...Auburn, for more than a decade, has been among the N.C.A.A.’s most consistent visions on the perp walk of violators.

Given Auburn’s recent purge of academic guilt, Oklahoma’s self-policing of bogus summer jobs for athletes and the shutdown of prep factories, has anything really changed on big-time campuses?

Yes, if only technically. Certainly the rite of easy passage in college athletics has become a path obstructed by scrutiny. Out of the sporting society’s pathology of cheating — if it isn’t steroids or corked bats, it’s sham grades and corked diplomas — a rampant skepticism about a team or an athlete too good to be true has emerged in the high-tech age.

The Internet has eyes. Every chat room is filled with rumors of programs out of control. And the e-mail messages leave trails. Rival boosters routinely send whiffs of scandal to opposing athletic directors.

Cover-ups are becoming more difficult by the day. Scandals aren’t over, but the scandalous have to be more ingenious, because no one is above suspicion these days. No one is above punishment. No one is immune from accountability.

“When you knowingly and intentionally and premeditatedly break N.C.A.A. rules, you cannot be a member of this football team,’’ Stoops said at a news conference announcing his players’ dismissals.

Stoops’s words rippled with false integrity and self-righteousness. The rash of recent internal actions by college programs — including Phil Fulmer’s new zero-tolerance approach at Tennessee and Larry Coker’s fresh hard line at Miami — has not been hatched from a moral obligation to do what is right, but out of self-preservation.

Bomar was not the first Sooner who worked at Big Red Sports/Imports. The team mascot of car dealers has employed 20 to 25 Oklahoma players over the past several years, according to The Dallas Morning News. As recently as this spring, running back Adrian Peterson was cruising in a luxury auto from the dealership before returning it.

But what set off Oklahoma’s car alarms? The Tulsa World reported last week that details of the car plot were posted on a message board for Texas A&M fans in January. Sooners foiled by an Aggie with spy info.

And Auburn was not motivated to check the academic veracity of its course work until James Gundlach, a sociology professor, surfaced as a whistle-blower to perk up the ears of the N.C.A.A.’s antennae.

Self-disclosure isn’t a sign of an epiphany of college ethics, just a way for university officials to plea-bargain with N.C.A.A. investigators: see, we launched an internal investigation; see, we took action.

Don’t confuse self-protection with self-policing. The wink-wink era isn’t over, but its loopholes and shortcuts require more creativity.