In handing down a two-year bowl ban to the University of Alabama football team, a resolute, almost indignant NCAA Committee on Infractions sent an unmistakable message that will no doubt reverberate in every corner of the country: It's back in business.

Compare penalties

As part of a three-day series on the NCAA's enforcement and infractions process, ESPN.com recently examined the penalties given to football teams since Southern Methodist was temporarily shut down in 1987 in the landmark "death penalty" case. Hit the links below to compare the Alabama penalties to those given to other teams that have been involved in major cases: Major cases since SMU: SEC | Big Ten | Pac-10 | Big 12 | ACC | WAC | Big East | C-USA | Others | By Year

Crimson Tide fans, justifiably, are shocked.

There was no reason to think the committee would pull out the whuppin' stick. Sure, this was the third time since 1995 that an Alabama team had been found with major violations. Sure, the allegations -- of large cash payments for prospects -- were on par with anything the Southern Methodist rowdies could come up with in the 1980s. Sure, the NCAA had the benefit of piggy-backing on an FBI investigation focusing on booster payments to Memphis high school coaches.

The bottom line was that for the past seven years, the committee had come up with every excuse not to use its once-feared hammer. Didn't want to hurt current players and coaches for the sins of former players and coaches. Didn't want to hold schools responsible for rogue boosters. Didn't want to come off as mean, vindictive.

So the law professors, conference commissioners and other members of this eight-person sanctioning body pulled out the feather duster on team after team -- Michigan State, Florida State, Mississippi State, Kansas State, Notre Dame, Southern Cal and Wisconsin among them.

Alabama's suggestion that it be penalized with scholarship cuts but no bowl ban oozed of cocky presumption, as if there was no way the committee had the guts anymore to knock a program -- much less the institution Bear Bryant built -- out of the postseason.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the next wrist slap.

The infractions committee, under new chair Tom Yeager, got tired of being mocked.

"The message is we're not kidding," Yeager said Friday in announcing the penalties. "If you refuse to adhere (to the rules), there will be consequences."

The committee's newfound resolve was not so clear after Kentucky was given a one-year bowl ban on Thursday, for separate recruiting violations of a Wildcats football staffer. After all, the 'Cats were 2-9 last season and would have been lucky to earn a bowl of Cheerios next season. The NCAA added no further scholarship cuts to the 19 that Kentucky had already inflicted on itself as punishment.

But now it's obvious the committee wants to be taken seriously. In giving Alabama the first two-year bowl ban since the Ole Miss and Washington cases in 1994, and taking away more than 20 scholarships for the first time since the Miami case in 1995, the committee not only threw a haymaker at a powerful and financially important program, but employed logic that ran against the grain of committee thinking the past few years.

Foremost, the bowl ban was issued despite any finding of "lack of institutional control." No one seems to know exactly what this term means. But a school facing major violations doesn't want the NCAA to determine it's been guilty of it. It's often the basis for justifying the issuance of a postseason ban.

That's why Alabama officials fought mightily to beat the charge, going to great pains to show NCAA investigators and the infractions committee that they did everything possible to educate and monitor boosters who might think about breaking the rules. The committee praised them for their efforts in that respect.

Then it held the school responsible anyway for the actions of three boosters, Logan Young, Wendell Smith and Raymond Keller.

"There had been an opinion developed over time that a finding of lack of institutional control was the poison bullet," Yeager said. "But there isn't any magic, get-out-of-jail-free card that comes with (avoiding that) finding."

Yeager's metaphors may be mixed, but not his message. He wants boosters everywhere -- not just in Alabama -- to know that the schools they are associated with will be punished, even if the NCAA can't prove that school employees were in on the misdeeds.

"This is a message to a certain degree to everybody: You may think you're helping, but you're not," said Yeager, whose day job is as commissioner of the Colonial Athletic Association. He took over as chair of the infractions committee last summer.

The committee's official report was similarly aware of what this case meant nationally.

"While rogue athletics representatives are new neither to infractions cases generally nor to the infractions history of the university, their level of involvement and spending is an increasingly visible and major problem in intercollegiate athletics," the committee wrote. "Such rogue athletics representatives demonstrate a profound and worrisome immaturity in the satisfaction they derive from close and continued intermingling with college and even high-school age student-athletes.

"Even if sincere, their claimed motivation for cheating -- helping a university to recruit blue-chip athletes -- betrays a lack of integrity and a 'win-at-all-costs' attitude that undermines and cheapens athletics competition and corrupts the ethics and maturation process of the young people they claim to be 'helping.' "

The committee was so disgusted with Alabama boosters that it issued the unusual order to keep all of them off the practice field, off the team charter, off the sideline at games, and out of the team's postgame locker room. It wants the three boosters cited in the violations to be disassociated permanently from the program.

Listening to Yeager, you get the feeling the committee would have sent them to Guantanamo Bay for detention if it had the authority.

"These are some of the worst violations in the history of the NCAA," he said.

That being the case, you might wonder why Alabama didn't get the death penalty. Alabama was eligible for such a fate, since any school with two major violations cases within a five-year period -- Alabama's men's basketball was penalized in 1999 -- merits automatic consideration. But ultimately, the committee determined it would cut the Tide a break because, unlike in the SMU case of 1987, school officials did not show a blatant disregard for the rules.

Besides, although it would never say so, the NCAA doesn't want to pick that kind of crazy legal fight. Even when fired up, it's more Lennox Lewis than Mike Tyson.

Alabama would be smart to make the absence of an institutional control finding a centerpiece in its argument before the NCAA Infractions Appeals Committee. It's worked in the past. With Southeastern Conference commissioner Roy Kramer providing guidance in the Lester Earl basketball case, Louisiana State argued that postseason bans usually only come with an institutional-control deficiency -- and the appeals committee promptly eliminated the penalty on the eve of the 1999 SEC Tournament.

The Crimson Tide also have won on the appellate level. The appeals committee vacated a second year of scholarship cuts in a 1995 case when it determined that the infractions committee had erroneously determined that the school's faculty athletic representative, Tom Jones, had provided false information to the NCAA.

So this battle isn't over.

But the fact that there is a battle to be waged is newsworthy enough.

When one Alabama reporter asked Yeager on a national teleconference Friday whether the committee gave any consideration to the fact that innocent players on the current team will be punished by the two-year bowl ban -- a common and effective argument used in recent years to discourage draconian penalties -- Yeager acknowledged that unfortunate impact. Then he dismissed the violin music, pointing out that innocent players still benefit by improper recruiting of teammates and potential teammates.

"That sometimes just comes with the territory," Yeager said of bowl bans.

Look out. The NCAA's enforcement arm maybe, just maybe, is back on the job.

Tom Farrey is a senior writer with ESPN.com. He can be reached at tom.farrey@espn.com.