If there was still such a thing as “academic integrity” in big-time college sports, the NCAA would give Florida State an ultimatum: Get rid of Bobby Bowden or get the death penalty. It should make no difference that Bowden is the current record-holder for career victories in what should be called The Overemphasis Division. He should never again have the opportunity to embarrass college football.

Of course, that’s assuming that anybody in big-time college football still has the capacity to be embarrassed. Long ago, the university presidents sold out their principles and went over to the dark side. Correct me if I’m wrong, but has even one president stepped up and called Florida State’s most recent scandal a disgrace? I mean, where’s the outrage?

After the season, when it was learned that 36 Seminoles would be held out of the Music City Bowl game against Kentucky because of their participation in a bogus online music-history course. FSU President T.K. Wetherell should have immediately told the Music City Bowl to find a replacement for the Seminoles. They had not earned a post-season reward because they had cheated academically during the season.

When Wetherell declined to do the right thing, the bowl committee should have done it for him and uninvited the Seminoles. It would have been easy to find a scandal-free replacement. And when the bowl committee did little more than clear their throats and look the other way, ESPN should have pulled the game from its bowl package and refused to televise it.

Instead, the Florida State team, or what’s left of it, is in Nashville to play UK without the 36 miscreants. This unprecedented mess has turned the game into a bad TV sitcom. And guess what? The joke is on Kentucky. If the Wildcats win, it will be because Florida State didn’t have half its team. If the Wildcats lose, it’ll give the ESPN commentators material for a month.

UK and Coach Rich Brooks deserve better than this. The Wildcats achieved their 7-5 record with athletes who were actually going to real classes and making their grades. UK doesn’t have a single player who’s academically ineligible for the bowl game. But that important fact is lost in the chatter about Florida State’s cheaters.

Most amazing of all is Bowden’s Teflon quality. Nothing has ever stuck to him for long. The same apparently will be true of the most recent scandal.

Since the 1980s, Florida State players have been involved in so many altercations that the Seminoles’ rivals began calling them the “Criminoles.” As one sign had it, “You can’t spell ‘felon’ without n-o-l-e.”

In the early ‘90s, when former Seminoles Peter Warrick and Laveranues Coles went on an illegal shopping spree in a Tallahassee Dillard’s store, Steve Spurrier, then at Florida, dubbed FSU “Free Shoes University.”

And let’s not even go through the police blotter of arrests during the Bowden era at Florida State, except to say that a multitude of players have been charged with all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors. But the university’s administrators turned their heads because Bowden was raking in wins and cash – and wins and cash is all that matters in big-time college sports. Remember that the next time somebody starts to drag out the threadbare old arguments about “amateur” sports.

Inevitably, when under fire, Saint Bobby uses the Father Flanagan Defense.

“I feel sorry for them (the errant players),” he once said. “Who is going to help them if we coaches don’t? We’re the closest thing to a father these kids will ever have. I was told that ‘Daddy’ was the greatest one word that a young man could have.”

Yeah, especially when it’s preceded by “Sugar,” which is how overly generous boosters are characterized.

The media’s hands aren’t clean, either. Because Bowden is a charming, folksy sort who plays up to the media, he hasn’t been held to the same standard as, say, another coaching icon named Bobby. We’re talking, of course, about Bobby Knight, the Texas Tech basketball coach who became a legend during 29 stormy seasons at Indiana.

About all that Football Bobby and Basketball Bobby have in common is that each is the all-time career victories leader in his sport. Unlike Football Bobby, Basketball Bobby always has run a clean program that stresses academics.

But where the media always has been willing to let their buddy, Football Bobby, off the hook, Basketball Bobby gets hammered every time he screws up, at least partly because he has made no attempt to hide his contempt for the media.

Can you imagine what the media would be doing if Basketball Bobby had half his team declared ineligible for academic cheating? Oh, my. The knights of the keyboard would be beside themselves with outrage and indignation.

But Football Bobby? Here’s your free pass, Coach Bowden. Just keep the folksy quotes coming.

How you answer the following questions will reveal much about yourself: Which Bobby has been the greater embarrassment to his sport? Which Bobby has made the greater contribution? Which Bobby would you rather coach your son?

Many coaches have been fired for transgressions far less serious that the current academic mess at Florida State. If the FSU president had any class, he would have suspended Bowden for the Music City Bowl and asked his Board of Trustees to void the lifetime contract it awarded Bowden a decade or so ago.

So what if Bowden would sue the university for breach of contract? Big deal. It wouldn’t take a Wall Street lawyer to prove that Bowden has failed to live up to the basic requirements of being a coach. Heck, Denny Crane could win this one.

At 78, Bowden has stayed far too long at the dance. But he shouldn’t be the only one to go. Wetherell, that absolute joke of a university president, should be given the bum’s rush, too. To have three dozen players – three dozen! — declared academically ineligible for a bowl game is to establish a new all-time low for lack of institutional control.

At this very moment, the NCAA should be dragging the death penalty out of the mothballs. Apparently that’s the only way to break up the culture of corruption that has existed at Florida State under Teflon Bobby.