If we’ve learned nothing from recent college football scandals, it’s that programs are going to claim plausible deniability at the end of the day, if at all possible. That has been a recurring theme from one scandal to another and as long as the programs can’t be proven to be lying, there’s an out for the program to dodge responsibility.

Considering that’s a common defense, it does leave open the window that a coach truly did not know what was going on off the field.

Following Ohio State’s decision to keep Urban Meyer and give him a three-game suspension, Kirk Herbstreit offered up some advice on how programs could avoid these incidents in the future. During a SportsCenter appearance, Herbstreit suggested that programs should all hire someone that works to investigate the backgrounds of everyone on staff.

“I think Ohio State — I think every school out there should hire a former FBI detective or somebody that has a background in investigating and put them on staff,” Herbstreit said on SportsCenter. “Their entire job is to focus on the coaching staff, their wives, their children, the players, the players’ girlfriends, the players’ children if they have them, and that’s all he does. And the coach can rely on an investigator to look into some of these things that continue to maybe come up, and then, that investigator can go to the head coach and say, ‘Hey, here’s what’s happening. Here’s the report this week. What do we want to do about A, B and C?’ As opposed to relying on the head coach, who necessarily isn’t even qualified.

“(Schools) need to get an outside party in who does this for a living, understands the psychology of these situations and could help a coach make these decisions.”

It’s unclear how many programs actually need something like this, however. Maybe coaches should just move on from an assistant when he has multiple allegations of domestic abuse instead of every program in the nation digging into the background of the staff and players on campus — the vast majority of which have nothing in their background to warrant such investigation.