Remember the scene with Captain Louis Renault in the movie “Casablanca”? A nightly visitor to the gaming tables, he is sharply questioned about the happenings at his favorite night club and feigns outrage: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here.” Moments later, the scene closes with the croupier handing him a wad of cash, saying: “Your winnings, sir.”

Well, that is the only way to reasonably approach the four major conference commissioners — the Big Ten’s Jim Delany, Larry Scott of the Pac-10, Dan Beebe of the Big 12 and John Swofford of the ACC — and their hypocritical and hyperbolic response to the NCAA ruling on Cam Newton.

They are not shocked at the ruling any more than Renault was shocked by gambling in Casablanca. These are all educated men who swim daily in the slimy cesspool of intercollegiate athletics. What they are shocked and sickened by is the continued dominance of the Southeastern Conference. If Auburn defeats Oregon on Jan. 10, it would mean five straight BCS championships for the league and six of the last eight.

That’s what is giving these men migraine headaches — especially, Delany. The Big 10 last won the BCS in 2002 with Ohio State, led by the poster child of good behavior and virtue, Maurice Clarett.

A Newton-led Auburn win would begin another long year of agony for the rest of college football — especially the Big Ten, a once dominant conference that controlled football but lately has been jettisoned to second-class citizenship.

Delany is the same gasbag who opened the floodgates to conference expansion last summer. I didn’t see him on the short list for a Nobel Prize for that endeavor. And Beebe and Scott were like drunk frat boys on a spring break binge, all too ready to hijack the integrity of the sport with their near super conference marriage last summer. They were willing to wreak havoc with academics and leave longtime partners out in the cold. And these fellows are shocked, just shocked, at the NCAA making a highly combustible but appropriate ruling in the Newton case.

It reminds me of the old story about Winston Churchill. He runs into a socialite at a party. He decides to test the woman’s virtue with a lewd suggestion. The woman responded angrily:

“What do you think I am?” she said.

“We’ve established that,” said Churchill, “now we are trying to determine your price.”

So these four conference commissioners — who are willing to let their teams play football and basketball at any hour or day that a network who will show them on television and let borderline athletes slip in the back, side and basement door of their august institutions of higher learning — are suddenly feigning shock and finding religion over this ruling.

Isn’t it interesting how these great men — who rarely call each other out because it was thought to be verboten in the good old boy’s club — now are going postal? However, this time, they couldn’t get over their “BCS envy” of the SEC. Instead of shrugging off Mike Slive’s cunning power play with the NCAA — a classic case for the ages of laywering up — they came apart. They all threw out some hysterical clichés, like “slippery slope,” and “really troubled” and “dangerous precedent” on top of their usual indecipherable mumbo jumbo.

However, at the end of the day, what they’re really saying is pathetically obvious. I believe every one of these men would have made the same argument for their schools and their own conference as Slive has done.

The contrived outrage over Cam Newton has nothing to do with facts and the NCAA by-laws or the integrity of the game. They are just boiling mad the SEC was able to get away with it and left following the lead dog around again in college football, where the view never changes.

The Paul Finebaum radio show airs weekdays at 2 p.m. on WJOX 94.5-FM, as well as on satellite radio at Sirius 122 and XM 143. Contact Paul by e-mail at finebaumnet@yahoo.com.