A friend of mine recently told me not to turn on the news because there was nothing new being reported.

He was right, especially from a college football standpoint, where it seems history is doomed to repeat itself.

Last week, Yahoo! Sports released a report which alleges that former University of Miami booster Nevin Shapiro provided thousands of impermissible benefits to at least 72 Hurricane athletes between 2002 and 2010. This included cash, prostitutes, entertainment in his multi-million dollar homes and yacht, paid trips to restaurants and nightclubs, jewelry, travel, bounties for onfield play and even an abortion.

As damaging as this news was, other schools besides Miami have been getting their fingers dirty.

In 2010, the NCAA ruled that former USC running back Reggie Bush had accepted gifts from his lawyer of over $290,000. The Hurricanes first shot themselves in the foot in 1994, when a Miami adviser plead guilty to falsifying Pell Grants for 80 student athletes in exchange for kickbacks. And in May, five Ohio State players were suspended for the first five games of the season after the NCAA found out that the players had traded football memorabilia for tattoos. Apparently their championship rings didn’t mean as much to them as fresh ink.

I think we can all agree that this needs to stop. But it’s just not that easy.

There are inherent problems within the system. Coaches who toe the line can’t compete with those places that break the rules. If they don’t win, they will lose their jobs. The competitiveness in college football breeds these violators and rule breakers and drives them to take every advantage to help the team succeed.

Coaches who ignore the relationships that players forge with boosters is one problem, but players who knowingly break rules and accept these people into their lives is a completely different situation.

Perhaps, some of the time, players don’t recognize that they’re doing wrong, but after calling up a booster to help them abort an unborn child, don’t you think they might wonder if they have crossed the line?

Why not just pay the players since the universities are raking in cash off of their performances anyway?

This old argument that says, “if you pay the players then they won’t succumb to the temptations of boosters,” is redundant.

Most players already go to school for free. They get help with their classes, they are coddled and pampered by team officials, and in one way or another, they are paid for what they do.

Treating these players like celebrities by coddling them has created a new problem.

This new problem is reflected in the Miami situation in that players now have this sense of entitlement. They think they deserve these illegal benefits. They bring in huge money to the schools they play for. Fans adore them. Why shouldn’t they look out for their own needs and wants?

Fans, coaches and university officials and whoever else is involved need to stop cultivating this false sense of entitlement. They need to stop making promises to these players that they will receive whatever they want when they get to college. The team officials have to stop idolizing these players, telling them that they are the best, that they are the embodiment of our school pride, and coaches have to start paying much more attention to who the players are hanging out with.

In doing this, we bring the players down a peg, and hopefully college football can gradually return to the glory years when football was considered just another extracurricular activity.

Being at an institution of higher learning, their education should be the most important facet of their college experience, not re-working their lives around what happens on Saturdays.

Until a solution can be reached, expect to see more of the same news from college football.