Throughouth this week, “Sports Illustrated” has been releasing its story about Oklahoma State University’s football program and its rise to national prominence. In the story, SI outlines different measures the team took from 2000-2011 under coaches Les Miles, now at LSU, and Mike Gundy, who is still at OSU, to become a national powerhouse. 
The findings were not so clean. Many players from those 11 years admitted to taking money from boosters, getting paid for sham jobs, having advisers write papers for them, having professors give them false passing grades, turning players into drug dealers to make more money and arranging for recruits to have sex with hostesses to persuade them to attend the university.
Doug Gottlieb, national radio talk show host for CBS Sports Radio, said on his show Tuesday, “Well, to me, it shows like they were just running a successful, big time college football program.”
Pete Pissco from CBSports.com tweeted yesterday, “Don’t tell me boosters are paying players,” in regards to the story. 
What message is sent to the people when an organization is accused of cheating and is met with a collective shrug of the shoulder? 
I personally agree a bit more with what ESPN analyst, Jimmy Dykes, tweeted. 
“Wrong is wrong, even if everyone else is doing it. Right is right, even if no one else is doing it,” he said in his tweet.
I wrote in a previous article the NCAA should suspend itself after a lack of discipline to the Johnny Manziel investigation. Now, I am beginning to believe the best course of action is a total overhaul of the system. Right now, the only perceived answer to the question of how to make a football team better is to cheat. When people start to become numb to cheating going on around them, I believe it far past time for a change.
The overarching idea to solve this problem is to make paying players legal. But paying athletes would merely just open up the floodgates, I believe, and college football would never be the same. If the NCAA decided this was the plan of action that needed to be taken, then I think that would only increase the divide between the rich teams in college football and the ones struggling to pay bills already. 
I think instead of just accepting the notion, “Everyone is cheating, so might as well make it legal,” the NCAA should try to get to the bottom of the cheating. Instead of waving the white flag and rolling over and just accepting failure, the NCAA should stand up for what it believes is right and has stood for since its inception. 
A free education is a valuable privilege that not many people get to take advantage of in their times as students. Imagine for a moment if a student receiving a free education also received free grades for no work. The university would immediately expel the student. But if a student-athlete does the same, it seems to hardly be addressed and is never talked about again. 
The purpose of the wonderfully written piece from SI was to expose what goes on in a successful football team, and it showed everyone’s favorite is not as clean as people think. It is time people stop accepting cheating and start demanding change from the NCAA and universities that turn a blind eye to what goes on  in their football programs.