PHILADELPHIA — As the college basketball season begins, the never-ending debate about recruiting continues. There are bad guys with bad intentions. There are good guys caught in a bad situation who have to make choices they would rather not make. There are good guys who refuse to play the game and end up as former coaches.

The situation isn't getting better. It is getting worse.

Winning matters so much that otherwise well-intentioned people have to play a game in which they would prefer not to participate.

Whatever the reality, the perception is not good.

Late last month, the Division I board of directors passed several emergency rules that will have an immediate impact on recruiting. The first task force to consider rules for one sport was formed in June 2008. The group, consisting of NCAA enforcement reps that solicited opinions of college coaches and conference commissioners, made several significant recommendations that are now in effect:

■ No more package deals in which somebody close to a player gets hired to a staff position in what is perceived as a quid pro quo.

■ No more payments to summer-league teams with prospects.

■ No subscribing to recruiting services that really aren't services at all, but ways for an outsider with access to a prospect to get paid in return for giving a school a chance to recruit that prospect.

There is more, but that is the essence of it. Other changes will be voted on in January and probably pass because they have the backing of the National Association of Basketball Coaches and conference commissioners. They would be enacted in April.

Is this going to end the corruption? No. Cheaters will cheat. Could it make it tougher? Maybe. Is it necessary? Depends upon whom you ask.

"It took the (Securities and Exchange Commission) 17 years to catch up to Bernard Madoff," Georgia Tech Coach Paul Hewitt said. "He can go 17 years, and everybody gives him the presumption of innocence. In men's basketball, we're presumed guilty from the door."

There are some very prominent coaches who are either unethical, willing to straddle the line between right and wrong, or both. The problem is that just about every coach gets painted with the same broad brush.

"I'm disappointed that we continue to give the perception that college basketball coaches are the scourge of the earth," Hewitt said. "... I think most of the rules that are put in are for maybe three to four percent of the prospects."

Notre Dame Coach Mike Brey understands the perception as well. He just looks at it differently.

"I think we need drastic changes to the culture," Brey said. "It's embarrassed us as a profession. From the end of the Final Four, we were in the news for the wrong reasons again. I'm in favor of anything really drastic to see if we can get the whole culture under control. We're put in some really tricky spots as coaches now when we want to access the network, so to speak."

The "network" is that netherworld of hangers-on, street agents and people-who-know-people. It is all about getting players, but what is right and wrong is the debate.

"Is it really unethical, is it really wrong, if a kid feels comfortable with a guy, that he wants that guy around, and that school thinks he's qualified enough to hire him?" Hewitt asked.

This summer, Hewitt had a position open, and he kept it open. Why?

"I was waiting to see if somebody came up to me who was qualified and who could have a player come with him. I was going to hire that person. By the end of the summer, nobody materialized."

Hewitt eventually hired one of his former players.

"Getting players is a big part of the job," Hewitt said. "If that guy can bring a player with him, I'm hiring him. Why is that wrong?"

It is a reasonable question with no clear answer in every case.

"I think coaches, as a whole, have thrown their hands up and said please help us," Brey said. "I'm hoping that it's a start.

"This has been a really hard culture to figure out. There's times I don't think we can cure it. I do worry about that."

Is it better or worse than it was?

"I think it's worse," said Brey, who was hired as a Duke assistant in 1987. "There's a lot more people in the game with a prospect now, more people around and involved. I think it's been a trickier climate to negotiate now than when I got in."

Hewitt disagrees.

"I think it's better because of how pervasive information is now," Hewitt said. "There are no secrets anymore. I don't think you can pull off some of the stuff you could pull off in the past. The players that used to command 'dollars.' Those guys ain't in college long anymore. You're not getting (the superstars) for three years."

But even a one-year superstar can get your team to the promised land of the Final Four. Greg Oden did it. So did Derrick Rose and Kevin Love.

"If money's changing hands, that's a big problem," Hewitt said. "If kids are being just out and out bought, I've got a big problem. I just have a problem with saying, because I know a player, that I can't get a job at that school."

Monte Ross at Delaware has a completely different set of problems. These new rules, as Hewitt said, are about the big boys and the major recruits. The package deals aren't really relevant at the mid-major level.

"We can barely hire the guys that we have," Ross said.

Everything is a struggle. And some of the rules that matter to a school such as Delaware are contradictions.

"There's a rule that you can't go out in the spring to recruit," Ross said. "That kills us because that's an opportunity for us to see upwards of 200 kids playing at one event versus going from high school to high school to high school. With budget crunches, you just don't have the money.

"In the springtime, you can't go to AAU events, but you can go to high school events. But, in the summertime, you're not allowed to go to the high schools to see the kids. You're only allowed to go to AAU events.

"What kind of sense does that make? So you're telling the kid in April, don't play for an AAU coach. Only go to your high school and be seen there. Then, you're telling him in July, well, a coach can't come to your high school. They shunned that AAU team for their high school in the spring."

So there are those issues. This is not what these changes are about, but it does demonstrate the differences between the haves and have-nots.

Brey and Hewitt agreed on some of the changes — the faux recruiting services, payments to summer-league teams.

This recruiting-service rule is similar to the banning of the exhibition games against AAU teams where coaches with access to prospects were getting paid big money to bring their teams to play a pre-season game.

"It got a lot of people off the hook," Brey said. "I was getting calls, 'Well, how come you haven't played us yet, this is our number, this is what we need.' "

Notre Dame, Brey said, subscribes to a number of the recruiting services just because the Irish don't want to take a chance of getting shut out of an area. The coach is pleased that he won't have to worry about that any longer.

But, if it's not that, it might be something else. Where there is money to be made by winning, there is always an incentive to take risks.

"Am I that naive in not understanding that we are that bad as men's coaches?" Hewitt wondered.

That is the essential question. Are they that bad? Are some of them that bad that all are guilty by association? Can some apparently well-intentioned rules change the perception? Can anything?