It's been a long, long time since the NCAA handed down really serious sanctions on anyone, so long that an entire generation of fans -- and player, and most importantly, caches -- has come up more or less in their complete absence. The last BCS conference team kept home from a bowl game by Association fiat was California in 2003, one year after a bowl/championship ban prevented Alabama from claiming the SEC West title it won on the field in 2002. That's five years with no major teams feeling that kind of bite, and you have to go back another decade, to the penalties against Florida, Texas A&M, Auburn and Alabama again, just to name a few, to dredge up notable sanctions prior to that.

Either athletic departments have become remarkably cleaner over the last 10 years -- an unlikely proposition -- or the NCAA has grown so squeamish since dropping the bureaucratic equivalent of a nuclear bomb on SMU in 1987 that it lacks the will -- or the power -- to cause anything in the vicinity of that kind of turmoil again.

Most observers seem to presume the latter. Three weeks ago, when Alabama was slapped on the wrist for its third "major" offense in a little over a decade, Sports Illustrated's Andy Staples wrote that the tepid response proved the NCAA won't hold the heaviest hitters' feet to the fire. Old Auburn hat Pat Dye (who knows from NCAA violations) said essentially the same thing to The Sporting News: "There's no question it has changed. ... They didn't punish them very much. In the past, the school had to pay for their mistakes. This is not going to affect (Alabama) in terms of winning games." Dye's contemporary at Ole Miss, Billy Brewer, told TSN lesser-known schools seem "more susceptible" than bigger programs; Washington legend Don James called the Huskies' stint on probation during his tenure as the NCAA's effort to be "holier-than-thou" with a national power, but he "[doesn't] see that happening much anymore." Other than the residual effects on Bobby Bowden's legacy in the record books, the recent rap against Florida State for "widespread academic fraud" falls into the same category of cosmetic chiding -- and it's not guaranteed to hold up, like Oklahoma's order to vacate wins for fielding ineligible players in 2006 didn't hold up.

TSN's Dave Curtis seems to be thinking along the same lines today about the spitballs lobbed at 'Bama and FSU, but he comes to the exact opposite conclusion about what that recent leniency means for the next behemoth lumbering into the NCAA's sights:

Watch out, USC. Some influential folks in the NCAA are yearning to hammer a school that has strayed from its rules on recruiting and/or academics.
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... circumstances have aligned, in official and unofficial contexts, for the NCAA to snap back at the increased rule-bending around the country. And what better way to send college football a message than to handicap one of the sport's flagship programs for the next few years.
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So where does USC fit here? If this sense that rogue behavior has gone too far is legitimate, then someone has to do penance for both its sins and those of under-punished programs past. ... [P]unishing the school for a lack of institutional control -- if the allegations are accurate -- would be the biceps flex the NCAA needs. Banning the Trojans from the Rose Bowl or from TV, or docking them a dozen scholarships for a couple of years, would show no school is untouchable. Everybody best behave, no matter what a school's record book reads or pocketbook holds.

So be careful, Trojans and fans. Maybe USC's not the biggest offender out there. But for now, it's the most famous, it's at the wrong place at the wrong time, and its punishments could signal that change is coming to college football.

Curtis recognizes that "recent examples" suggest the opposite trend, and even gets a coach, UConn's Randy Edsall, tempting the fates on record: "The NCAA isn't as stringent as it used to be with its rules. Everybody sees that." So who corroborates Curtis' vision of a pending crackdown?

"If you have one of these big, sexy recruiting cases, it could get them teed up," said Gene Marsh, a Birmingham, Ala.-based attorney and former chair of the NCAA Committee on Infractions. "When the case is right, there's a real possibility that television bans will come back. Bowl bans will come back."

Big and sexy as it may be, it's still a leap at this point to assume there will be any punishment against USC over the Reggie Bush illegal benefits saga, of any variety. To assume that the hypothetical hammer would transcend the familiar realm of petty scholarship hits and retroactively vacated victories and rain down old-school television, bowl or championship bans like righteous lightning bolts is like vaulting over the Grand Canyon from the current vantage point, obviously one of leniency. And if it's recruiting violations they're after, the aren't any in relation to Reggie Bush, or anyone else Pete Carroll's lured to L.A. (None with any traction, anyway.)

If the Trojans are meant to be just an example, well, the Association had a chance to knock Alabama back into the Dubose era as a repeat repeat offender, and didn't take it. What incentive does it have to make those kinds of waves? As Curtis says himself, "the cheating is less overt than it was a generation ago," in the open market on chicanery in the old Southwest Conference, for example, the rampant offenders that forced the historically toothless NCAA to come down with unprecedented severity in the first place. The "death penalty" at SMU was the nadir of a long escalation of authority.

If the NCAA can live with a slap on the wrist for a fraud case it described in its own words as "widespread," "unethical" and "egregious" across Florida State's entire athletic department -- including members of the department who responded in "serious and intentional" and "reprehensible" ways -- I don't see that the pendulum is going to swing back on the "lack of institutional control" at USC in one fell swoop. Again, if it even brushes the Trojans at all.