To find the only football team in all of college football banned from the postseason this year, go to Division II, down to southwest Georgia, where the Albany State Golden Rams play for little more than pride in a city-owned stadium used mostly by high school teams.

	Former Golden Rams running back Robert Cummings stayed a step ahead of the competition, but Albany State was caught by the NCAA for major rules violations.

A total of two reporters, both local, cover the team. No pro scout has attended a game this season. The biggest annual event for the 3,200 students on campus is the Fountain City Classic, against Fort Valley State University, its rival in the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, made up of 10 historically black colleges.

"We're really not the kind of place looking to cheat," said John Davis, Albany State's athletics director.

Still, major violations and significant NCAA penalties found Albany State -- the only team in all of college football that is banned from playing postseason games this year for breaking rules. The Rams are serving the second of a two-year ban for handing out too much financial aid.

The Rams are not the only small college to feel the wrath of the NCAA in recent years. While heavy sanctions are down in Division I-A football, oddly they are up in the conferences where athletic departments have little money and even less glamour.

Since 1996, the only teams given bans on playing postseason games for rules violations are Bethune-Cookman, Cal State-Northridge, Texas A&M-Kingsville and Albany State -- each members of either Division I-AA or Division II. There have been no associated television bans in part because, well, none play regularly on television.

Les Pico, an NCAA investigator from 1990 until '99, says the trend does not suggest that big-time cheating has left the big schools and migrated to the small colleges. Rather, he said, the little colleges simply make easier targets than their well-funded Division I-A peers.

	Equal justice?
	The last 10 football teams, in all divisions, given post-season bans for rules violations:
	Team	Div.	Banned
	Albany State*	II	2000-01
	Texas A&M-Kingsville	II	2000
	Cal State-Northridge	I-AA	2000
	Bethune-Cookman*	I-AA	1996
	Morgan State*	I-AA	1995
	Miami	I-A	1995
	Alabama	I-A	1995
	Ole Miss	I-A	1995-96
	San Fran. St.	II	1994
	Washington	I-A	1993-94
	* Historically black colleges
	Source: NCAA infractions database, ESPN.com research.

"The NCAA is only scratching the surface on some of the big problems at the large schools," Pico said. "They should go after the significant extra benefits and academic fraud at those schools. Instead, it's the historically black colleges they go after because those schools have no money."

Historically black universities make up just six percent of NCAA schools. Yet seven of the past 17 football teams in all divisions that were involved in major violations cases -- a disproportionate 41 percent -- are from black colleges. That represents a marked shift upward for the NCAA, which rarely penalized black colleges in the first four decades after the enforcement program was started in 1953.

The trend is less pronounced, but still visible, in men's basketball. Two of the last 17 cases, four of the last 23, and eight of the 54 since 1990 are from black colleges. The most recent case involved Howard University, which received minor sanctions on Tuesday.

NCAA spokeswoman Jane Jankowski dismissed the numbers as meaningless. "You can do anything you want with statistics," she said.

Leon Kerry, commissioner of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, a conference of black colleges, said the figures may not suggest any racial bias.

"I don't think it's that the NCAA is out to get black America," he said.

Rather, Kerry and Pico attribute the statistical shift to a lack of rules compliance systems at those schools. In the late 1980s, in response to scandals in some of the biggest programs in the country, Division I-A programs started hiring staffs of full-time compliance officers to serve as experts on the NCAA's thick rulebook. They have proven effective at flagging administrative violations before they spiral out of control.

Small colleges later began hiring those officials, and black colleges were among the last to join the crowd, Kerry said.

Count Albany State among the late arrivals. With only five men's and five women's teams, Albany State figured it did not need a compliance coordinator. The only official charged with reviewing financial aid figures was the athletics director, a position held by four different people during a six-year period at the end of the 1990s. Oversight fell through the cracks.

Last year, the school was cited for giving out too much money to athletes in three sports. The school said it failed to calculate work-study arrangements into the value of its scholarship. In sum, the NCAA says the excess money amounted to the equivalent of between seven and 15 scholarships annually for a six-year period.

The NCAA found no evidence that the school had intended to break rules, or was aware of the problem. But the Division II Committee on Infractions banned the Rams, who won five conference titles in the mid-'90s, from the postseason for two years. It was the first multi-year ban given to a football team in any NCAA division since Ole Miss and Washington in 1994.

The Rams are now taking their medicine. Officials have hired a compliance coordinator. They have installed special NCAA compliance software on athletic department computers to help keep track of things. They file the annual probation reports. Without any hope of going to the playoffs, the team went 4-6 for the second year in a row.

But Davis, the athletics director, does not feel like equal justice was served. He says the NCAA should be more understanding when small colleges slip up unintentionally -- or spend more resources trying to get underneath the sophisticated forms of cheating at the Division I-A schools.

"The big boys, you know they have shady operations," Davis said. "We're just not hearing about it."

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