Interesting IHE article on NCAA problems and how it is, apparently, all the faculties' fault
Of course.
An interesting point in the comments is that anything goes, as long as the football team wins (or basketball or whatevah).
But, in the nature of the game, precisely half the teams lose each time. Which seems to be a guaranteed recipe for frustration of collegieate athletics.
Now this is partly circumvented by, for example, in football having 3 games against lower division teams for "warm-up", with near 100% certainty of victory. In which case the average football team playing 12 games would expect to perform at the 8-4/7-5 level, in division I-AAA football or however many "A"s the NCAA awards the top division (why can't it just be division 1, 2, 3 etc?)
So... you'd expect random games to give a nice broad spread from 11-1 to 4-8 as typical "average" performances for a team which plays 3 warmup games and 9 real games.
The lower division teams, would have the same spread but centered at 5-7 records because they accept 1-2 games each year against a much better team from a higher division.
So, no matter what we do, college atheltics supporters will never be happy because on average most teams will perform below the level they expect their team to perform at.