The drumbeat of college football scandals just got louder with some serious allegations being leveled against the Miami Hurricanes football program. Yahoo! Sports broke the story and followed up with more analysis, and this thing could be pretty big.

In one sense, none of this is surprising. As we’ve said many times, college football players are squeezed by the current system and there are too many temptations for them to cash in on benefits when they don’t have their own spending money. We’ve seen it in the tattoo scandal at Ohio Sate and the potential suit scandal at Alabama. The NCAA needs to reform the rules.

This crap happens everywhere. The deciding factor is simply proof available to the NCAA. With Ohio State, they had an FBI sting that produced the memorabilia that was central to the scandal. So far in Alabama there are tons of photos produced by sites like SPORTSbyBROOKS. We’ll see where that goes.

Here in Miami things might be even worse, as a rogue booster named Nevin Shapiro is in prison. He’s pissed off and he seems determined to take down the Miami football program. Thus the problem – if he can provide proof, Miami is in huge trouble. Some of the allegations are pretty tough as he’s saying he also provided prostitutes to the players.

The NCAA needs to be careful here. If they go off on these programs with massive sanctions, you might end up with a revolt as other schools will realize that this is happening everywhere on some level. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Meanwhile, the officials in Miami need to get on top of this asap.

The biggest problem facing the NCAA is the myth of amateurism in college sports. With the Internet, 24-hour cable channels, and now social media, the activities of “student athletes” is now much more open to scrutiny.

In their losing battle to monitor and control these college kids, the NCAA is chasing down some ridiculous “problems.” Check out their recent allegations against North Carolina:

Last week the NCAA found that from February through June 2010, the university “did not adequately and consistently monitor social networking activity that visibly illustrated potential amateurism violations within the football program, which delayed the institution’s discovery and compounded the provision of impermissible benefits.”

The statement included an NCCA request for “copies of materials posted on Twitter by football student-athletes. … Furthermore, the NCAA is requesting information regarding the institution’s efforts to monitor the social networking activity of football student-athletes.”

So the NCAA is now seeking to become a social networking assassin of its own. Or should I say it is just playing another variation of its familiar role of assassin, as the NCAA is often in the business of search and destroy, usually of its own making.

Following the Ohio State tattoo fiasco and the emerging story of Alabama players potentially getting suits, the NCAA is setting itself up for repeated failure by expecting their athletes to avoid all temptation. They need to loosen the rules, and they need to consider letting athletes earn money on outside activities.

Ohio State lost its coach and best player as a result of a scandal stemming from tattoos. That story seems to be winding down, but we shouldn’t be surprised to hear about potential scandals at other schools where players are trading signed memorabilia for stuff.

In Alabama, it looks like the players might be partial to suits over tattoos. Outkick the Coverage is tracking this story, and they have photos of Julio Jones wearing 10 different suits as he walks into Alabama games. It’s still early, but let’s see if the NCAA gets involved.

Until the NCAA changes the way it does business, these scandals will start popping up all over the place.

UPDATE: Brooks digs into the story and uncovers more information and photos, including information about Mark Ingram.