St. Louis ? Inside the athletic department at Missouri, administrators are doing a different kind of scoreboard watching these days.

They’re counting up the number of NCAA rules violations rolled up by the men’s basketball program under head coach Quin Snyder.

If all of the NCAA’s new allegations (at least 40) against the Missouri basketball program are true, it would raise the total number of infractions to well over 50 since Snyder was hired in April 1999. Before this latest round of charges, Snyder and staff already had committed 16 violations.

I believe that breaking the rules more than 50 times in five seasons constitutes a disturbing pattern. Tuesday in Columbia, Snyder solemnly stated he would take full responsibility for this most recent blotter of alleged transgressions.

But just how is Snyder taking responsibility?

He didn’t resign. Now that would be taking responsibility.

Instead, assistant coach Lane Odom fell on the sword for Snyder and resigned. And Missouri administrators won’t renew the contract of another assistant, Tony Harvey, who is on unpaid leave over his role in the latest tawdry episode.

Again: How is Snyder taking responsibility? Going along with the scapegoating of assistant coaches hardly demonstrates strong leadership.

It’s the easy way out.

If Odom and Harvey are gone, Snyder should go, too. And that would really demonstrate a willingness to hold himself accountable.

Surely, Snyder can’t be trying to tell us that taking responsibility means that his program FINALLY will learn the rules and opt to obey them. It’s not as if Snyder is a newbie, unfamiliar with the NCAA rulebook, or incapable of understanding it. He graduated from Duke, ran the Duke offense, and trained in the Duke way. He was an assistant to legendary Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, a beacon of integrity.

And though some Missouri fans sneer at the 40-plus allegations — some, laughably, have even suggested that Missouri was “exonerated” by the NCAA — at least Snyder has the stomach to admit otherwise. He’s not a lost soul.

“Every one of these things, in my mind, is major,” Snyder said Tuesday. “We take all of these things very seriously.” Problem is, Snyder wasn’t serious enough earlier in his career at Mizzou, when he could have taken preventive measures to curtail the likelihood of more ethical lapses. You can’t convince me that Snyder was oblivious to the activities of his assistants. It’s his job, his duty, to pay attention to them. Yes, an inexperienced head coach can make mistakes. But Snyder already made NCAA mistakes — 16 of them before this messy business with renegade recruit Ricky Clemons.

If Snyder needed to learn a lesson — and I don’t believe he did, given his intelligence and his Duke pedigree — then he truly should have cleaned up his program after those first 16 rules infractions. But he didn’t. The pattern of violations, neglect or poor judgment continued.

Why did Snyder even engage in the mercenary-coach activity of recruiting a shady character like Clemons?

Snyder always was touting his program’s ethical standards and higher virtues, but hustled to pursue a problem person to fill the need at point guard.