My advice and 30 cents will get you a cup of coffee at one of our office machines. So if Kansas University gets zapped hard for its various NCAA athletic transgressions, I’ll give you back the 30 cents.

The current KU sports furor is nothing to be sneezed at, particularly that zinger about “lack of institutional control.” Whether such crime emanates with chancellor Robert Hemenway, athletic director Lew Perkins or any of the coaches or boosters, it must be addressed forcefully. All the ducks must be on the pond in prim and proper order, immediately if not sooner.

KU seems to have exercised some initiative. Trying hard, intellectually and financially, to patch holes in the ship and prevent new ones could work to KU’s advantage. I see no ax murders or serial killings on the list in this latest debacle.

It’s hard to see, as some do, anything like postseason bans, lifting of scholarships or severe recruiting restrictions. But I’ve been wrong before; maybe there’s a lot more than we know suspended below this looming iceberg.

You look at the truly serious banditry that has occurred at places like holier-than-though Baylor, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma and other Big 12 schools where some new shoes are yet to drop. KU’s miscreants don’t exactly come off as BTK killers. There have been far too many cases of fools meeting and making bad decisions. But we have nothing close to the Baylor murder mess or the chancellor-and-spouse involvement with renegade Rickey Clemons at Missouri.

The 14-year, laissez-faire KU athletic department operation by the low-key and high-principled Bob Frederick lacked the thrust of supervision that could have headed off some problems. Basketball coach Roy Williams built an unhealthy power base, control of which Frederick seemed to lose near the end. Chancellor Hemenway let football coach Glen Mason renege on his Georgia job shift in 1995. Frederick stayed home from a bowl game and might have hired Dennis Franchione but for the Hemen-Haw.

So KU gambled on ill-equipped Terry Allen, a heavy choice of Roy Williams, and saw its football program deteriorate. In came athletic director Al Bohl for a two-year train wreck that hastened Williams’ flight to his beloved Carolina after pal Allen was booted. Can you imagine KU paid $75,000 to a consultant to help “find” Bohl?

Bohl managed to hire Mark Mangino, but it took Drue Jennings and the likes of Rich Konzem and Doug Vance to get Bill Self for basketball. All the while a departmental analysis by Stanford saint Ted Leland, which cost about another $75,000, was virtually ignored by Bohl. His idea was to make money by spending less. New man Perkins’ notion is to spend more to make more. He quickly hired scads of well-paid people to do things like improve “institutional control.” KU should expect nothing less from a $605,000-a-year man.

Perkins and Co. need to be as good at their jobs as their salary-benefit packages would indicate. They have been scratching and clawing to make things right. Considering how they can raise money and orchestrate other events, they could produce some saving graces to prevent punitive disaster.

I’m betting on Lew and the gang to lighten the blows from the NCAA hammer. After all, isn’t that the kind of thing they and the chancellor are so well-paid for?