If we learned anything from college sports in the past year, it is that no scandal, however large or grotesque, will derail the runaway locomotive of big-time athletics. Not the Great Tattoo Coverup at Ohio State. Not the shenanigans at Miami. Not even the horrors of the Penn State locker room.

Desperate for a feel-good sports story amid the cascade of corruption, the news media found Yale's star quarterback, Patrick Witt, and his coach, Tom Williams. Witt, you will recall, made the difficult and, to many, admirable choice to play his last Harvard-Yale game, thus forgoing his interview for a Rhodes Scholarship. He was counseled in that decision by Coach Williams, who had done something similar while a player at Stanford. Both halves of that tear-jerking tale, of course, turned out to be untrue.

What I noticed about the Witt story as it went bad was a point buried below the revelations about the Rhodes: Patrick and his older brother, Jeff, had repeatedly transferred from high school to high school (and from Atlanta to Dallas) to find the right football match. We have become numbingly accustomed to college athletes' treating their campuses as