If we’re being honest, this was overdue.

The fact college sports made it five years since the Supreme Court opened the door for expanded sports gambling and full-on scandal to hit home is frankly stunning. In reality, corruption was undoubtedly swirling without detection before former Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon became the cautionary tale.

But with new details emerging this week in Sports Illustrated, a combination of sloppy execution and great security cameras helped shove the inevitable into the headlines and force action from above.

The stakes really couldn’t be much higher.

In the age where tin-foil hat conspiracies go mainstream, cracking the door with any breadcrumb to doubt the integrity of games was rigged or fixed builds a house of cards.

And with billions of dollars in play and big fish looking for any small edge, players (mostly) become targets for manipulation or corruption. That’s always been true though with 34 states legalizing sports gambling, the pool is considerably deeper. The temptation to accept a few or more bucks to go Shoeless Joe has never been greater even in the NIL era.

This was among the hot topics at last month’s SEC spring meetings in Destin. And if we’re still being honest, there didn’t sound like a whole lot of fresh approaches were bounced off the resort walls. At least in post-meeting interviews, a reiteration of the anti-gambling education routine was the main talking point.

“That shocked me,” Texas A&M football coach Jimbo Fisher said when he learned of the gambling investigation at Alabama that quickly expanded. “When that came out, I mean, you hadn’t heard of that for years. I can’t remember the last time that came out and there were two or three schools.”

Alabama athletics director Greg Byrne perhaps said it best.

“We’re obviously very attuned now that we have a real-life example we can learn from and we’re going to make sure we do that going forward,” he said, “but we’ve also done that in the past as well.”

That’s the kicker.

The energy in Destin was high on the educational aspect of it all but, as Byrne said, they were doing that already and didn’t stop a head coach from allegedly going ‘Pete Rose’.

The league brought in Mark Holt, head of the U.S. Integrity oversight group that initially flagged the flagrant activity that led to Bohannon’s downfall. They were taking the risk seriously, and the concern was there.

But what’s actually being done to stop this from infecting the full sporting landscape?

That was the simple question I had for SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey during one of the evening press briefings in Destin.

“We utilize the NCAA’s rule structure,” he said. “I’ve not been involved in any conversation on changing the rule.”

Well, the NCAA acted.

Less than a month after the SEC packed up and left the beach, the wounded but still functioning NCAA updated its rules related to athletes and gambling. It modernized the structure and offered tiers of punishments for varying levels of involvement with gambling.

Should an athlete be found guilty of influencing the outcome of games or providing inside information to gamblers, they face the potential of a lifetime loss of eligibility. In the past, any gambling activity — whether it involve a game they’re playing or one in the NBA — resulted in a year of lost eligibility.

There’s nuance now with small-dollar bets resulting in the loss of 10% of a season’s eligibility instead of the full boat. And that’s important since the NCAA in May released results of a study that showed 58% of 18-to-22-year-olds have engaged in at least one sports betting activity. The 3,527 surveyed weren’t exclusively athletes either.

Of course, there are levels within the most series tier of offenders.

As far as we know, Bohannon isn’t accused of throwing the Alabama baseball game at LSU back in April. He’s accused of giving inside information of a late scratch of their Friday pitcher to a gambler who tried to place six-figure bets on a game that wouldn’t normally draw more than a few hundred bucks at most.

Still, while coaches aren’t addressed in these new rules, it’s widely understood he’ll never be trusted to coach another college baseball game.

Athletes including football players at both Iowa and Iowa State remain under investigation related to gambling activity in a separate issue that dropped the same week as Alabama baseball.

The NFL is also dealing with suspensions of players over gambling but, so far, integrity-of-the-game concerns haven’t been raised.

With a new football season on the horizon and gambling joining NIL and transfer controversies on the doomsday countdown, an increased spotlight is focused on preserving the purity of the competition itself.

Nick Saban said the Alabama football program’s gambling education included a talk from former mobster Michael Franzese. The former member of the Colombo crime family does the scared-straight speaking circuit given his experience in point shaving and game fixing.

“But I think one of the more difficult things is when you make things legal and all of a sudden there’s so much more access to – people are gambling and don’t even know they’re gambling on some of these social media things that I don’t even know how to operate or run or ever been involved with,” Saban said. “So I think you have to be more diligent about how you approach it with players so that they understand the consequences of even some of the slightest things they may do when it comes to gambling.”

We’d be naive to think the action on fall Saturdays is as pure as the moonshine smuggled into student sections.

And it’s overly simplistic to assume new sanctions and reformed capos will neutralize rouge actors when millions become billions.

But they can try.

Because if we can’t trust the games, a slight breeze could topple that house of cards.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook