighty percent of the college athletes that don't have much when they're in college get money, too."

Everybody's doing it so why shouldn't I is kind of a lame excuse, but really, what if everybody's doing it, or damn near? Maybe we shouldn't take Horn's top-of-the-head figure at face value, but it would be beyond naive to think there isn't a huge percentage of athletes in revenue-producing college sports accepting benefits that violate NCAA rules. Especially when you realize that almost everything violates NCAA rules.

"You start thinking back to all summer," former Oklahoma quarterback and Heisman-winner Jason White told the San Bernardino County Sun about attending compliance meetings at the beginning of each school year. He said he'd find himself thinking, "Oh, dang, I took a piece of gum from somebody on campus ... is that going to get me in trouble?"

Are all those speeders outside your town bad people? Or is that speed limit a law that demands to be broken? In other words, what does it mean when a society, in this case the NCAA, has a law that its citizens widely flout?

I asked Chris Kutz, a law professor at the University of California's Jurisprudence and Social Policy program in Berkeley, that question.

Kutz noted that he wasn't familiar with the charges against Bush, then said, "If there's a major strategic disadvantage to not breaking the rules, if it's individually irrational not to break the law, then the system needs to change. The structure of incentives needs to change. And that means institutional change."

Next page: Almost all of the incentives in college sports encourage cheating