They can’t think we’re this naive. The NCAA can’t shovel it and expect us to swallow and smile and give new chief Myles Brand a big, loud hurrah for his staunch stance on all that is wrong with college sports. The hypocrisy is hideous.

Washington football coach Rick Neuheisel was fired last week, less than a week after acknowledging that he took part in an NCAA men’s basketball tournament pool with some friends. Brand, the man best known for bringing down Bob Knight at Indiana, hovered above it all, practically forcing the Huskies into a sanctimonious firing by saying if he were the president of Washington, he’d “take personnel action.” Meanwhile, on its own side of town, the NCAA’s house is in disrepair.

The issue isn’t whether Neuheisel was right or wrong. The issue is the NCAA’s longstanding habit of sticking its nose in when it feels like it and conveniently forgetting its abhorrent policies that go unchallenged year after year.

Bet with friends — not a bookie, not Vegas — on Maryland winning the NCAA basketball tournament, and it’s Armageddon. Beat your wife, sexually harass your secretary, have a “relationship” with a student, or get a DUI, and the NCAA doesn’t sniff. But that’s only the beginning.

How can Brand and the NCAA legitimately spout a holier-than-thou attitude on gambling when academic fraud is the most glaring ghost in the closet? Gambling undermines sports programs; academic fraud destroys universities. Joe Freshman sweats out the SAT, thinking it will take 1,100 or so to get into State U. Yet NCAA rules allow football players to score 400 on the SAT and gain freshman eligibility, as long as they have a 3.55 grade-point average in 14 core high school classes. Here’s a little news for Mr. Brand: If an athlete scores 400 on the SAT, he likely has the intellect of a blowfish and can’t earn a 3.55 unless someone is cheating.

The NCAA allows athletes with subpar SATs into universities for one reason: They’re cheap labor. The sport’s governing body soothes its soul with the nonsensical notion that scholarships and special tutors and extending deadlines for classwork and the use of elite training facilities makes up for exploiting athletes it knows won’t graduate. A majority of the football and men’s basketball scholarships — more than 50 percent in the latest figures released by the NCAA — are essentially meaningless because the athletes don’t graduate.

Don’t believe the garbage that graduation rates for athletes are just under the rate of the student body. You want to compare apples and apples? Show me graduation numbers for students on full academic scholarship. I’m guessing those are in the 90th percentile. So why, as the watchdog for the institutions of higher learning, would the NCAA wink at academic fraud and continue to pump money into something when the return is less than 50 percent? Because the monetary return is 1,000 percent.

I’m not saying what Neuheisel did was right. But if the NCAA is guiding the ship with a moral compass, there needs to be continuity. Just last month, Brand said the NCAA has no business butting into the ACC’s raid of the Big East, which could eliminate five schools from the BCS race (read: loot). Two more bowl games were certified this offseason, even though the postseason is saturated with bowl games in half-full stadiums.

Academic fraud, cheap labor, vacillating virtue. And Rick Neuheisel gets nailed for betting with friends.

Stop the charade.