A story out of Oklahoma last week probably sounded a little familiar to Mustang football fans.

J.D. Quinn, an offensive lineman for the Sooners, was permanently dismissed from the team last fall for taking money for hours they did not work at a Norman auto dealership.

He, along with former quarterback Rhett Bomar, simply clocked in and clocked out for work that never occurred.

“All I did was take cash,” Quinn said.

Cash that is forcing the Sooners to go before the NCAA Infractions Committee later this week on April 14. The NCAA is alleging that OU failed to adequately monitor the employment of its student athletes at the car dealership.

But don’t expect any harsh penalties to be handed down.

At most maybe some scholarships taken away from OU for a few seasons, but that’s it.

No ban from post-season play. No ban from conference play. Nothing.

The NCAA just doesn’t bring the hammer down on guilty programs – especially powerful state schools.

We aren’t naive enough to think the NCAA would hand out anything like the Death Penalty. But when situations like this come up, all we can think about is what happened twenty years ago and how SMU is still struggling from what happened.

The NCAA hasn’t dared to inflict the Death Penalty on another Division I program after it saw what happened to our school.

We have to be squeaky clean – to the credit of the athletic department. But for too long clean meant fielding poor teams that could not compete on the field. Only now we seem to be approaching a proper balance.

The football powerhouses know they do not have to have such balance.

Accordingly, programs across the nation know they can do whatever they deem necessary to win. There will be little to no consequences in their desire to get to the Bowl Championship Series Promised Land.

Which is frustrating to us.

We are tired of waiting for next year. We are fed up with other schools flaunting their screw-ups and only getting slaps on the wrist.

Maybe the NCAA will finally make another school an example the way we were.

But we aren’t counting on it.