There's a great story about Gov. Mike Johanns, the man proposing to pay Nebraska football players.

The governor was at the Nebraska-Oklahoma game two years ago when, as the Omaha newspaper later recounted, the Cornhuskers broke out the razzle-dazzle. No. 7 handed the ball off to No. 1, who flipped the ball to No. 16, who then threw it to No. 7, who ran to the brightest form of daylight. Touchdown.

	Nebraska Gov. Mike Johanns believes paying football players minimum wage is the least colleges can do to repay them for their exciting play.

In the delirium, Johanns turned to his wife Stephanie and asked which player was No. 7. She paused, to make sure he wasn't joking.

"That's Eric Crouch," she said, of the soon-to-be Heisman Trophy winner.

Amazingly, the governor wasn't impeached on the spot.

It's not the last time Johanns will be accused of failing to recognize the obvious. By promising to sign a bill that asks the state to pay Cornhusker football players a modest stipend -- the latest attempt to better compensate the athlete-entertainers of college sports -- the governor is taking on an institution, the NCAA, that just doesn't lose these battles.

The history of college sports is littered with futile, if well-meaning efforts to shuttle more of the loot to those who make us root.

"I don't think the whole system is going to roll over just because one state decides to pay its players," said Gary Roberts, a Tulane law professor and an expert on NCAA legal issues. "If the state of Nebraska lays down the gauntlet, it's going to lose. The NCAA will get along just fine without Nebraska."

And yet maybe this is the right bill at the right time. A key provision of Legislative Bill 688 is that the university can only start doling out the cash if three other states with Big 12 teams pass similar bills. That means it's a largely risk-free venture for Nebraska, which would only face the possibility of NCAA banishment if stipends-for-athletes grows into something of a national movement.

By then, the expectation is that the NCAA will have already stepped in and quelled the issue, by finding ways -- on its own -- to better compensate athletes.

"The NCAA will change its rules before this ever gets to four states," said Sen. Ernie Chambers, chief sponsor of the bill. "I'm a politician and the NCAA acts like a political body, so I know how these people work. When they see the momentum shift, they will (adjust)."

Chambers, from Omaha, has been banging this drum for more than two decades. An African-American in an overwhelmingly white state, he has long considered himself an advocate for the Cornhusker players, some of whom come from poor homes in distant states. He's seen athletes come, and athletes go, leaving behind questions of whether they got as much from the school as the Husker juggernaut got from them.

In 1988, Chambers pushed a similar bill that was passed by the legislature. But it was vetoed by then-Gov. Kay Orr. He blames that failure on "that sneaky snake" Tom Osborne, whom he says lobbied against the measure, effectively revealing himself as something less than a true players' coach. Osborne is now a Congressman for Nebraska.

In Johanns, Chambers has found a more receptive partner.

"We need to come out of the dark ages," Johanns said Thursday while en route to a national governors' conference, where he plans to speak informally to his peers about the stipend issue. "This bill recognizes that there's an element of big business to college football, and that the players help build (the program)."

Every season we read about athletes around the country taking money from boosters, he said. "This bill would make things more open," he said. "It's honest. It's above board."

The bill calls for all football players -- the 85 on scholarship, as well as the 100 or so walk-ons -- to be paid the federal minimum wage ($5.15 an hour) for approximately 728 hours per year, which works out to an average of 14 hours per player. Over a year, the stipend works out to $3,749 a player, and a total cost to the Nebraska program of $751,000. The money would be on top of the value of the players' current scholarships.

As always with any discussion of pay-for-play, the idea begs many questions. Would Title IX require that female athletes get the same money? What about the men's basketball team, the other revenue-generating college sport? One way the NCAA has fended off the issue of stipends is by insisting that all athletes be treated equally, even though that's a hollow claim. Schools already spend more on revenue-producing sports -- the money just goes to coaches.

The fear, as well, is that stipends could open the door to the real salaries that could wreck the seemingly fragile finances of college sports. Rational or not, visions of Chris Leak, Parade's national high school player of the year, soliciting competing financial deals from Florida and Florida State are enough to terrify athletic directors.

No one knows exactly where college sports would be headed with stipends -- much as it once was hard for people to imagine what the economy of the Deep South might look like without the free labor of slavery. But Johann and Chambers appear willing to go there, confident that the marketplace will dictate that the Huskers still play the Sooners on a regular basis.

They aren't alone, either.

"I applaud what they're doing in Nebraska but we're going to look even further into these issues," said Kevin Murray, a California state senator from Los Angeles.

On Wednesday, with no fanfare, Murray also filed a bill in California that intends to address the treatment of college athletes in that state. The exact language of that bill has not been submitted yet, but Murray said hearings will be convened to examine the viability of stipends, and whether NCAA rules violate anti-trust laws by restricting the amount of money athletes can receive -- from the school or other sources.

He pointed to the Jeremy Bloom case as evidence of the NCAA overstepping its bounds. The NCAA last year told the Colorado receiver he could not play college football if he accepted sponsor money from his fame as a world-class skier. Bloom backed down after losing a court battle, and played for the Buffaloes as a freshman.

"We don't treat student violinists or student physicists like that," Murray said. "If one of the students can make money off their talents while still in school, there's nothing that says they can't get paid for it.

"I'm not up for athletes being able to negotiate (playing contracts) for hundreds of thousands of dollars. But they should be able to live comfortably while they're in school."

Nebraska and California make two states tapping on the NCAA's door, hardly enough to knock anything down. But the line at the door is now forming.

"I'm sure the NCAA will just dig in its heels and tell them to go to hell," Roberts said. "It'll be like Hootie Johnson and the Masters -- they won't want to make changes at the point of a gun. But once they put that behind them it will lead to more discussion about the issues and, maybe, a loosening of the rules."

It's razzle dazzle, with a hint of power politics.

Tom Farrey is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at tom.farrey@espn3.com.