When the most maniacal of University of Alabama fans called Tom Yeager's home at 3 and 4 a.m., they awoke him and his wife with that sinking, frightful feeling a parent with two daughters off to college can understand: Something awful must have happened to the girls. Eventually, they understood the rings were just the Crimson Tide clowns harassing the most fearless man in college athletics, telling him they wish he would drop dead.

Closing his eyes to go back to sleep, Yeager had a nagging question hanging over his pillow: Why I do want this job again?

"As the chair," committee member Andi Myers, the Indiana State athletics director says, "Tom gets the brunt of everything."

Seriously, why do you want to be the chair of the NCAA committee on infractions? It just brings you grief, makes enemies out of thousands of strangers across the country and, if you do the job right like him -- if you're willing to take on the biggest, most powerful conferences in the country and bring their football programs to their knees -- it practically assures Yeager, the commissioner of the Colonial Athletic Association for 17 years, that he will stay commissioner of the CAA for 17 more.

"That could be," Yeager said. "But I've always believed you do the right thing and let the chips fall."

Whatever the ramifications, this corrupt landscape of college athletics needs Yeager and his eight-member committee now. It needs to punish these wayward programs and send messages out across the country. He's the most important man in college sports today, undertaking the most important work with a fearless ferocity that's so rare in this spineless money-grubbing culture.

Since the start of Yeager's three-year chair in 2001, the infractions committee has hit the football programs of Marshall, Kentucky, Alabama and, this week, the University of California harder than those schools expected. When cheaters should be embarrassed over serial NCAA offenses, they are too often indignant. Kentucky, Alabama and Cal are filing appeals for the probation sanctions, when they should be spending their energy cleaning up the messes made in those athletics departments.

"The NCAA-imposed sanctions appear duly excessive," Cal chancellor Robert Berhdahl sniffed.

Here is what is duly excessive: Cal-Berkeley, this so-called bastion of serious academia, getting busted again within five years for major violations. When there are serious violations, there should be serious consequences. What else will deter the cheating? What else will instill fear across the country? Between scholarship cuts, bowl bans and fired administrators and coaches, major college football is suddenly feeling the pain again. Beyond this, understand: If you're a repeat offender and you cross a threshold that Alabama walked to the edge of, understand that this committee swears it won't hesitate to SMU a rancid, repeat offender.

The Crimson Tide was so close, one person familiar with the committee's discussions said: "Like the University of Minnesota, Yeager thought Alabama might have deserved the death penalty."

"Do I think this group has the guts?" Myers said. "Yeah, I do. I don't think this committee would be afraid to hand down the death penalty."

Think they were bluffing about seriously considering Alabama for it, think again. Ever hear of Mark Sheppard? Yeager hadn't until he was called for jury duty in December of 1994. His first inclination was to ponder the perfectly professional American question: How do I get out of this? Nevertheless, he showed on a Saturday morning and said, "They didn't just pick me for the jury, they made me the foreman." They told the jurors to pack a week's worth of clothes and tell their families goodbye. They were going to be sequestered. This was a capital murder trial, a true death penalty case.

The way Virginia law worked, the judge didn't decide the defendant's sentence -- the jury did. Sheppard was a drug dealer charged with the execution murders of Richard and Rebecca Rosenbluth in the couple's suburban home. If these corrupt college programs don't believe Yeager has the resolve to close them down, they should've been witness on Jan. 20, 1999, when Sheppard lost his life to a lethal injection.

Does Yeager have the guts to give the death penalty?

What do you think?

"I've learned this: It's one thing to sit around a cocktail party and talk about what you'd do, it's another thing when you're charged with the responsibility of really dealing with the issue," Yeager said. "It was an extremely emotional trial, even for the jurors. They talk about the trauma of victims, but the attorneys on both sides will rip you to shreds. I've learned that until you've really done it, don't hold yourself out as an expert. People can second-guess our (infractions committee) decisions, but there were eight people there that knew the information, knew the story."

His committee shouldn't be beyond criticism, but understand: They don't deserve it. If you care about clinging to a fleeting notion of integrity within college athletics, they're owed a standing ovation.

After Marshall had scholarships suspended for an obscene practice of giving $25-an-hour janitorial jobs for non-qualified freshmen athletes, the football coach, Bob Pruett, insisted his program would overcome this "adversity," just like Marshall had overcome the greatest tragedy in college sports history -- the crash of the team plane in 1970, killing 70 members of the Thundering Herd's traveling party. Sorry coach, but adversity is something that happens to you -- not something that you do to yourself with a complete disregard for NCAA rules. And to compare scholarship reductions with the plane crash, well, this is just an illustration of the mindsets these committee members are dealing with.

Or like this one: On one Crimson Tide Internet fan board, enlightened fans referred to the school's sanctions as Alabama's "9-11." (Of course, on the Auburn board, someone responded with a posting that Alabama's sanctions were Auburn's "12-25.")

Yeager is no cowboy, just an administrator one colleague described "as maybe the most principled guy I know in our business. He'll always do the right thing." He's the rarest commodity in college sports: Someone willing to march into the middle of this cesspool and take the heat one serious sanction at a time. This starts with the power schools and the power conferences. This starts at the top.

"If the coaches and boosters believe someone who was as at the top of the heap got knocked down a peg, they'll know that the (NCAA) sure won't blink an eye knocking out somebody in the middle of the rack," Yeager said. "It's an important message for everyone to know that if they follow the rules, that in the long run it'll pay off. People are going to take short cuts, break rules and eventually get their due. Some will argue that it's been a farce, and 'who's kidding who?,' about what's going on. Well, coaches used to say, 'They'll fire me for losing before they fire me for cheating.'

"I'm not so sure that's true anymore."

So, Cal fired football coach Tom Holmoe for finishing his final season 1-10 -- leaving the NCAA violations under his watch secondary to his dismissal. Now, school officials think the infractions committee should've gone easier. They all do these days, which tells you this: The more appeals made, the more Yeager's committee is doing its job.

"After the announcement at Berkeley, I started to hear from the Alabama fans all over again," Yeager said.

When the next school gets brought to its knees and dirty programs get angry all over again, just send Yeager an e-mail. He has learned to use the delete button, but those obscene calls can make it hard to get back to sleep, especially when you're asking yourself just why in the world you wanted this job anyway.

Of course, it always should come back to this for Yeager and the infractions committee: If not them, then who? Someone has to stand in the furious face of college sports corruption. Someone has to keep the needle within reach and let a lawless landscape understand that a lethal injection will be administered if need be, that there will be no blinking in bringing the biggest, baddest college machinery in the country to its knees.

Adrian Wojnarowski is a sports columnist with The Record (N.J.) and a regular contributor to ESPN.com. He can be reached at Wojnarowski@northjersey.com.