Credit Kansas for exposing what an utter joke the NCAA has become

Kansas basketball and coach Bill Self stared down a six-year NCAA investigation with five Level I violation charges, and proceeded to beat the brakes off the NCAA and its Independent Accountability Resolution Process (IARP) like it was some hapless March Madness 16-seed.

“A good day for Kansas basketball,” Self said Wednesday, and honestly, he should have popped a bottle of celebratory Champagne as he said it.

One part of the NCAA (enforcement) went to the mattresses to get KU and despite being armed with FBI and SDNY-generated evidence saw another part of the NCAA (IARP) scoff at the entire concept of the rulebook.

KU’s most notable punishment? It has to take down the banner commemorating the Final Four it went to during its run in 2018 … and then it won a national championship in 2022 while under investigation.

Credit to Self and the Jayhawks for being the latest to prove that the most fraudulent part of the NCAA infractions process isn’t the violations of the rules but the process itself. Why bother? This is an exercise in nonsense, like Oz tossing fire to distract from the curtain that hid his impotence.

The system produces little more than selective enforcement, uneven punishments and billable hours.

It’s why NCAA president Charlie Baker, still new on the job, should step up and acknowledge the absurdity of the entire operation. He should decry this old, broken disciplinary system designed to protect the old, broken concept of amateurism.

Then he should start apologizing.

He can start with the 2020-21 Oklahoma State basketball team. A slew of schools were caught up in the FBI’s ridiculous 2017 investigation into college hoops recruiting. OSU’s was the weakest and simplest case — basically just a fired former assistant who took some cash from financial planners.

It was so weak and simple that it didn’t go to the IARP, which the NCAA created to supposedly handle the big, tough cases.

This was a small one, so Oklahoma State cooperated fully with the NCAA and got sent to the traditional Committee on Infractions. This was seemingly traffic court. There wasn’t much there. All the players and coaches involved were long gone anyway.

The NCAA banished the 2020-21 team from that year's NCAA tournament anyway, took a March Madness dream, a real tangible experience, from those players because, well, it could.

Somehow the lightest case got the harshest penalty.

Essentially, the players were screwed because their school worked with the NCAA rather than deny everything and fight.

It’s not because the NCAA has any consistent or credible way to snuff out violations. Every other school got off with minimal sanctions. KU. LSU. North Carolina State. Louisville. What was caught was all random, all a bunch of nothing. Not even a strong-ass offer could impress the IARP to act.

The NCAA will go on and on about how its system has procedures upon procedures and safeguards upon safeguards. It will say that it created IARP to fix the old system even if it is essentially acknowledging that the IARP proved worthless because it is retiring it and bringing in a new, new system.

The next one will work, they promise.

The issue isn’t better bureaucracy, though. It’s all the fruit of a poisoned tree. In real life, the results are all a joke. It’s all based on protecting amateurism despite the 2021 granting of name, imagine and likeness rights essentially ending that.

At that point, all of these cases should have been dead and buried. Most of what KU and Adidas stood accused of was no longer against the rules, at least not in any real world way.

Instead the NCAA pushed and pushed only to lose and lose. Yet now Baker is headed to Washington next week to beg Congress for carveouts and special status so it can claw back control (amateurism) against NIL? He wants more power?

Please. Even Washington politicians know the NCAA is a fraud.

He can begin to change that by apologizing to those Oklahoma State players who despite having nothing to do with anything got hit harder than almost anyone.

Then he can apologize to the former assistant coaches and sneaker executives who wound up in prison because the FBI and SDNY were able to weaponize rule violations that in the end not even the NCAA’s own IARP was willing to levy punishment over.

Then he can apologize to the random athletes who get caught up and suspended in arcane statutes.

North Carolina’s Tez Walker missed almost half a season this year due to transfer rules. LSU’s Maason Walker sat out a game for holding an autograph signing one month before it was legal.

A UMass tennis player, Brittany Collins, was once stripped of a conference title because of $252 she received to cover a phone jack in her apartment she didn’t know existed.

The list could go on and on and on, absurdity after absurdity, mind-numbing example after mind-numbing example.

When operating a process this busted, busting a few minor cases isn’t proof that the NCAA is working but that the NCAA isn’t.

It’s just selective and unfortunate enforcement, like a small-town cop using a speed trap to extort the poor lead foot he catches but not the 100 more that sail on by.

That’s what Charlie Baker is running. That’s what he’s going to Congress to try to protect.

That’s what Kansas, among others, so perfectly exposed.