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.

With college football rivalry games on the slate this weekend, The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Futterman takes a long look at a signature event that’s threatened by continuing realignment, conference championship games and, starting in 2014, a four-team playoff for the national title.

As of this season’s there’s no more Texas-Texas A & M game, nor a Kansas-Missouri game. Saturday’s clash involving Notre Dame and USC is notable only in that the Irish are ranked No. 1 for the first time in nearly two decades. Futterman writes that while “rivalry games are selling tools,” the larger national imprint for enticing regional matchups is making increasing and unrelenting demands:

“Given all that passion, one might think college football would do everything to preserve it. But the theme of big-time sports the past quarter century is that more is better, especially when it comes to television money. The new TV contract for the football playoff is likely to be worth as much as $7 billion during the next decade.

“The test of whether that investment is worthwhile will be if the regional passion can continue to evolve into national obsession. The traditional rivalries clearly have their enduring appeal. But the tide appears to be turning. Population growth and the growing popularity of football, especially among young African-American children, have fostered a boom in talent. Now there are enough good players to build quality teams at Florida and Alabama, but also at Boise State and Kansas State, the season’s biggest surprise.”

Read more: “The Battle for the Soul of College Football”

The addition of Maryland and Rutgers to the Big Ten sent off shock waves throughout the college athletic world, and prompted some sharp, white-hot commentary right off the bat. Dana O’Neil of ESPN.com:

“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.”

Read more: “Do caretakers of college sports care?”

Pat Forde of Yahoo! Sports drives down to the level of the athletic directors at the two schools to lay the biggest blame:

“Two largely underachieving, financially irresponsible athletic programs are parlaying their geographic proximity to major metropolitan areas into membership in the Big Ten. They’ve done very little on the field of competition to deserve it. But that’s not what drives conference affiliation these days.

“College Sports, Inc., is no meritocracy.

“Rutgers and Maryland might as well be the airline and automotive industries. They’re losing money left and right, but because they have inherent value (thanks to their TV markets of New York, Washington D.C. and Baltimore), here comes the institutional bailout.”

Read more: “Maryland, Rutgers cash in on their incompetence with move to Big Ten”

At Sports on Earth, Patrick Hruby lights into the NCAA in the wake of the Shabazz Muhammad “investigation” and likens its enforcement of amateurism to the War on Drugs:

“If all of the above seems unfair . . . well, that’s because it is. In college sports, justice isn’t blind; it’s a blind, trembling man throwing darts in a pitch-black room, hoping to strike a coveted recruit getting a free pair of shoes, or maybe a star player receiving a cash-stuffed envelope from an overzealous friend of the program. And things can never be otherwise. Not so long as the NCAA continues to promote and defend a false ideal rooted in ersatz morality; an unworkable mandate that makes no practical sense; a corrupting system that turns legitimate, well-meaning oversight (specifically, looking out for the safety and welfare of campus athletes) into a risible, dispiriting wabbit hunt, an endless, unwinnable war against both human nature and basic economics.”

Read more: “It’s past time for the NCAA to put an end to amateurism”

Unless you’re a Dallas Cowboys fan, it’s hard not to like Washington Redskins rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III, who had an outstanding Turkey Day game on Thursday. At The Washington Times, Rich Campbell explores the qualities the reigning Heisman Trophy winner inherited from his father:

“Robert Jr. met his son’s desire with a commitment just as deep.

“He would go to the library and watch videos of great quarterbacks. He studied Dan Marino’s quick release, Ken Stabler’s scrambling ability, Joe Montana’s poise and John Elway’s strength — to name a few — and contrasted what he saw with videos the family shot of Robert III’s games and practices.

“When he took over the local AAU track and field program when Robert III was 12, he taught himself the mechanics of field events. He studied how Olympic gold medalist hurdlers Edwin Moses and Allen Johnson ran and jumped. Father and son analyzed the video, always striving for that perfect amalgamation of skills.”

Read more: “RG3’s traits passed down from father”

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.”

Thanks to all those on Twitter and elsewhere for their comments this week to the start of my series, “Women’s Sports Without Illusions.” I’m really humbled by it all.

Of course, I’m not expecting the precincts of The Sisterhood to report in, at least directly. They prefer to stay wrapped in a cocoon of their own making, locking up blog comments and talking only among themselves.

I’m not sure I intended it to turn out this way, but my posts this week ended up being a short history of the women’s sports movement, nearly decade-by-decade. As I’ve been pointing out, this isn’t just about Title IX. Perhaps my biggest arguments have been about the cultural grievances that I outlined in Parts 4 and 5.

Next week, which marks the 39th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, I want to lay out some ideas about where women’s sports goes next — indeed, where they actually are now. These include reworking Title IX and examining the challenge of women’s pro sports and developing women’s sports around the world, where true oppression still exists.

Of course, I may under the biggest illusion of all in thinking we can move beyond the rhetorical, legal and other cultural realities of the present. I just want to revive the notion of “joy” in women’s sports, which its leaders have disdained for a very long time now.

Regardless of your views on this — and if you disagree, please speak up — let’s start having a conversation. This was one of the main reasons for me taking the plunge and putting this series together. Feel free to comment here or on any of the posts in this series.

Oh, and I promise to write a lot shorter next week!

Part 1: The elusive notion of gender equality in sports

Part 2: Women’s sports and the matter of choice

Part 3: How women have held back women’s sports

Part 4: Making football the enemy of women’s sports

Part 5: Sports and eros, or why sex is more fun than gender

This is the third in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

The standard narrative script followed by women’s sports activists is that men are to blame for the slow progress of female athletics.

But it doesn’t take much digging to discover that women — female physical educators until the 1970s and politically-minded feminists since then — also have hindered what’s referred to now as the women’s sports “revolution.”

Starting in the 1890s, when Senda Berenson Abbott formulated a restricting first set of basketball rules for women, leading figures in women’s athletics wanted anything but a revolution. As much as any men, they expended decades’ worth of energy to prevent that from ever taking place.

The singular philosophical line running through organized women’s scholastic sports has been anti-commercial, and until the 1960s, largely anti-competitive. For the better part of 70 years, these women resisted efforts to expand competitive athletic opportunities, working especially hard to prevent varsity sports from trumping intramurals and “play days” on high school and college campuses.

That’s because for many of these women’s leaders, maintaining control of women’s sports — and keeping them out of the hands of men favoring a commercial, highly competitive model of sports the women reviled — has mattered above all else, even at the expense of increased opportunities for female athletes.

Maiden Aunts don’t always know best

“When equal opportunity knocks,” posted on the NCAA website in January, chronicles the dramatic, contentious 1981 vote at the NCAA convention to sponsor women’s college athletics, which since 1972 had been governed by the female-led Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. The story amply quotes two high-profile AIAW stalwarts who still believe that women’s sports was dealt a severe setback when the organization collapsed.

Said former Texas women’s athletics director and Women’s Sports Foundation CEO Donna Lopiano, the AIAW president during its last sports season of 1981-82:

“I think the NCAA takeover slowed down the development of women’s sports probably by a good five to 10 years.”

For most of its existence, however, the AIAW was short of money, and ambivalent about pursuing commercial options. The AIAW also was the defendant in one of the first Title IX sports lawsuits because it initially banned athletic scholarships, while the NCAA permitted them for male athletes.

Just let this sink in for a moment: Women discriminating against women, as the age of Title IX dawned. How many years did that set back women’s sports?

This policy, eventually dropped in an out of court deal, was a byproduct of the AIAW’s egalitarian philosophy but untenable in the wake of the new law.

From that point on, AIAW leaders were focused more on holding on to power and their self-proclaimed virtuous approach than catering to the competitive desires of female athletes. Within the organization there was disagreement about later revisions of the scholarship policy that prevented women athletes from receiving aid for anything more than tuition and fees, and other rules that banned schools from paying coaches for recruiting trip expenses.

According to data gathered by sports historian Ying Wushanley, the AIAW spent more than 20 percent of its overall revenues ($847,000) on legal expenses during its 10-year history, while allocating only eight percent ($315,000) on championship competitions for women athletes.

During its final three years (1979-82), as it battled for survival, the AIAW burned through $569,000 for lawyers, mainly to fight the NCAA.

But even well before the NCAA vote, top women’s coaches — including Tennessee Lady Vols legend Pat Summitt — were publicly saying that the NCAA was the way to go, as she reflected 20 years later:

“For me it was tough emotionally, but professionally it was clear cut. We felt emotionally tied to the AIAW, but there comes a time when you have to look at the big picture, opportunities for your sport and women’s athletics across the board.”

That the AIAW required schools to pay their own way to national tournaments also made it easier for athletics departments to cast their lot with the NCAA, which then as now foots the bill for those expenses.

Virtue or politics?

Also by this time, even some AIAW leaders had become disenchanted with the organization’s activities, including what women’s basketball writer Mel Greenberg described as a vendetta against schools and individuals supporting the NCAA move. Judith Holland, like Lopiano a former AIAW president, felt that women athletes were being shortchanged amid all this, and testified on behalf of the NCAA during the AIAW’s unsuccessful antitrust trial.

For that, Holland, then an associate athletics director at UCLA, was labeled a “co-conspirator,” as if she were the Whittaker Chambers of women’s sports. In a recent video interview posted on the Pac 10 website, Holland, now retired, affirmed her belief that the NCAA-AIAW merger was good for women athletes (picks up at the 2:50 mark):

“I don’t think you should have different rules for women than you had for the men. And the women couldn’t have an impact on the rules for the men unless they were in the same association.”

But in the same NCAA website piece linked above, former Iowa women’s AD Christine Grant, who preceded Lopiano as AIAW president, underscored the political animus of sports feminists like her:

“The whole decade of the ’80s was pretty much a whole downer. We just seemed to be losing one thing after another.”

She doesn’t define who she meant by “we,” but in truth it didn’t include female athletes. The AIAW was gone, and from 1984 to 1988 Title IX sports compliance was on the back burner thanks to the Grove City vs. Bell Supreme Court ruling, which exempted parts of educational institutions not receiving direct federal aid. (Congress pre-empted the decision by passing the Civil Rights Restoration Act, then overrode a veto by President Ronald Reagan.)

Concluded Wushanley in his 2004 book, “Playing Nice and Losing,” which culminated with the AIAW-NCAA dispute:

“Toward the end, the AIAW became more of a political agency for women leaders than a national organization devoted to the advancement of women athletes.”

But women’s sports were starting to flourish at the college level, especially basketball, in which iconic figures like Cheryl Miller and Teresa Edwards were competing. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Summitt guided the powerful U.S. team to the gold medal. Two years later, the women’s hoops team at Texas, where Lopiano still presided, won its first and still only national championship in undefeated 35-0 fashion.

While basic Title IX compliance still lagged in far too many places, the superior resources and organization of the NCAA were beginning to pay off for women.

Coming Thursday: Longstanding complaints about football hogging financial resources took a darker, nastier turn in the early 1990s, when more radical voices in sports feminism demonized the sport on cultural grounds.

—

Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

Sports legal beagle Brian Goff thinks Mark Yost’s Wall Street Journal take on the Reggie Bush saga misses quite a few points, and typically overreaches with moralizing that sportswriters apparently cannot resist on subjects like these.

Ray Ratto sees the last stalwart defenders of the notion of amateurism attempt a desperate fling at curtailing the commercial enterprise of college football, and reckons how it might end:

“And in these brazenly Darwinian times, with colleges across the country no longer even trying to hide that the only true motivation for their athletic departments is to squeeze money out of the customer base, the illusory virtues of education that the NCAA likes to brag about matter less and less.

“Indeed, the jockeying to trade up, which has now reached Villanova and Montana for God’s sake, and the side-door deals for recruits, which has now touched Kentucky and Tennessee (along with all the others), is part of the same general tone.

“The planets must grow. The giants must feed. And subtlety is for little prissy schoolmarms, because this is where the carnivores roam.

“Subtlety is the only way cheating can thrive untroubled. Keeping everyone quiet, keeping everyone happy, keeping everyone paid — that takes time, and attention to detail, and unlimited resources. You try and cut a corner here, forget to cross a T or dot an I, you have a donor who isn’t kicking in as much to the ancillary slush fund — it all adds up to less attention to the small stuff.

“That is, unless the NCAA is suddenly infused with new enforcement resources and the mood to use it, which seems counter to their secondary goal of keeping the wheels turning by keeping the engines churning.

“Their primary goal? Making people think this is a noble enterprise.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education adds up the salaries of the 14 highest-paid NCAA executives and comes up with a grand total of $6 million for the 2008-09 academic year. New president Mark Emmert’s salary hasn’t been disclosed, but it’s speculated to be in the $1 million annual range, around the same as his predecessor, the late Myles Brand.

As Andy Katz points out, about $1.2 million of that subsequently has been shaved away due to the recent retirements of three long-time officials, incuding Tom Jernstedt.

I’m still digesting the recently-released NCAA report on revenues and expenses covering 2004-2009 (download the PDF here); the organization’s in-house summary is here).

As for the highest paid college athletics director in the country, who abruptly “retired” this week, as a growing ticket scandal has grown enough legs to prompt a federal investigation, among other inquiries? That’s Lew Perkins of Kansas, which has announced that his going-away package amounts to $2 million, or half his 2009 annual salary. (h/t The Wiz of Odds)