The big and heavy anvil dropped from the NCAA sky and landed flush upon the head of the Syracuse community Friday.

After nearly a decade of investigations regarding multiple instances of running afoul of its rules, intercollegiate sports’ governing body released a 94-page report that ripped into Syracuse Univerity officials over that period of time and sent down its penalties that reached beyond this year’s self-imposed post-season ban for Coach Jim Boeheim’s men’s basketball team.

Way beyond that move, which already had set tongues in the university-centric community afire when the school announced that one.

Boeheim will be suspended from coaching the first nine Atlantic Coast Conference games next season, bad for next season’s squad. The university will be forced to negate wins in five seasons that it was found to have used ineligible players because of academic fraud. That will remove 108 victories from Boeheim’s career total of 966, dropping him from second on the NCAA’s all-time list to sixth. That’s awful for his legacy. The team will lose three scholarship for four seasons in a row, which won’t start until 2016-17 because high school athletes have already been offered scholarships for 2015-16. That will injure the program for years to come. The football team was also found to have used ineligble players for three seasons, starting in 2004, and was placed on five years probation.

Here’s the link to an extensive report from a team of reporters at syracuse.com, if you’d like to know more.

I tuned into CBS on my flat screen at noon Saturday with interest, wondering how this year’s team would react in its first game since the announcement and final game of this season.

It did not end well down in Raleigh for senior center Rakeem Christmas and mates as North Carolina State pulled away for a 71-57 victory.

Junior Trevor Cooney, nagged by back pain as well as this post-season ban these last several weeks, again did not shoot well as he and the rest of the Orange will retreat to watch or avoid watching the brotherhood of college players take part in the ACC Tournament and NCAA Tournament during the next month. It will be hard to avoid in Syracuse. The NCAA East Regional will bring four teams to the Carrier Dome in the bracket rounds leading to the Final Four.

After the penalties were announced, Syracuse University officials, including Chancellor Kent Syverud, disputed with the NCAA’s conclusion that its individual findings added to the conclusion that Boeheim was guilty of the big sin of failing to properly oversee his program during the past decade.

The university, and Boeheim, have two weeks to appeal the decision to the NCAA, which then would put the matter before a five-person panel with the final power to reduce the penalties.

That would indeed alleviate some of the sting.

But not the bruises or the stigma of what was included in that 94-page report. That, like the anvil to the head, can’t be taken away by any panel reversal that may come. So much, simply, was laid out in so much vivid detail, to sound so convincing. The athletic director, still working up there, got together a panel of staffers to strategize the best way to restore the athletic eligibilty of an athlete whose grades did not meet requirements. The resulting actions included the director of basketball operations and an important program receptionist rewriting a past paper for the player and getting a grade changed, indeed restoring his eligibility. The NCAA’s investigators said it was not the only instance. They had forensic evidence from the indiduals’ computers as proof. Also, a local YMCA staffer paid players too much and fudged internship records to keep their eligibility intact, and the YMCA fired and sued the employee in question over such practices. The university ignored its own substance abuse policy multiple times, mostly for marijuana use, saying the policy was unwieldy.

Boeheim has not spoken to the media since Friday, sending assistant (and head-coach-in-waiting) Mike Hopkins in his place after Saturday’s game. On Friday night, however, he released a statement saying he was “disappointed” in the findings in the report, including the fact that a worker vetted thoroughly by both the university and a trusted organization such as the YMCA would take such actions. The statement also cited “alleged academic violations.”

Boeheim, Orange football coach and athletic director Daryl Gross were among the Syracuse officials who explained their points of view before an NCAA committee in October.

Since Friday, I’ve been considering what I’ve heard on talk radio and TV shows and been reading online while gauging my own level of disappointment.

This is not the first instance of NCAA penalties coming down against the university in this city in which I live. The men’s basketball team was hit was a postseason ban two decades ago, and the men’s lacrosse team had to vacate a national championship a few years after that. At that time, I worked for the big daily, and some of the backlash in the city was directed at The Post-Standard reporters who wrote stories about the violations in the first place. I heard my share of “How could you do that to your hometown team?” around the bars and restaurants back then. That’s how loyal Syracuse University fans were. And are, two decades later, after Syracuse put new people into positions and pledged allegiance to compliance only to find itself in a similar pickle, with even stiffer penalties.

Now, there are plenty of people who are more angry at the NCAA than Syracuse University officials. The rules stink. The rules committee stinks. The investigators stink. The NCAA stinks.

There is indeed much about the guidelines and governance of college sports that leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve come down on the side of paying college athletes a work-study rate for practice and game time hours, in fact.

And yet, I can’t get past the fact that the NCAA is nothing more than a collective put together by all of these universities that hate it every time one of them gets hit by the anvil. Hey, university presidents and chancellors and way smart people, if you want a better way, invent it and implement it, already.

As it looks today, I think some sort of punishment is deserved, and what stands now sounds about right. And Boeheim in turn should have his chance to stay on the bench far and beyond to prove that guidance is indeed good and proper.

If Syracuse University and its basketball coach appeal these penalties and they’re reduced, that will be a good day for the Orange program. Right now, they say, our rules are in place, they won’t be broken, oversight is good.

We’ll see. Yes, from our season tickets for football, still.

Do you think college presidents need to lead sports down a better path for all? Would you blame the NCAA or Syracuse officials for these penalties? Are you getting tired of hearing about colleges getting flagged for breaking NCAA rules, and would that make you give up on following college sports?