Sports legal analyst Michael McCann has chimed in on the Sports Illustrated website:

A state government challenging the NCAA’s power to regulate a matter only loosely connected to sports represents a worrisome alignment of litigants, facts and law for the NCAA. Foremost, the lawsuit emerges from unique circumstances that do not readily fit NCAA precedent and thus make application of law hard to predict. Legal challenges to NCAA regulatory power have normally involved an athlete, coach or university seeking redress for a distinctly “sports” related issue. Those issues have included unauthorized conversations between a student-athlete and player-agent (Andrew Oliver v. NCAA); recruiting violations (NCAA v. Jerry Tarkanian); restrictions on broadcasting of games (NCAA v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma); or, as currently being litigated, compensation to players for the licensing of their image or likeness (Ed O’Bannon v. NCAA).

The sports nexus between the NCAA and its punishment of Penn State, in contrast, is dubious. Even the NCAA acknowledged in its Penn State consent decree that “the circumstances involved in the Penn State matter are … unlike any matter encountered by the NCAA in the past.” There’s a reason for that. Punishing a school (and consequently its student-athletes) because its leaders failed to prevent an ex-coach from sexually abusing children does not clearly fit within the NCAA’s purview. Consider NCAA president Mark Emmert’s own view of the NCAA’s mission: “to be an integral part of higher education and to focus on the development of our student-athletes.” To be sure, Penn State’s behavior implicated criminal and civil laws. But that doesn’t answer the relevant question: Did it implicate the development of student-athletes in a way that warrants NCAA penalty?

Early media reaction from Dan Wetzel:

Where the case seems to go sideways is the argument of who exactly is damaged. Challenging the core power of the NCAA is fine, but that wouldn’t seem to be a priority of a sitting governor.

Penn State was not hit with the so-called “death penalty” so it continued, and will continue, to field a team. The postseason ban doesn’t affect business directly in Pennsylvania since the Big Ten championship game and any bowl game are played outside the state. Sure Penn State is unlike to win as many games in the future due to the scholarship reductions, but that is neither certain (anything can happen) nor a particularly moving argument. It could have lost anyway. Is it Penn State’s birthright to win 10 or more games each season?

Lester Munson thinks Corbett is wasting his time:

There are two basic legal rules that are likely to result in an early dismissal of Corbett’s lawsuit. The words that describe these legal rules are “standing” and “waiver.” To succeed in any civil lawsuit, the person filing the lawsuit must have standing to sue, a stake in the outcome of the dispute. If, for example, a former Penn State player filed suit over the NCAA’s elimination of Penn State victories and championships, he would have standing to challenge the NCAA, because he played in the games. Corbett has no identifiable interest or standing in the welfare of the Penn State football program. His lawyers, clearly worried about the standing question, attempt to establish standing for Corbett with multiple mentions of supposed damage to the “state revenue base,” but it won’t work. Corbett is the wrong guy to file this lawsuit.

Christine Brennan ignores the legal arguments to take a few pointed shots at the guv’nuh:

It’s not a coincidence that the announcement was made Wednesday, right after the New Year’s Day bowl games. Corbett said he “didn’t want to file during football season to take away from the team’s momentum.”

He actually said those words. Something this vitally important had to wait for the football season to end? If this weren’t such a serious topic, if this weren’t so pathetic and appalling, it would be laughable. Who is running this state, Barney Fife?

As the most valuable college athletes there are toil for free today, word comes from Jeremy Fowler of CBSSports.com that NCAA president Mark Emmert is dusting off his stipend proposal for preview at the organization’s convention later this month, with a new formal offering coming in April:

A need-based plan can be seen as glorified financial aid, especially when nearly 20 percent of NCAA student-athletes already receive a Pell Grant, a federal program that gives students in need up to $5,500.

The original proposal likely would have cost schools more than $400,000 per year because of Title IX regulations.

The thought of subsidized universities tacking on a few hundred more dollars to the student body’s already-high yearly tuition rates is a hard sell, said Alabama-based attorney Gene Marsh, a former NCAA committee on infractions chair who helped Penn State navigate recent sanctions.

Not long after that story was posted, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett announced the commonwealth would be suing the NCAA for its heavy sanctions on the Penn State football program, with more details coming Wednesday.

This week’s blockbuster announcements that Maryland and Rutgers are joining the Big Ten and leaving the ACC and Big East, respectively, to fend for themselves, has reopened college athletic realignment machinations once again, and they figure to go on for a while.

Just weeks after Notre Dame announced it was leaving the Big East and joining the ACC in everything but football, Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany conducted a rapid stealth campaign to get his league to 14 teams — just like the SEC — and, more importantly, move into major East Coast television markets.

This breathtaking action — coming on the heels of massive financial mismanagement within the athletics departments at both schools, and that Yahoo!’s Pat Forde rightly savaged Monday — is a stunner, even for sharp sports media types accustomed to the realignment carousel.

At ESPN.com, Dana O’Neill tore into the moves on Monday, fingering the men running the leagues for failing to be proper “caretakers” of college athletics:

“The NCAA will have you believe that runners and agents are the most insidious cancer in the game today, that the notion that athletes are on the take has disenchanted the fan base to the point of no return.

“The NCAA is wrong.

“The commissioners are the ones on the proverbial take and everyone knows it.”

What she said.

While that’s strong stuff, and the media furor figures to grow with a fresh new game of musical chairs afoot, these hardly stack up on the audacity meter with major conference moves of the past.

Including the Big Ten in a time long before lucrative television contracts and multi-million dollar coaching salaries.

Earlier this year, East Lansing, Michigan native David Young published his book “Arrogance and Scheming in the Big Ten,” which recounts Michigan State’s battle to join the Big Ten in the years after World War II.

In 1946, the Big Ten was down to nine schools, with the departure of the University of Chicago, a charter member that produced the very first Heisman Trophy winner — Jay Berwanger in 1935 — but that wrestled mightily with the balance between academics and athletics.

Four years later, Chicago dropped football, and seven years after that, de-emphasized athletics altogether.

Among the candidates to become the new 10th team of the Big Ten — commonly known as the Western Conference — included Pittsburgh and Nebraska before Michigan State was added in 1950.

But as Young, a Notre Dame graduate and physician in Holland, Mich., unfurls the story, the Spartans’ in-state archrival did everything it could to prevent the move. Thus, his book subtitle: “Michigan State’s Quest for Membership and Michigan’s Powerful Opposition.”

It was an ugly battle, according to Young, as bitter and nasty as the present-day poaching of BCS schools. While the money stakes weren’t as high, intra-state animosity and institutional status was at the heart of this dispute.

Michigan State Agricultural College wanted to upgrade not only its competitive sports opportunities, but also sought Big Ten inclusion for greater academic prestige. As a land-grant university, it had much in common with Big Ten members Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio State, Purdue and Wisconsin.

Ultimately, those affinities helped Michigan State overcome Michigan’s strident opposition. As Logan Young wrote at The Classical in an October review of Young’s book — just ahead of this season’s UM-MSU game — what we’re witnessing now shouldn’t be all that shocking:

“The misplaced priorities, epic arrogance and constant scheming on display in today’s Big Ten are more or less the same ones that were roiling, loudly, during its prehistory. How this makes you feel will depend a lot on how you feel about those particular priorities, but their evolution (or proud, high-handed and repeated refusal of it) makes for fascinating reading.”

Once Michigan State began competing athletically in 1953, the Big Ten was as stable as any conference in the land, remaining at 10 schools until the inclusion of Penn State in 1990.

That’s when the realignment ruptures that continue today were initially triggered. But the intervening 37 years of “peace” in the Big Ten wouldn’t have occurred without individuals like University of Minnesota president James Lewis Morrill acting beyond the immediate self-interest of his institution.

While it’s easy to bemoan the lack of those qualities today, the behavior that Michigan demonstrated more than 60 years ago has never been in short supply.

Ivan Maisel penned a thoughtful, fair-minded piece last week on ESPN.com about the Knight Commission — whose motto he tongue-in-cheek describes as “Tilting at Windmills since 1989″ — and the increasingly difficult challenge of advocating college athletics reform in an age when more money is flowing into big schools and major conferences than ever before.

The Knight Commission has picked up a number of allies along the way, including Title IX activists who still insist that football, in particular, is draining resources from women’s sports. Maisel points out that the body put the NCAA on its toes with such things as improving graduation rates for athletes. And yet:

“John Cheslock, the director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State, told the Commission that television revenue has increased from $55-75 million in the mid-1980s to about $1 billion last year, an increase of more than 1,000 percent.

“In other words, the Commission knows how to defend the wishbone, and intercollegiate athletics is running the spread.”

This has been the case for many decades, even before the battle over television revenues between the NCAA and the Lords of College Football that led to a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that created the current climate of wall-to-wall games spread out over multiple outlets on fall Saturdays. And many Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings this time of year as well.

Indeed, the real story of the rise of college athletics since World War II is centered around that saga, and so very well-told by Alabama sportswriter Keith Dunnavant in his excellent 2004 book, “The Fifty-Year Seduction: How Television Manipulated College Football, from the Birth of the Modern NCAA to the Creation of the BCS.”

Sports Illustrated’s Andy Staples wrote a terrific piece along these lines back in August, updating the timeline with new TV contracts, the realignment that has ensued and the entrepreneurial ethos of Pac 12 commissioner Larry Scott now driving the commercial landscape of college athletics.

Reformers have always been at least several steps behind what they’re trying to rein in, usually for deeply philosophical reasons. But the advocacy of pure amateurism and education-first pushed by the Knight Commission, the NCAA, gender equity leaders and others forlorn about rampant commercialism in college athletics belies their own conflicted realities with money, prestige and competitive ambitions.

While it’s not surprising for Brit Kirwan, the chancellor of the University of Maryland system, to sound the alarm bell about higher and higher finances in college athletics, there’s a puzzling lack of a larger perspective about rampant spending in the rest of the higher education structure.

The Chronicle of Higher Education cited research this summer showing that nearly half of the nation’s colleges and universities are close to, or are headed toward, an “unsustainable financial path.” (That analysis, by the way, was prepared by Bain & Company, the consultancy where Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made his fortune.)

While that may sound alarmist, higher education leaders who wring their hands about paying $5 million a year for a football coach are just as tone-deaf about runaway tuition costs and the inability of many families to afford college. The risks of taking out hefty student loans and the crushing debt obligations that can hound graduates for decades are becoming too great for many young people and their parents to bear, especially with an uncertain economic future.

Before we can have an honest discussion about being prudent in the athletics department, this conversation must first take place in the main administration building.

Women’s sports advocates fought bitter battles with college football leaders three and four decades ago, at the dawn of the age of Title IX, just to squeeze out a few dollars to pay for new programs demanded by the law. Those fights sowed the seeds of distrust that remain, even though the commercial growth of college football and men’s college basketball has helped women’s sports to flourish at the highest levels. As former Stanford athletics director Ted Leland told Maisel, referencing the success of American women Olympians in London:

“The BCS schools are 25 percent of Division I, and they are providing about 100 percent of Olympic-level athletes in women’s sports. It’s a by-product of the huge influx of money from football.”

But for Title IX leaders to admit this would mean minimizing an “enemy” they need to further their advocacy. There’s plenty of red ink produced by football, as The Birmingham News recently reported about the public subsidies handed out to non-BCS athletics programs in the state of Alabama (including Troy, my alma mater). But women’s advocates would rather use that data to continue to demonize “King Football” than to acknowledge where the money comes from to pay for women’s programs — and basketball coaching salaries are the notable examples here — that will likely never be close to revenue-producing.

As for the NCAA, its decision on Monday to withdraw five national championship competitions from New Jersey because of that state’s new sports wagering law speaks volumes about what many will claim are its numerous hypocrisies.

The dispute involves legal action against the state from not just the NCAA, but professional sports leagues as well, and it figures to get even uglier.

But later on Monday USA Today reported that the NCAA, which is paying its top leaders more than their predecessors, has around $500 million in net assets. Not bad for a tax-exempt organization that professes to uphold the highest values of amateur sports and higher education. While NCAA staffers I have come to know are hard-working, humble people devoted to ensuring positive experiences for “student-athletes,” the top leadership of the organization has never been more out of touch with what those values really are.

Money will do that do you, of course, and it’s richly ironic that the NCAA is under increasing pressure to share its vast sums with the uncompensated athletes whose exploits have created this wealth.

Those sounding the loudest calls for reform have been unable to reconcile their purist, for-the-love-of-it ideals with the commercial realities that have engulfed the entire higher educational and college athletics enterprise.

That’s because they’ve been engulfed by this predicament too, and that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon.

Alabama had barely hoisted the BCS national championship trophy late Monday night when the long-winded explications of the entire college athletic landscape were being churned out.

Actually, those missives have been continuing for a good long while. But in the context of a remarkable and dispiriting college football season — fraught with realignment, record streams of television money and a jarring sex abuse scandal — these arguments will take on a new complexion.

The college basketball season is in midstream, but football has been driving the argument more than ever, prompting such non-sporting journalistic figures as Taylor Branch and, more recently, columnist Joe Nocera of The New York Times (here and here) to launch tirades against the NCAA.

And with the NCAA convention beginning Wednesday in Indianapolis, sportswriter Patrick Hruby piles on to that theme, exhorting college athletes in revenue sports — football is his only reference here — to go on strike:

“It would make the bad situation of big-time college sports better by making it more equitable, more honest. By exercising their dormant power, players would become partners, not serfs, free to make negotiable demands instead of unheeded requests. Maybe college athletes don’t want cash. Maybe they want four-year, irrevocable scholarships and lifetime health insurance for their injuries. Maybe they want the same right to profit from their image and endorsement deals that college-attending actors and musicians take for granted. Or maybe they really do want a salaried piece of the multibillion-dollar pie. Whatever the case, the important thing isn’t the particulars; it’s that athletes would have the ability to ask. And that matters. At their core — or at least at the for-show ersatz core that ensures ongoing tax-exempt educational status – college sports are supposed to be about more than wins and losses. They’re supposed to be about building and shaping character. Do we want a system that conditions our athletes to think like atomized short-timers, too cynical and defeated to care about anything but the scraps they can grift from a corrupt system? Or do we want sports to nurture independent thinkers, empowered individuals who also can work together for a common good?”

This thinking is running headlong into more traditional reformers, who continue their windmill-tilting about regaining some notion of the amateur ideal. But Douglas Lederman of Insider Higher Ed is skeptical these calls will be heeded, since they haven’t been before.

A few details of his reporting jump out — the possibility of something like class-action Title IX litigation that may prompt cutbacks in football that women’s sports advocates have wanted for years. One such veteran, former Women’s Sports Foundation head Donna Lopiano, tries making her long-standing claims about the “arms race” more startling than ever, believing this also might quell the cult of the coach that led to scandals at Penn State and Ohio State.

That’s unlikely, as are renewed desires to strip the NCAA of its tax exemption. But Lederman casts a very long-range scenario for possible change:

“And while it is often suggested that the most-visible and richest sports programs own all the power in the NCAA, the Ivy League, Division III and other nonscholarship programs have something on which the sports powerhouses arguably depend: the ability to cloak themselves in the ‘amateur’ mantle that the most competitive and commercialized football and basketball programs have increasing difficulty claiming.

“In a restructured college sports landscape in which the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ are much more clearly and formally separated, it is not too farfetched to envision a group of angry members of Congress looking very differently than they historically have at the question of whether big-time sports is truly an amateur enterprise that warrants tax exemption as an educational activity.”

While Big East Commissioner John Marinatto reaches all the way to San Diego to keep his crumbling league together, Larry Scott, his Pac 12 counterpart, continues to make himself the most intriguing figure in college athletics.

After pulling off a record-setting Pac 12 television contract this spring, Scott is looking to the Far East to extend the conference’s footprint. But as Pete Thamel wrote in The New York Times Monday, Scott’s current visit to Beijing is just as much about academic and cultural exposure as it is about athletics:

“Pac-12 presidents and athletic directors say there is a strong desire for the results to transcend sports, hoping that an increased presence in China will lead to recruitment of future students and positive cultural experiences for their athletes who travel there.”

The goal is to have some Pac 12 games in sports like basketball and volleyball to be played in China in the next few years, and Scott also has hired a Nike marketing veteran with previous experience there.

This is all unprecedented and fascinating as Scott continues to turn heads with his novel ideas. With his background with the Women’s Tennis Association, Scott has brought a creative, forward-thinking approach to college athletics that is really refreshing.

But as Sports Business Daily indicated in a June profile of Scott, it’s his consensus style that has helped elevate the Pac 12’s profile in a hurry. Said Arizona State president Michael Crow:

“The conference in the past was what I’d call sleepy and procedural. He’s made it entrepreneurial and creative. It’s been a challenge, but he has us working as a group instead of individual universities. It’s a political process and he’s been very successful at it.”

What really struck me about Scott were his comments to The Oregonian last year that he wants to see if women’s sports can turn a profit someday:

“My dream would be for us to have two or three women’s sports that not only pay for themselves but be revenue-generators.”

Now, there are a lot of skeptics about this. I count myself in that group, and even he admits it’s a long-term goal at best. But what I like the most about Scott is that he’s willing to put these thoughts out there, publicly, unlike anyone I’ve heard in his position.

If nothing else, setting such a lofty goal might be just the thing to unlock some creative marketing and promotional possibilities for some women’s and even men’s non-revenue sports.

Whether Scott’s latest ideas will bear fruit remains to be seen. But contrast that with Marinatto, who was taken totally by surprise when Syracuse and Pittsburgh bolted for the Atlantic Coast Conference this fall. A glorious basketball conference is being shattered, primarily because the Big East didn’t have the proactive football chops to stay ahead of the curve. To be fair, Marinatto inherited a weak hand, and the league was made vulnerable after losing Virginia Tech, Boston College and Miami to the ACC in 2004.

If its Big East football move is officially formalized, San Diego State will shift 14 other sports to the Big West, giving athletes in those sports an entirely different experience.

This may become the unfortunate reality for many schools chasing down BCS affiliations and money and committing crimes against geography. It’s truly a shame, and while college realignment is nothing new, what’s happening now in some places is the result of a lack of foresight and creative thinking.

Unlike some of the usual suspects who decry the continued commercialization of college athletics (also not a new charge), Scott has to work pragmatically inside a system that typically doesn’t welcome new ideas.

I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.