If someone said that I could only watch one television show the rest of my life, it would "Friday Night Lights," hands down. Football. Great writing. High-level drama. Great acting. Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton.

Then there is Michael Jordan who plays quarterback Vince Howard. It's not THAT Michael Jordan. This one uses a B., as his middle initial, perhaps to distance himself from THAT Michael Jordan.

Howard is the quarterback of the East Dillon Lions. He's a superstar. He's a junior in high school. And a couple of weeks ago they had an episode where you could have substituted the name Tyrelle Pryor for Vince Howard.

In the show, big-time football powerhouse called Oklahoma Tech, really wants Howard to go to school there. They are wooing his father, who just got out of prison, by the way. They invite both of them to visit the school with a wealthy alumni as a guide. They introduce Howard to two hot girls, one black and one white. They each take an arm as they guide him and his father past the swimming pool, populated by enough hard bodies to look like a mini-Spring Break.

There is lots of lip service to the strict recruiting rules. And then the school and its alumni bend the rules, break them to pieces, stomp all over them and pat the kid on the back, telling him that everything is going to be just peachy once he signs on the commitment line.

"Friday Night Lights" is great fiction, except it's not fiction. Substitute the name Tyrelle Pryor for Vince Howard and you have a biting reality of lust, exploitation and flaunting the NCAA rules.

Pryor is the former Ohio State quarterback who has gotten car deals. He was invited to play golf regularly at a private country club when before he had even taken a single class at Ohio State. The story of Terrell Pryor is coming out in drips and drabs, but it has all the earmarks of a Tiger Woods or Anthony Wiener story. You ain't heard nothing yet.

What Pryor's story, and Bruce Pearl's story, and the USC story and so many more, continue to point out is that there is a fierce ugliness to NCAA sports, an ugliness that is determined by the NCAA, which really does nothing about it except hand out penalties between bouts of counting its money.

The toughest challenge ever faced by the NCAA came after the end of World War II, when rules governing amateur participation, recruiting practices and what to do about this new thing called television. The NCAA got two of those three right, but the recruiting and participation practices are still virtually unbridled.

For every Terrell Pryor, there are hundreds of other athletes who are getting something improper, at least according to the absurd rulebook of the NCAA. I call that rule book "absurd" because any set of rules without rigorous enforcement is barely worth the paper it is printed on.

If I had an answer, I wouldn't be sitting here. But I don't. What I do know is that nobody seems to really care about all of this.

The fans just want a winner. The students just want a winner. The coaches just want a winner. The players just want to win. Nobody really cares how you do that. Just win.

There is obviously something wrong with the enforcement of the rules. There is obviously something wrong with the obedience to the rules. Look at just one rule.

A TV reporter asked University of Wisconsin wide receiver Nick Toon, who was watching a high school tennis tournament, what Toon thought about the recruitment of a quarterback from North Carolina. Toon told the reporter he hoped the guy would come to UW because he could help the Badgers.

Bang! An NCAA violation. Here's the rule:

"Before the signing of a prospective student-athlete to a National Letter of Intent or an institution's written offer of admission and/or financial aid, a member institution may comment publicly only to the extent of confirming its recruitment of the prospective student-athlete. The institution may not comment generally about the prospective student-athlete's ability or the contribution that the prospective student-athlete might make to the institution's team; further, the institution is precluded from commenting in any manner as to the likelihood of the prospective student-athlete's signing with that institution. Violations of this bylaw do not affect a prospective student-athlete's eligibility."

Almost makes you want to put a gun up to your head and pull the trigger. NCAA rules, my foot!