“I believe they did something awful, but I want them to continue at the University of Miami,” said Shalala, as if expelling a player was her only option. “It’s time for me to say to the community and to those who have been sending me e-mails that this university will be firm and punish people who do bad things, but it will not throw any student under the bus for instant restoration of our image or our reputation. I will not hang them in a public square.”

Suddenly, she is sensitive to ridicule? She spoke of a new “zero-tolerance” standard for the football team even though this year the Hurricanes had already stomped on the logo at Louisville to hone their mocking skills.

It’s as if Shalala has discovered her dreamboat job as Miami president has big football as a flotation device. Money matters. Duke officials canceled the lacrosse season when rape allegations illuminated a history of reckless entitlement last year, but acting half as punitively against football could cost millions in lost revenue.

A conscience can be bedeviling to the bottom line. Why else would a respected educator like Shalala become an enabler to the culture of derision in college football?

That’s what Shalala did when her university paid F.I.U. $150,000 to be its clay pigeon on the football schedule. She is not alone, of course.

In college football, everyone has put a dollar figure on humiliation. In its duplicitous role in the college football arms race, the N.C.A.A. handed teams a 12th game this season to create a money grab.

This is how lucrative life is as a schedule dummy: As The Times reported earlier this year, universities from Troy, Ala., to Buffalo command $600,000 to $750,000 in appearance fees from teams like Nebraska and Wisconsin.

What’s in it for the powerhouses? Elite teams can sell out a stadium for the photo shoot of a team picture, so scheduling a pushover churns revenue.

Playing victim is fast money for anonymous programs desperate to raise profiles on large stages. But punching bags have feelings, too. Florida Atlantic University — an hour north of Miami and F.I.U. — made nearly $2 million this year as the chum for Clemson, Oklahoma State, Kansas State and South Carolina.

•Florida Atlantic lost those games by a combined score of 193-20, making the team experts in salvaging self-esteem.

“It is true that with the lower-profile teams, a lot of players probably wish they could be playing at the higher-end schools, playing in front of 80,000 fans,” Craig Angelos, Florida Atlantic’s athletic director, said when reached by phone yesterday, “but for one reason or another they didn’t get a scholarship there and are playing at this level.

“So I do think there is a chip on their shoulder to go and show some of those players — especially if the geographical location is close, like it was between Miami and Florida International — that they were passed over for a scholarship. They want to say, ‘Hey, I’m just as good as you and I’m here to show you.’ ”

Not every grudge by the disenfranchised manifests into a fight with the establishment. As Angelos rightly pointed out, in sheer numbers, most fights materialize among longtime rivals — see Clemson and South Carolina, or, more recently, Dartmouth and Holy Cross — but with more no-name teams than ever handing over their lunch to bullies, the meek are bound to retaliate against humiliation.

•Few are as artful at ridicule as Miami. Shalala just cannot afford to accept it.

“It’s time for the feeding frenzy to stop,” Shalala said. “These young men made a stupid, terrible, horrible mistake, and they are being punished. They are students and we are an educational institution and we will act like an educational institution, not like a P.R. machine that’s trying to spin and restore its image that we worked so hard to put in place.”

Who is spinning whom? Shalala knows politics as the former secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration. So when she stepped to the mic yesterday, in her dutiful role as cash-cow protectionist, Shalala did it with the certitude of a skillful politician: she scolded the scandal mongers, not the scandal makers.