Cheating? Our jocks hardly cheated, Florida State President T.K. Wetherell told the NCAA star chamber.

``We don't really believe they cheated,'' Wetherell told the all-powerful infractions committee looking into the imbroglio formerly known as the FSU cheating scandal.

``They got inappropriate help.''

I tried to imagine running such tortured prevarication past the dean of cadets at my old military school. Not likely. But maybe wayward spouses could adopt the Wetherell Doctrine: ``Honey. I didn't cheat. It just a little inappropriate sex.''

Wetherell deconstructed the FSU moral code a year ago Sunday in a closed door meeting in Indianapolis. He was trying to persuade the committee not to erase 14 crucial victories from football Coach Bobby Bowden's pursuit of Penn State's Joe Paterno for the all-time wins record (not to mention the FSU track team's 2007 national title).

COURT RULING

The Oct. 18, 2008, proceedings were supposed to be private stuff, kept from the public by a college athletics governing body that assumed its secrecy rules trumped the Florida Constitution. Last week, Florida's First District Court of Appeal ruled otherwise, noting that FSU can't ignore open records laws. ``The right to inspect a public record in Florida is not one that is merely established by legislation; it is a right demanded by the people.''

The NCAA quickly announced that it would petition the state Supreme Court to recognize that in Florida, like everywhere else, college sports should be held above the law. But FSU released the 695-page transcript, providing a rare glimpse into a furtive process.

It wasn't pretty. Brenda Monk, the FSU learning specialist hired to help athletes with their academic struggles (and FSU's designated scapegoat), admitted giving student jocks extensive help as they muddled through an online music course. But Monk, whom FSU has labeled a ``rogue tutor,'' argued that she was hardly doling out inappropriate assistance, given their lowly comprehension skills.

FSU's rogue tutor described college student athletes who could not read or write beyond the second-grade level. She spoke of one athlete with an IQ of 60 -- a level categorized as mentally disabled -- who, without her help, ``would be unable to read the questions and would be unable to understand most of the questions.''

Monk argued that she was essentially obligated to provide this so-called ``inappropriate help'' for students with such profoundly stunted reading and writing skills. Without a tutor's help, they couldn't hope to cobble together coherent answers to a test, said Monk, who was fired and is now suing FSU for defamation of character.

OBVIOUS QUESTIONS

The infractions committee, in those 695 pages, carefully avoided the obvious follow-up questions, the questions that hang over all of big-time college sports, the questions that might undermine the flow of cheap labor to a multibillion-dollar sports entertainment enterprise disguised (for federal tax purposes) as higher education.

How does a kid who can't navigate an online music class designed for easy jock credit maintain his eligibility through serious academic course work? And how did a student with only second-grade reading and writing skills ever get past his college entrance exam?

No wonder the NCAA attempts to keep these proceedings top secret.

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