Every year, the NFL draft sends a few surprises our way, and this year was no exception with Tim Tebow getting drafted by the Denver Broncos in the first round. While a few analysts had predicted his drafting as high as Number 8 or 9, the quarterback from the University of Florida ended up going to the Broncos as the 25th overall pick of the draft.

This came as a shock to just about everyone, especially since Jimmy Clausen, Notre Dame’s quarterback, was expected to get picked ahead of Tebow. And Denver didn’t get Tebow for cheap; they had to give up their picks in the second, third, and fourth rounds to get a second first round pick and snag the QB.

It seems like both Tim Tebow and his new team are equally excited about the decision. Tebow recently visited Denver to show off his skills to Bronco’s quarterback Josh McDaniels, who was clearly impressed with what he saw. Tebow says that the Broncos can expect him to give “heart and soul” and everything else that comes with him, including a strong work ethic and the determination to give his best.

Even though Tebow is not going to be the new starting quarterback for Denver (that spot is filled by Kyle Orton), he could very likely become the new face of the Broncos franchise in a few years. For now, Tebow says that his main goals are to “be a great quarterback” and to “repay [McDaniels] for what he did for me, believing in me.” And he will have plenty of time and opportunity to do that as he heads into his first season as a pro football player.

In an interesting twist of fate, Tim Tebow’s first NFL game with Denver will be in his very own hometown of Jacksonville, FL against the Jaguars on September 12. When he was asked if being passed up by Jacksonville surprised him, Tebow said he wasn’t expecting to get picked up by the Jaguars. Instead, he is excited to “be part of a franchise and a great organization” after being drafted by Denver.

USC was the big story-line early, with NCAA executives seemingly reacting by aggressively investigating athletes at a host of other schools — including North Carolina, South Carolina, Clemson, and Florida — who may have illegally associated with agents over the past several months.

In reality, however, agents finding ways to provide prospective clients with gifts, money and lavish trips is nothing new.

The NCAA, as an institution, has long maintained strict rules governing agent-athlete relationships. Unfortunately, much of the actual policing of these rules was done “in-house” by school officials. Imagine being in the position of these officials — who certainly know the rules — but are understandably hesitant to publicly admit they failed at their job by turning in their own star athletes and thereby risking the team’s success.

With the heavy sanctions being levied against USC, however, it isn’t at all surprising that North Carolina and the other universities so far investigated by the NCAA have been so cooperative. The NCAA, of course, has the legal right to sanction the players and the schools.

Some might argue that enough is being done by the NCAA. If the NCAA and the individual universities and athletic teams are policing themselves, there shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Players, themselves, are often to blame. I’ve talked to agents who tell me they field calls from players openly looking for cash handouts before signing contracts — a clear violation of NCAA rules. Agents hoping to play by the rules, I’m told, are too often “beaten” by other agents who are willing to break them.

And therein lies the problem.

There is no strict policing of agents. Agents’ actions can get players and their collegiate teams in real trouble, but until the NFL and/or NFLPA takes a tip from the NCAA and elects to discipline those in their control — the rogue agents — the problem will continue to spiral out of control.

It will take someone much more intelligent than I to come up with the legal mumbo-jumbo to get this thing fixed correctly. But, doesn’t it make sense for agents to suffer similar consequences as the athletes should they be found involved in these cases?

If Dez Bryant or another player is found to be involved, he’s typically suspended for the year. Should an agent be proven to have knowingly given athletes improper benefits that result in the player being suspended for any amount of time, the agent too should be suspended by the NFL.

Not allowing him or her to add any additional clients for one year would likely do the trick.

First of all, since we’re talking about “The League,” I would insist that the current problem is not the NFL’s. Until the draft and the free-agent signing period that follows, college football players are college football players, not NFL players. NFL clubs assessing the character of prospective draftees, and the Players Association assessing the character of prospective agents, can deal with the revelations of improper benefits however they see fit. But the problem in itself is not an NFL problem.

It’s the colleges’ problem, but here, assigning blame and proposing solutions get a little tricky. There’s no defense for the agents. The very act of offering benefits to college athletes with eligibility remaining exposes their dishonesty and unreliability. They may break no laws, only NCAA rules, but they instantly put their clients in jeopardy of losing eligibility and perhaps more, much more. The very act of offering improper benefits proves that they do not have the best interest of their clients at heart.

The athletes are surely to blame — they knowingly violate the rules of their scholarship and put their institutions as well as themselves at risk — but here the blame needs to be spread around a little, or at least contextualized. The $200,000 or so that Reggie Bush received while at USC was 4 or 5 percent of his coach Pete Carroll’s salary for one year — and all of the Reggie Bushes today are aware of such disparities. While a football scholarship today pays for what a scholarship paid in the 1960s, the average coach’s salary in the Football Bowl Subdivision has risen from maybe $25,000 to $1 million, with the coaches in the major programs earning three, four, five times that much. And the trickle-down effect actually works in college football, as the head coaches’ rising income trickles down to his assistants, the athletic director, even the president of the NCAA. In fact, it trickles down to just about everyone except the players. And the players know this.

So, improper benefits is the universities’ problem, but just the tip of a much bigger problem: the growing absurdity of treating big-time college football (and basketball) as an extracurricular activity for the players but a multi-million-dollar entertainment business for everyone else. The old contract implicit in an athletic scholarship — an education in return for athletic services — has broken down. The growing evidence of low graduation rates, gaps between athletes and non-athletes in SAT scores, “clustering” in easy (sometimes meaningless) majors, calls seriously into question whether athletes’ educational “opportunities” are real. Lip service to “student-athletes” notwithstanding, everyone knows that many of the athletes in the top programs are at college to get ready for the NFL (or NBA), not the civilian job market. This is where the issue of “improper benefits” gets tricky.

The NCAA will not allow its athletes to capitalize on their own athletic accomplishments or protect their own athletic interests — the right to transfer without penalty, secure agents, etc. “Improper benefits,” if viewed dispassionately, are among the rights enjoyed by most employees. Athletes are not employees, we’re told, they’re students, but that is ultimately the issue, or problem, at the bottom of all of this. The Ed O’Bannon case that is working its way to trial (asserting the rights of former college athletes to financial benefits from the use of their images), the rumblings in Congress about tax-exemption for hundred-million-dollar athletic programs, legal demands for “athletes’ rights”– these provide the context for viewing “improper benefits” as part of a much larger issue.

A real solution to the problem of improper benefits would have to go beyond policing agents, punishing athletes, and protecting programs from a problem beyond their control. It will have to come to terms with the increasingly unsustainable situation in which college athletes earn millions for everyone but themselves, and get too little in return.

These coaches are allowed to jump franchises with all the integrity of carpetbaggers anytime they want. Meanwhile, if the athletes who are responsible for that revenue accept so much as a free dinner outside the purview of their scholarships, they’re punished for violating the terms of a “spirit” of amateur athletics that hasn’t existed in decades. And if a kid wants to transfer to a different school, he has to sit out a year with very few exceptions.

So, the first thing that must be done to eliminate agent perfidy is to find a way to pay athletes a percentage of overall revenue received by every athletic program. If football and basketball make the most money, those players get the lion’s share of the revenue split. Players are put on a per-year slotted salary scale that corresponds to those percentages. Pay could be based on starts, awards, performance incentives, postseason bonuses … it would be a complicated system, but a fair one if handled properly. But let’s get the whole “amateur” thing out of the way — the top athletes among big-ticket programs in major college sports are simply underpaid professionals.

The next step is where the agents show up — the transition from college to pro. And the best way to eliminate issues here is to extend the slotted salary scale to the NFL draft. This is on the verge of happening anyway; the NFLPA agrees that the salaries paid to high draft picks are out of hand, and the only problem right now is that the two sides can’t seem to agree on what to do with the money left over that was not spent on the Sam Bradfords and Matthew Staffords of the future. If there is a sliding scale all the way from college to pro, agents would be far more interested in what they should be doing — helping the players who have made it to their second and third contracts by dint of their NFL performances make as much money as possible.