Mike Bianchi, columnist
Orlando Sentinel

"Wouldn't it be great if we could go to a college basketball game during the NCAA tournament and not have to cover our eyes to keep from seeing the hypocrisy and not have to hold our noses to keep from smelling the stench?...

"How about we raise admission policies and quit listening to college coaches who say the reason we need such low academic standards is so 'at-risk' kids can come to college and turn their lives around? How about somebody telling these coaches that college is not a place for 'at-risk' kids to turn their lives around? It's a place for 'intelligent' kids to get an education because they received stellar grades in high school.

"How about we make the NCAA tournament a place where reporters don't roll their eyes and openly giggle whenever the moderator opens up the postgame news conference with, 'Any questions for our student-athletes?'...

"And instead of players playing as freshmen and then deciding to leave, how about we don't allow them to play as freshmen so they'll decide to stay? Let the serious athletes jump right from preps to pros; leave the colleges for the serious students who don't mind spending their first year in the classroom instead of the film room.

"And how about we make the NCAA tournament a place where 'senior' isn't a derogatory word that means, 'Not good enough for the NBA'?

"And how about we reward those programs that graduate athletes and penalize those that don't?

"And how about we make college a place where kids go for four years to improve their minds instead of a place they go for one year to improve their jump shots?

"How about it?"

David Steele, columnist
San Francisco Chronicle

"One or two or five or 20 years from now, it'll be a different school selling out, a different renegade coach and a different talented athlete/marginal student. There will be outrage, there will be more fine-tuning of the rules or chair-shuffling in the hierarchy, and there will be another Knight Commission to condemn it all.

"There will also be another billion bucks circulated among the networks and the schools and the NCAA, generated by the hype that barely slows and reduces the scandal du jour to a speed bump on the Road to the Final Four.

"The spectacle always overshadows the scuzz. Ratings go down, players leave early or don't attend college at all, coaches get fired, schools get punished. Yet by next fall we all will have reaffirmed our faith in an arrangement that stopped working long ago, and which other sports-loving countries laugh at, or make a mockery of in the NBA and international competition. ...

"Maybe the big basketball and football schools should conduct an occasional alumni survey, to find out whether the pride generated by a possible national title is worth the potential humiliation of a widespread, deep-rooted, reputation-wrecking scandal. In other words, whether waving a national championship banner makes up for having to hide one's diploma in a drawer for 10 years.

"What do the proud alums of (schools currently embroiled in controversy) think? On the other hand, if your school is the last of the 65 left standing at the end of March Madness, what would you think?"