PERSPECTIVE ON COLLEGE ATHLETES : Exploitation Under the Aegis of Amateurism : End the hypocrisy by repealing scholarship limits and bans on agents, and let the good times roll.

The scandal involving USC and UCLA football players and an Oxnard-based sports agent highlights a poignant irony--many would say hypocrisy--arising from the cutthroat enterprise that has become big time college athletics.

Three USC players and one from UCLA have been suspended from their teams amid allegations that they accepted cash and other inducements from the agent--transactions that would clearly be in violation of National Collegiate Athletic Assn. rules. These rules, which restrict athletes’ employment opportunities and the value of gifts they can receive from non-family members, have always been enacted and defended, of course, in the name of preserving amateurism--a most worthwhile goal.

However, the irony--or hypocrisy--revealed by this latest scandal stems from the fact that, while the NCAA is understandably outraged by the exploitative tactics of unscrupulous sports agents, its amateurism-preserving rules belie the lucrative, high-stakes realities of big-time college sports.

Indeed, the onus appears to be squarely on the NCAA and its members to show how their high-powered sports programs--typically men’s football and basketball--are themselves not exploiting student-athletes under the pretense of amateurism. The stakes have become obscenely high: We no longer talk about high-profile men’s football and basketball programs in terms of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, but in terms of billions.

While genuine amateurism does indeed continue to thrive in many quarters of intercollegiate athletics, including in many NCAA sports, it is virtually extinct in those major college sports we so frequently watch on TV. Consider:

* The NCAA agrees to a billion-dollar pact with CBS for broadcast rights to its basketball tournament.

* Universities like Notre Dame sign billion-dollar contracts with NBC to air their football games.

* Universities, including USC, Michigan, Duke and Florida State, in exchange for millions of dollars and free uniforms, force their players to become unpaid models for Nike.

* Coaches sign six- or seven-figure contracts with sporting-apparel companies and force their players to become running billboards.

* Universities pay coaches two to 10 times more than the highest-paid distinguished professor at their particular institutions and then proceed to defend those salaries in the name of free-market enterprise.

Given these obscenely high stakes, it becomes exceedingly difficult to see how NCAA leaders and especially leading university executives can, in all good conscience, cast the first stone at the exploitative tactics of sports agents.

The charge that this profit-making industry brings billions of dollars to coaches and universities at the expense of players is being leveled by many in and out of the NCAA, not the least of which is former NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers, by all accounts the principal architect of big-business college sports. In a recent book, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes” (for Byers, perhaps the equivalent of Robert McNamara’s mea culpa, “In Retrospect”), Byers disowns many of the policies he originally championed and argues that the only hope for reforming this “economic tyranny” and “plantation relationship” lies outside the collegiate structure.

Among other things, he suggests that Congress should end the NCAA’s right to set arbitrary limits on the value of sports scholarships, which would allow athletes to earn what the market would bear; that athletes should be allowed to hold jobs during the academic year, including the right to endorse products; that athletes should be able to move freely from one college to another, and that athletes should have the right to consult freely with sports agents in making sports career choices.

That intercollegiate athletics has gotten to the point where these recommendations are compelling is truly lamentable--at least to this university professor and college sports fan. While I remain skeptical of attempts to give athletes--and agents--carte blanche, two things are increasingly clear to me. First, the high-stakes, win-at-all-costs realities of men’s basketball and football are not going to go away. At best, all we can hope is that no other college sports reach such educationally perilous heights.

Second, student-athletes, particularly those in the high-profile sports, are increasingly asking aloud why it is that professional agents can approach a member of the university symphony or theatrical troupe, sign them up, and university officials will not only not raise an eyebrow but will actually sing the praises of that artistically gifted student’s good fortune. Contrary to popular opinion, the young men and women who don athletic uniforms each week are not dumb jocks. They know the score, they see the hypocrisy, but they feel powerless to do anything about it.

But they are wondering: How can our NCAA leaders and our university leaders continue to look at us with a straight face and defend the status quo in the name of amateurism?