Rugby league might just have exposed the dumbest football club in the nation. The Parramatta Eels: intelligence quota 0. On a good day.
The Eels' brains trust - how we love an oxymoron - played the game and lost but like an addicted gambler did not see the problem and chased their money while all the time clinging to their cover-up.
The decision not to put their hands up when the NRL coppers lobbed is inconceivably stupid. Once fingered by the NRL integrity unit the club had no choice but to stop the deception and co-operate. There was no other conclusion they could reasonably reach. 
With a sniff of a salary cap rort and the power to sweep through Parramatta's office computers, phones and whatever else was appropriate, the jig was surely up. But no, the club chairman Steve Sharp was as late as the weekend posturing to take the NRL to court. Bozo can retire, there's a new clown on the block.
The price of the club's idiocy is crushing. Premiership points gone, $1 million fine, five board members and administrators asked to show why they should not be thrown out with the rubbish.
And there is no prospect of gaining premiership points until the club can find nearly $600,000 in salary cap cuts.
While these are preliminary findings by the NRL they are in a sense an ambit claim. Whatever way Parramatta react, from the moment they were informed of the breaches yesterday morning will determine the final punishment.
The Eels have not engaged with NRL through the past three months so it would make no sense for them to co-operate now. But with such a thick-headed club it is impossible to predict.
It is clear that systematic salary cap cheating remains constant in the NRL.   Maybe endemic. In 2002 it was the Bulldogs, in 2005 the Warriors were docked four premiership points and in 2010 it was Storm losing premierships and premiership points. Now, it is Parramatta.
If you string the years together in which the NRL considers clubs cheated there might not be one single season where a rort was not in play for the best part of two decades.
The sport deserves better than that. So do the supporters for they are the ones who are punished the most. The fans are the heart of the NRL and the ones who make the biggest investment.
It is heinous for board members to treat the passion of the supporters so flippantly. That the club has not learned from the fate of their rorting rivals before them underlines their hubris.
Not only do these salary rorters disrespect the fans who invest emotion and money in their clubs but they treat the sport with -contempt.
By taking positions within the sport they take a role as guardians of the sport. To rort the cap is to abuse that privilege.
NRL chief executive Todd Greenberg and his integrity chief Nick Weeks made an impressive pair as they announced the sanctions heaped on Parramatta and discussed the investigation.
They acted with the surety of men who know they have right on their side. Greenberg rightly claimed it was a stain on rugby league. But it is also, by association, a blot on all sport.
It engorges the cynically held view that officials and sports folk would do just about anything to win.
Neither the AFL or NRL escaped WADA punishment last year when the anti-doping body found against players under regimes run by the witch doctor -Stephen Dank.
The Australian cricketers have turned their sport into a grim -battle of egos, sledging and one-liners. Racing continues to battle those who seek to gain advantage through potions and poultices. Greyhound racing has been exposed. Tennis cheats.
If you believe a cricket result then you might be called an optimist. There might not be a Russian athlete who runs, jumps or throws unless he or she has been art-ificially improved. World soccer stinks.
Greenberg and Weeks did the only thing possible yesterday. -Parramatta have been hit with heavy penalties and if club officials remain as recalcitrant in the future as they have in the past then the Eels will not earn a premiership point for quite some time.
That they still have the opportunity to play for points is a privilege not offered Melbourne Storm. Greenberg said he had no part in the Storm decision but found it disheartening to see players compete and supporters cheer for no tangible reason.
The Storm's punishment came quickly and roughly, the price of betrayal from within.
The NRL is bouncing along nicely. Good crowds, great ratings, good footy. But it is not inde-structible.
Nor is the AFL no matter how well it bounces back from the -Essendon drug scandal.
But what might be dismissed as glancing blows will eventually hit any sport for six - it did tennis last   January in the Australian Open.Fancy that might just have sailed over the heads of the Parramatta Bozos.