MORGANTOWN — College athletics is at a crossroads and if the NCAA and the professional leagues and players’ unions do not get together soon and come up with a new structure the very games that we revere so much in college towns throughout America is threatened.

Headlines this week pointed out the depths of the problem, a problem of ethics and morality, of false amateurism and professional greed. Never before in our history has there been such an imbalance leaning away from what college sports have claimed they stood for all these years.

Headline No. 1 came out of USC, where Mike Garrett was let go as athletic director and replaced by former USC quarterback Pat Haden, this coming in the wake of the Reggie Bush and O.J. Mayo scandals. At the same time USC announced it was disassociating itself with both men, returning Bush’s Heisman Trophy and taking down all of his and Mayo’s memorabilia.

All Bush and his family took was $280,000 in improper benefits from agents, with Mayo also found to have accepted gifts, which may even be why West Virginia and Bob Huggins steered clear of this West Virginia native during his recruitment.

Headline No. 2 came out of the SEC Media Day when Alabama’s head coach Nick Saban, our own favorite son, went ballistic after word got out that his school is looking into defensive end Marcel Dareus and whether he broke NCAA rules by attending an agent’s party in south Florida. If his expenses were paid, the player would have broken NCAA rules and could be suspended for some games.

Agents, who always seem to be in the middle of everything, are poisoning the fruit that is college athletics, an area where they are neither welcome nor necessary.

“What the NFL Players Association and the NFL need to do is if any agent breaks a rule and causes ineligibility for a player, they should suspend his (agent’s) license for a year or two,” Saban told ESPN.com. “I’m about ready for college football to say, ‘Let’s just throw the NFL out. Don’t let them evaluate players. Don’t let them talk to players. Let them do it at the combine.’ If they are not going to help us, why should we help them?”

The Alabama situation grew out of an NCAA investigation of North Carolina players Marvin Austin and Greg Little for improper involvement with sports agents. And this comes after Dez Bryant, who turned professional out of Oklahoma State, was suspended by NCAA for 10 games in 2009 for lying about his relationship with former NFL star Deion Sanders.

Then there was John Wall of Kentucky, the first pick in the NBA draft, who was suspended for two games in college for an improper relationship with a registered but non-practicing agent, who also was coach of his AAU travel team.

In case you miss the point, agents have become the enemy of college sports.

They come bearing gifts, money, clothing and jewelry and parties with lots of pretty women, all the kinds of things that can lure young, healthy athletic collegians into their camp. While agents are supposed to be in the role of advisors and negotiators to get the best for their clients, they work with kids who have no advisor outside of the college coaches and administration in an effort to lure them with offers that are illegal and, in the spirit of college athletics, immoral and unethical.

There are now voices being heard to change this, Saban wanting to ban the NFL if it doesn’t rein in the agents. Others, like Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk.com wants the NFL and NBA to suspend players who took benefits in college, bringing on sanctions to the schools.

See, the problem is that none of that really affects the agents. The NFL scouting gets hurt, which may hurt a player who has done nothing wrong, if their scouts are banned as Saban wants. Agents get hurt only in that a player who is suspended by the professional league will not be earning any more money, but he will have taken his share of the bonus and whatever equipment or manufacturing deals they may have negotiated.

Perhaps the most shocking, at least to the college institutions, proposal is to do away with the sham of amateurism that exists in college athletics and find a way to pay the players enough so that the temptation of the agents’ lures is eliminated.

Sham? Certainly, amateurism is a sham when you have head coaches making $4 million or more, assistant coaches making from $250,000 to $500,000, when you have budgets of $50 million to $120 million for college athletics.

In reality, the players are already being paid through scholarships, room and board, meals and books. We’re just talking about the degree to which they are to be paid.

But to have as much money involved in college athletics, through the conferences, through the NCAA, through the television networks and the coaches and administration and have none of it filter down to the real stars of the show, the players, that is where the real weakness in the system lies.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.