Hurricane Earl zipped up the East Coast with great destructive power from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod. And like many such Atlantic September weekend hurricanes of the past, Earl may have disrupted some high school Friday football games along the Eastern seaboard plus the opening games of the 2010 college football season from the Carolinas to New England.

But one game postponed or delayed at a few Eastern colleges is hardly a tragic happening when you consider all the real damage this humongous storm was capable of inflicting.

I covered many a college game years ago played in the Northeast as a hurricane went by with violent winds, heavy rains and downed communication wires. I saw punts go 30 yards back over the heads of the kickers trying to punt into a 60 to 70 m.p.h. wind. But in the long run, nobody involved in the games or the sports programs at those -colleges suffered a twit from such bad weather. The next Saturday those athletes probably played in hot, bright sunshine and calm winds.

There will always be early fall hurricanes, and when they strike on Saturday, they can ruin a -football game. But I always felt the -athletes had a barrel of fun in those windy encounters and -certainly have windy stories to tell their grand children.

Something else that is also unfortunately an ever-present threat to the college football programs of many colleges and universities has already impacted this 2010 season as it started this weekend. That is the corrupt collusion of coach, athletic director and president of some institutions that has brought great shame and disgrace upon such schools as Southern California.

I include the presidents or CEOs of these institutions since they sit at that desk that Harry Truman so rightfully pointed to when he said, "The buck stops here." Coaches, athletic directors and presidents are the responsible parties when an athletic program goes awry.

In the case of the Southern California Trojans, the coach, Pete Carroll, skipped town before the sheriff arrived. The Trojans' athletic director, Mike Garrett, was replaced by the highly-respected Pat Haden last month and the new president, C. L. Max Nikias, -succeeded Steven B. Sample last month. Sort of a complete house cleaning that was long overdue.

One of the problems left behind in the wake of this mess in the City of Angels was that last winter Garrett, with the obvious consent of President Sample, plucked Coach Lane Kiffin away from the University of Tennessee, where the former assistant to Carroll at Southern California had been the head coach for only 14 months.

Kiffin, an apparently polished con man, promised great things at Tennessee, took critical pot shots at opposing coaches and ran off from Knoxville to Los Angeles leaving a tangled pile of trash in the form of a major NCAA investigation concerning recruiting practices. Three of his young recruits were -dismissed from the Tennessee team after being arrested for armed -robbery.

But Kiffin takes over coaching a football program that is now on probation and will not be eligible for a bowl game for two years as a result of one of the heaviest -penalties levied on a major -university athletic program in decades. The NCAA put a -postseason ban on Southern Cal football and basketball programs -- two years for football and one year for basketball. Also, each sport was penalized by major reductions in athletic scholarships.

Southern California football has been among the very elite and most successful teams for many decades going way back into the 20th -century. The highly-regarded Trojans' basketball program played for years in the shadow of the very successful cross town UCLA under John Wooden.

The problems for each program came about when one superstar on each squad was accused of accepting cash and other impressive gifts from agents who -wanted to handle those stars when they turned professional. Each of these young athletes, Reggie Bush in football and O.J. Mayo in basketball, is now playing in the NFL and NBA, respectively.

Reggie Bush, a spectacular running back who plays for the Super Bowl -champion New Orleans Saints nowadays, won the 2005 Heisman Trophy to become the seventh Southern Cal player to earn this college football player of the year award. Mike Garrett, who was a halfback, was the first Trojan to win a Heisman Trophy when he took the 1965 award.

Pat Hayden, a former Rhodes Scholar and Southern Cal quarterback, is a member of the university's Board of Trustees and also an NBC college football analyst. I know him and have a great deal of respect for him as do all folks in the sports world.

One of his first moves as the new AD at Southern Cal was to return the Heisman Trophy to the Heisman Trophy Foundation, meaning that Southern Cal now has but six Heisman Trophies. Notre Dame again leads the world in Heismans with seven.

The Football Writers Association of America, of which I am a member and a former president, convened a special committee of 20 current and former officers who voted unanimously to revoke the Grantland Rice Trophy the FWAA awarded to Southern California in 2004 for winning the "National Championship" of college football.

Although I was not among those former officers on that committee, I fully agree with the action of this group.

Never before has either one of these very prestigious awards been taken away from an institution. The Heisman Trophy is 76 years old and the Grantland Rice Trophy is 57 years old.

Many other colleges and universities have problems within their athletic programs. It behooves them to shape up.

I am thinking of the highly respected University of North Carolina, where the NCAA is conducting an investigation into whether or not a couple of Tar Heel football players received special treatment from agents.

Then along comes another NCAA investigation into Carolina academic -difficulties involving an -athletic department tutor who worked with football players.

In the first punitive step resulting from these investigations, 13 football players, or one-fifth of the Tar Heels' travel team, were suspended before North Carolina left Chapel Hill to play LSU in Atlanta Saturday night.

In its severe criticism of the Southern Cal -program that led to the probation penalties, the NCAA put most of the blame on what it commonly refers to as "institutional control."

That means the coach, the -athletic director and the president were, in the NCAA's way of thinking, the reason things got out of -control. Let's hope those three folks at North Carolina did not lose -"institutional control".

Otherwise they could be hit, and rightfully so, with additional NCAA penalties that will make Hurricane Earl seem like a zephyr.

Gordon White served 43 years as a sports reporter at The New York Times. His e-mail is sports@thepilot.com.