Dayne might have lost his Heisman Trophy.

He might have been suspended, and, like Peter Warrick of Florida State, he would have dropped out of the race.

According to newspaper reports, Ron Dayne was a frequent customer of The Shoe Box.(Allsport)

It is, of course, one thing to work surreptitiously with a sales clerk for discounts that the store's owner didn't know about, as Warrick did. But according to the Wisconsin State Journal series that started the school's and the NCAA's investigations, Dayne had heavy involvement with the benevolent shoe store owner outside of Madison.

For the ultimate postseason honor in college football, it was probably just a matter of timing.

The Shoe Box is 25 miles from campus in a town called Black Earth. Wisconsin athletes, 81 of whom were involved, received huge discounts. The store owner defended the situation by saying the same discounts were available to any Wisconsin student.

But the career leader in Division I rushing was apparently a frequent, and special, customer.

"When (Dayne) walked in the door, everything just shut down, especially for him," a former saleswoman at The Shoe Box told the newspaper for the series, which was published in July.

The State Journal quoted the woman as saying Dayne showed up at the store 16 to 20 times during football season last year.

"He got stuff for his girlfriend and daughter and himself," she said. "He never left with less than three pairs of shoes."

Another person who worked at the store said he was present when Dayne loaded up before leaving for last season's upset loss at Cincinnati. He said Dayne walked out with two pairs of shoes, plus three pairs of shoes and boots for his infant daughter, Jada.

The payment, according to the man: zero. The newspaper said Dayne had an open account.

That night, the man said, Jada's mother and Dayne's girlfriend arrived at the store with two other people. They walked out with "a stack" of T-shirts and sweatshirts, belts and "at least two pairs of Timberland boots."

The payment: zero.

"We wrote up a bill for him and he's been paying it off," the owner of The Shoe Box told the State Journal.

Dayne, of course, was worth many times the value of his scholarship to the University of Wisconsin. And please don't mention that a college education is priceless. If Wisconsin football coach Barry Alvarez believes that, perhaps the school can start paying his enormous salary in vouchers for priceless educations.

Then Alvarez can dole them out as he pleases, bestowing priceless gifts upon any number of deserving young people.

My goodness, he would be a midwestern Mother Theresa.

But no, like most capitalists, Alvarez prefers cold cash, such as what he must have made for doing the window and milk commercials on the radio broadcast of Wisconsin's season-opener Thursday night.

The situation once again exposes the NCAA's fundamental flaw. Players can see filled stadiums. They can read the details of their coach's new contract in the newspapers. They can imagine how much the schools are receiving for a national television game. They can see coaches leaving for a new job on a dime and how they are made to sit out a year if they want to move.

The really smart ones know that the athletes in revenue-making sports -- minorities, generally -- are subsidizing the scholarships of middle class whites in sports such as swimming and golf that bring in no revenue.

So it's not hard to understand how all this happened, and will happen again.

"If you went to the store and you were nobody, he gave you a discount," Dayne said, in an unfortunate choice of words, after the State Journal story broke. "If you weren't even a football player, period, he gave you a discount. That's just the way it was."

But Dayne was somebody, somebody who played in 11 regular-season games before winning the Heisman.