The Fresno State men's basketball program doesn't center just on Jerry Tarkanian, the former coach. And it's not just about sleazy street agents or ill-intentioned fans or unscrupulous players looking for the easiest path to the basketball court or the nearest rice bowl.

Too bad.

Because if that was as far as the predictable concentric circles of trouble surrounding Tarkanian's basketball program went, the self-imposed penalties Fresno State offered as penance -- a one-year postseason ban, two years of probation and three scholarships -- might be enough to satiate the NCAA.

But it's probably not.

A wicked combination -- the breadth of the allegations and the powerful positions of the people who allegedly committed many of the infractions -- makes it likely the sanctions will grow.

And one more postseason ban isn't just a worst-case scenario, but a highly possible one. The bigger surprise will be if it doesn't happen.

Fresno State finds itself in the rare Yahtzee of trouble. Some schools have just academic fraud. Some have athletes accepting money. Some have local businesses providing free goods and services.

Fresno State rolled 'em all.

It held improper practices. It had players certified as eligible when they shouldn't have been. It offered financial aid to players not eligible to receive it. All according to the NCAA.

Almost any transgression you have heard about at other schools allegedly happened right here. It's pretty impressive, really, but in a sad, demented way.

Just how the NCAA makes Fresno State pay for all this is uncertain. It has seemed fairly lenient to some schools recently (Minnesota men's basketball, with academic-fraud issues of its own) and a tad harsh on others (Cal football, where self-imposed sanctions were laughed at, then multiplied by about 116).

Several factors work against Fresno State. One is Tarkanian, a longtime NCAA nemesis. Another is new NCAA president Myles Brand, espousing his mantra of putting the "student" back in "student-athlete." Nailing Fresno State for academic fraud would hammer home that message.

The biggest factor, of course, is the vast list of alleged infractions themselves.

The most frightening part to all of this for Fresno State and its fans is not that something illicit could happen with Tarkanian as coach. As if no one saw that coming.

It's that other people at Fresno State -- people in positions of some power -- allegedly knew almost every one of those rules was being broken. Just as inexplicably, there was an odd habit of not reporting the incidents to anyone who mattered, according to the NCAA.

That double whammy -- a lack of following rules, plus not reporting it when it's caught -- could lead to a double whammy from the NCAA come penalty time.

It's called a lack of institutional control, and the NCAA uses the term often in its letter of inquiry (basically, a list of the allegations). Fresno State had a lack of control "demonstrated by its pattern of athletics administrators not taking sufficient actions to report to the NCAA violations of legislation in its men's basketball program," one part of the letter reads.

It's one thing to let a few bad guys infiltrate your program. It's quite another to have the list of bad guys include "administrators" who should have known better -- people with state-university salaries paid for by taxpayers, people purportedly working with the school's interest ahead of their own, people in the right place to shape young minds.

People who did the wrong thing.

There was a university vice president, Ben Quillian, not reporting in 1995 that players were getting free meals from a restaurant.

There was an athletic director, Al Bohl, not reporting it when Quillian told him about the meals two years later, and not doing anything, apparently, to find out about or report the myriad infractions going on around him.

There was a compliance officer, Jon Fagg, failing to report financial-aid mistakes.

There was an academic adviser, Katie Felten, arranging to have papers written for players.

Those are just some of the allegations from the NCAA. They pinpoint people who should have known better.

They also pinpoint, you might notice, people who no longer work for the university. Some argue that Fresno State shouldn't be penalized for the actions of people who no longer are there.

But there isn't a better solution. Not penalizing the institution at all is a worse one, because then there's no incentive to clean up the mess or run a clean program. Besides, Fresno State has been rewarded, and continues to be rewarded, simply because those people have gone away.

It's moot. The NCAA doesn't care where people are now. It cares only about what they did at the school back then.

And what people did will prove costly soon enough.

NCAA investigators, Tarkanian and Fresno State officials will gather in a Kansas City, Mo., hotel ballroom Saturday to discuss and argue the facts and allegations.

The final penalty from the NCAA infractions committee will come later in the summer.

When it does, blame Tarkanian for the embarrassment caused by the university so far. It was predictable.

But when the NCAA whacks Fresno State with more penalties, perhaps including another postseason ban, also blame the people who were trusted and paid to do the right thing -- and didn't.

That's the part nobody predicted.