George Kimball America at LargeThis past Monday, less than a week after Kobe Bryant reached a multi-million dollar settlement with the victim of his alleged Colorado rape, the parties in a somewhat less salacious civil matter agreed to an even larger tribute in which Rick Neuheisel, the disgraced University of Washington football coach, walked away with $4.5 million.

In Bryant's case the principal goal for both sides - silence - was successfully achieved. The reputation of the Los Angeles Lakers' All-Star guard, who had already lost over $100 million in endorsement fees as a result of his indiscretion, might have sustained even further damage, and the brokered arrangement meant that the victim was spared the prospect of being required to testify about her own sexual history.

Neuheisel's civil suit, on the other hand, had already played out for the better part of a month in a Kent, Washington, courtroom, and, since all of the principals had testified, we were left with a pretty clear impression of who was lying.

Everybody.

The laws of the land are one thing, the laws of the National Collegiate Athletic Association quite another. The NCAA employs its own investigative bureau and functions as its own judiciary, depending on the extent of the perceived infraction, meting out punishments ranging from the loss of scholarships to bans on post-season play to, in extreme cases, the imposition of the "death penalty," in which the sports programme of a member institution may be shut down altogether.

While it remains difficult to feel sorry for a character like Neuheisel, it is difficult to argue with the proposition that the NCAA sometimes functions as if it were a law unto itself, exempt from the provisions of the US constitution. So after Neuheisel was dismissed from his position at Washington, his lawyers adopted what retrospectively appears to have been a brilliant strategy in filing their wrongful-dismissal suit.

In addition to suing Washington, Neuheisel sued the NCAA.

The principal infractions which resulted in Neuheisel being fired on the eve of the 2003 football season seem almost petty. He participated in a high-stakes Calcutta pool in which he managed for two years running to correctly pick the winner of the NCAA basketball tournament, and he actively negotiated with at least one and possibly three NFL teams about coaching vacancies while he was still under contract to Washington.

In both instances he lied both to the university administration and to the press, protesting his innocence and coming clean only when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Over the next week almost everyone in America will fill out their bracket sheet and take a flyer in a friendly NCAA basketball pool, but most of them won't be employees of institutions of higher learning, and for most of them the stake won't be $5,000.

Of course, playing the pool wasn't what brought the NCAA down on Neuheisel. Winning it was. After the coach's cartel hit the Jackpot for the second year on the trot, the NCAA office received an anonymous tip (which doubtless originated with a disgruntled losing participant in the same pool) and was shortly hot on the coach's heels. In pursuing their quarry, however, NCAA investigators pretended that they were chasing down reports of minor recruiting violations.

NCAA investigator David Price said in his testimony: "We're certainly not required, nor do we normally tell people we're going to interview, about all the areas we want to talk about." But as it turned out, the NCAA's own bylaws should have required him to inform Neuheisel that he was a target of a gambling probe.

Accounts of Neuheisel's cloak-and-dagger trip to California to interview for the 49ers job in February of 2003 were downright comical. Spellbound jurors heard the coach describe how he followed a bellboy through an elaborate sequence of fire escapes and service elevators at a San Francisco hotel in order to evade a phalanx of reporters waiting in the lobby. He then exited out the back door and into a waiting car, which whisked him away to his meeting with 49ers general manager Terry Donohue, owner John York, and team executive Bill Walsh.

Upon arriving back at the airport for his flight back to Seattle, Neuheisel used his mobile phone to call home and tell his parents and wife that he was unlikely to accept the $3 million San Francisco offer. Unbeknownst to him, Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist John Levesque overheard the entire conversation.

When Levesque subsequently confronted Neuheisel about the 49ers offer, the coach produced a golf ball from his pocket and explained that he was only in San Francisco to play golf with a few old college buddies.

The newspaperman, obviously, knew better, and wrote as much. Although the University cited Neuheisel's improper behaviour in his dalliance with the 49ers in its bill of particulars when it fired him, the trial made it clear that the administration was very much aware of the job offer. With the NCAA facing the prospect of having the gambling aspect of its probe stricken because it had flaunted its own regulations, the parties huddled over the weekend and came to Monday's less than Solomonic decision.

Neuheisel walked away with $4.5 million, including attorney's fees and costs. Washington will absorb $500,000 of the hit, in addition to forgiving an outstanding $1.5 million outstanding loan. The NCAA will have to pony up the rest.

You'd have to say that Neuheisel has burned his bridges when it comes to college football, but that's the least of his worries right now. He already has a job next season - as the quarterbacks coach for the Baltimore Ravens. He'll be the richest assistant coach in the NFL.