Down in Tallahassee, it's tough to say whether Florida State should be penalized for what appears to be blatant academic cheating by athletes and the people who were were overseeing them or sheer stupidity.

You might recall that just before the Seminoles football team had to play in the Music City Bowl against Kentucky, it was revealed that dozens of Florida State football players would be ineligible to play because of a cheating scandal involving an online music course for non-music majors. To be fair, this cheating business apparently cuts across sports categories so it's not just football players involved here.

The latest news is that the Florida State president, T.K. Wetherell, is blaming folks running the athletic department at the time for trying to do damage control, rather than being absolutely forthcoming as a long investigation unpeeled this onion.

But what I think most people would find fascinating is how utterly senseless the cheating really was.

Let's start with the bottom line.  The questions for the tests given in this music course DID NOT CHANGE from semester to semester.

This from the mouth of Wetherell in an Orlando Sun-Sentinel article:  "Everybody had it.  The whole university had it, quite frankly."

And you know what? That was not a violation of university rules for kids to study the tests before taking the tests, the president added.  "No violation of the honor code, nothing like that," he said.

But even with that perfectly legal slam-dunk opportunity to pass the course available to them, students were still shouting out answers during test-taking, the president said. Once, an athletic tutor shouted out answers during the examination.  "That's a violation of NCAA rules right there," Wetherell said.  Really?

The guy who created the course said it wasn't entirely true that the tests didn't change from semester to semester.  There was a pool of 60 or 70  questions and from that pool, 40 were picked by a computer. OK, so it was a matter of students collecting a handful of previous tests to have nearly every question, plus the answers, prior to taking an exam. And they were so lazy, they STILL had to cheat.