You knew Kansas University chancellor Robert Hemenway was a big wheel in the NCAA, didn’t you?

Hemenway is chair of the NCAA Division One Board of Governors, a highfalutin way of saying he runs the meetings — and will through 2005 — when university presidents and chancellors gather to discuss how to control the runaway train that is big-time college football.

Or as Tulsa University president Bob Lawless, another NCAA potentate, recently told the NCAA News in too many words: “I would say at this point in time that is not accurate to say that the presidents are in control of football — certainly not postseason football.”

In college athletics, if you can’t control it, you can’t make any money from it. If the NCAA didn’t have its men’s basketball tournament, for example, it wouldn’t be able to afford to have conventions every January in warm-weather spots like Anaheim, Calif.

Is it just a coincidence the three most powerful men in the NCAA today are associated with schools where men’s basketball dominates and football struggles?

New NCAA executive director Myles Brand comes from Indiana where basketball is a state religion and football is a stepchild. Lawless, chair of the NCAA Executive Committee, comes from Tulsa where the Hurricane basketball team plays in a splendid new arena and the football team toils in an antiquated stadium. Hemenway comes from Kansas and, well … you know all about Kansas.

Is it also a coincidence that Lawless and Hemenway were the only Division One members of the five-person search committee that chose Brand to succeed the retiring Cedric Dempsey as grand poobah of the Indianapolis-based college bureaucracy?

Maybe I’m wrong, but it looks to me like the NCAA is practicing collusion and blocking chancellors or presidents associated with big-time college football from assuming positions of power.

By all measurements, anyway, Hemenway is a renaissance man most of the membership covets as a leader. A populist, an idealist and a scholar, Hemenway has never wavered from his commitment to students since coming to Mount Oread in 1995.

“It’s easy to forget,” Hemenway said the other night at the NCAA Convention, “as athletics gets so big and there is so much money involved why we got involved in college athletics in the first place — the purity and integrity of the game and the students who play the game.”

Money talks, though, and too often purity and integrity walk.

Allen Fieldhouse is a classic example. Once upon a time the only sign you could find in the Jayhawks’ hallowed basketball arena read EXIT. Now Allen Fieldhouse resembles an indoor mall with commercial signs standing over every entry, flipping on the scoreboard and streaming from end zone to end zone in front of press row on the east side.

Is Hemenway a hypocrite for allowing Allen Fieldhouse to become so addicted to the dollar? Or is it beyond his control?

I wonder how many major college basketball arenas are as crassly commercial as Allen Fieldhouse. Many NBA venues are. Some college facilities — Indiana University’s Assembly Hall comes to mind — are just the opposite. They’re advertisement free.

The argument for maintaining the status quo in Allen Fieldhouse is that the athletic department has become so dependent on the revenue it can’t afford to remove the signs, that finding an alternative source of income would be virtually impossible.

Then again, it could be worse. It may not be long before major universities, like the pros, sell the naming rights of their football stadiums and basketball arenas, saying they hate to do it but they need the money desperately to fund Olympic sports and to comply with Title IX.

That’s not to say it’s probable Allen Fieldhouse will someday become Megacorp Arena, but it’s possible. And once it’s done there will be no turning back. A new revenue source, like a new tax, immediately becomes an eternal revenue source.

Still, Hemenway and the other members of the NCAA hierarchy seem committed to trying to stem the tide of the commercialization of college athletics. If history is an indicator, though, they may not have enough fingers to put in the dike.