Empires fall when the people quit believing in the system. The cash-cow empire that has ruled college football and basketball, The NCAA, is headed for a dramatic fall.

That's the big-picture story developing out of the Baylor basketball tragedy.

Dave Bliss is an easy target for vilification. His despicable, self-preservation move is perhaps the most heinous act ever committed by a college coach. Attempting to smear the reputation of a dead 21-year-old with accusations of drug dealing to avoid NCAA violations should be a sin punishable by jail time.

	Poor decisions have cost Bliss his job -- and perhaps his career.

But instead of vilifying Bliss, we should examine him and his mindset. We can take the easy Arlington Road and point to Bliss as a lone mad man. Or we can be honest with ourselves, recognizing that Bliss had been a college coach in good standing for 30 years, and acknowledge that the current NCAA "amateur" system created Bliss.

The NCAA's rules and regulations, coupled with its dogged, single-minded pursuit of TV money, forces its football and basketball participants to be corrupt. It's impossible -- some coaches would say "morally impossible" -- to play by all of the NCAA's rules.

And it's really hard to be a little bit corrupt. It's like being HIV positive. You can change your diet, take all the proper medications, exercise regularly ... but there is no known cure. Eventually, you're going to contract AIDS.

Bliss is full blown. All coaches carry the virus, and so do the players.

They carry it because they flat-out don't believe in the system. They don't believe the chance to receive a college education -- in which many of the players are uninterested, anwyay -- is a fair exchange for contributing to a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Coaches feel handcuffed by rules they believe prevent them from being real mentors to their players. Coaches feel compromised by the fact that to compete -- to avoid getting fired -- they must recruit players they know won't make a legitimate effort in the classroom. And many coaches feel guilty about acquiring great financial wealth without being able to share it with the young men who make up their "basketball family" and do much of the work.

How can a good man earn $500,000 a year, and yet be prohibited from helping when one of the players he's recruited, developed and nurtured comes to him, crying about his mama being booted out of her apartment because she can't pay three months of back rent? He can't tell the player to get a part-time job. That would interfere with practice or study or even NCAA rules. If the coach does nothing, he risks a distraction that could cost him the full attention of the player -- and/or a rejection of the coach's "we're all family" message. The way the system is currently set up -- all the money, the rampant recruitment of non-student-athletes and mercenaries -- a coach has to subvert the rules simply so he can sleep at night.

And the players believe in the system even less than the coaches do. Right or wrong, the players feel exploited. And I'm not talking solely about poor inner-city athletes.

When I was playing football at Ball State in the late 1980s, we had a brilliant tight end, a kid named Ron Duncan. He was a three-time Academic All-American. He's a doctor now in Indianapolis. He sat at study table one night and calculated the number of hours we spent on football-related activities and divided that number into the worth of our full scholarship. I don't remember the exact figure, but he had us earning less than $3 an hour. He was convinced we were getting ripped off. Duncan, an NCAA student-athlete poster boy if there ever was one, didn't believe in the NCAA's system.

When I read the transcript of Bliss's tape-recorded conversations, that's what kept running through my mind. None of the people talking or being talked about believed in the principles espoused by the NCAA. Bliss had recruited a player so unethical that he said the player would rather lie than tell an easy truth.

The NCAA is rotting on the inside. Its form of athletic governance is outdated and isn't supported by its participants. The quick solution would be to cut the "student-athletes" in on the pay. That won't work. You pay Carmelo Anthony, you have to pay Diana Taurasi. You pay Taurasi, you have to pay the 10th woman on Ball State's team.

Given the money that's being made, there's really only one viable solution. College presidents should admit that Division I football and basketball are minor leagues for the NFL and NBA and entertainment for students, alumni and fans. D-I football and basketball have virtually nothing to do with the academic experience. The presidents need to quit making the coaches and athletes go through the academic charade. This is where the corruption and the cheating begin. The Bliss virus spreads from here.

Attending school should be voluntary for players.

Each football school should be allowed to carry up to 60 paid players and 25 scholarship student-athletes. (A school could raise the number of scholarship players by reducing the number of paid players.) Basketball teams could be made up of 10 paid players and five scholarship players. The NCAA could work out a reasonable pay scale for players -- I'd say no more than $40,000 a year for a fourth-year player.

Obviously, there would still be cheating. A booster could still give a recruit's aunt a $50,000-a-year, no-show job. But there would be a lot less hypocrisy. And it would be a lot easier for an honest coach to maintain his integrity and play by the rules. The NCAA must consider drastic reform to restore credibility with its top, money-producing employees: the athletes and coaches who compete in football and basketball.

Without reform, the NCAA will continue to rot, and it won't be long before it is toppled.

Jason Whitlock is a regular columnist for the Kansas City Star (kcstar.com) and a regular contributor on ESPN The Magazine's Sunday morning edition of The Sports Reporters. He can be reached at ballstate68@aol.com.