You have to credit Kansas State athletic director Tim Weiser for being a stand-up guy.

During halftime of Saturday’s Notre Dame-Michigan football game, NBC-TV aired a feature trumpeting how 13 of the schools in college football’s Top 25 gave course credit for participation in football.

Only two of those 13 schools’ athletic directors agreed to on-camera interviews. One was Weiser.

“The reason I agreed to do the interview,” Weiser told me, “is because it’s not an issue we have control over. It’s a faculty issue. It’s been this way for 50 or 60 years.”

K-State, Weiser said, also gives course credit to members of its marching band, debate team, ROTC cadets, etc.

In late August, The Washington Post published a story that caused a firestorm in academia by revealing that 36 of the NCAA’s 117 Division I-A football schools awarded credit for football participation.

Of those 36 schools, the Post chose Kansas State for the lead, reporting that during the 2003 fall semester, 69 Kansas State football players enrolled in coach Bill Snyder’s course — ATHM 104.

The Post obtained documents from Kansas State through state open records laws that showed only one of the 69 players enrolled in the class failed to receive one credit hour toward his academic degree, and all but four received grades of A.

Moreover, records showed last spring 91 players enrolled in the course, including many who were repeating the class, and Snyder awarded 84 of them the highest letter grade.

Weiser told me two other Big 12 Conference schools also give course credit for football, but he declined to identify them. One is Nebraska. The Post reported NU as one of the 36. The other school is not Kansas. KU gives one hour credit for weight-training on a pass-fail basis, but that’s it.

A few of the other schools mentioned in the Post story were USC, Brigham Young, Florida State, Georgia, Ohio State and Penn State. Maybe that’s why Joe Paterno hasn’t retired. Perhaps Joe Pa loves teaching football courses too much.

With so many high-powered college football programs giving credit for football, it makes you wonder why Kansas State was the focus of the Post’s story. Sure, K-State is a national player, but hardly on the same level with such traditional powers as Florida State, Ohio State and USC.

Weiser doesn’t know, but he suspects a possible backlash.

“I know the media doesn’t have warm and fuzzy feelings for Bill Snyder,” he said, “so there might be some getting back at a coach who won’t let them know about his program.”

Then again, perhaps K-State was singled out because no program in the history of college football has ascended from rock bottom to the top echelon so quickly.

Kansas State’s meteoric rise surely hasn’t been hurt by its participation-for-credit policy, that’s for sure, nor by its willingness to accept junior-college credits that many other schools — like KU — throw out.

While the NCAA does everything it can to level the playing field outside the classroom, it has no control over academics, nor should it. Scholastics will always be a crazy quilt of the arcane, the mundane and the obscure. One’s school’s English 101 may be another school’s remedial English. One school’s zoology may be another’s animal husbandry.

It should be noted, too, that while many of the schools do not allow credits from participation courses to count toward degree requirements, Kansas State does. But only in agriculture, arts and sciences, business administration and human ecology. KSU’s education school allows two credits, but K-State’s engineering school won’t accept any.

So, in the final analysis, academics isn’t really a school matter. It’s a case of schools within schools.

All in all, as much negative publicity as K-State has received over the Post article and the NBC treatment, you might suspect an upsurge in Weiser’s voice mail and e-mail.

“I’ll be honest. I haven’t had any feedback from anybody on campus,” Weiser said. “I’ve heard a lot more about our loss to Fresno State last week, a whole lot more.”