This is an opinion column.

Disgraced former Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon is barely one year into a 15-year NCAA show-cause penalty, which matches the longest in college sports history.

Disgraced and deceased Major League Baseball hit king Pete Rose is a mere three years away from induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, if he’s luckier in death than he was in life.

Bohannon’s downfall began two years ago at the BetMGM Sportsbook inside the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, the city where Rose played and managed and wagered on baseball for much of his storied career.

What are the odds?

Both men gambled and lost because of their involvement with betting on baseball, a cardinal sin in their chosen professions. Both men were permanently banned, Rose explicitly, Bohannon effectively. His Feb. 1, 2024 show-cause order from the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions stated, “If Bohannon becomes employed during the show-cause period, he shall be suspended for 100% of the baseball regular season for the first five seasons of his employment.”

That’s a ban by any other name.

According to the infractions report, Bohannon’s crimes against college baseball included providing “insider information to an individual he knew to be engaged in betting on an Alabama baseball game” and refusing to cooperate in the NCAA’s investigation of that allegation.

More specifically, he messaged an associate that Alabama was going to make a late scratch of its starting pitcher before a game against LSU. The associate, Bert Eugene Neff, stationed at the above-mentioned sports book in Cincinnati, then attempted to place a wildly suspicious $100,000 bet on LSU.

It had to be the biggest red flag the home of the Reds had ever seen.

Alabama fired Bohannon within days, and the program is far better off under successor Rob Vaughn. The NCAA hammered Bohannon nine months later. Unless Rob Manfred one day becomes NCAA president, Bohannon’s college coaching days are almost certainly over.

Manfred, adding to his already strong case for worst MLB commissioner ever, recently redefined the meaning of “permanent” regarding Rose’s ineligibility from baseball. It no longer mattered that Rose himself accepted in August of 1989 his placement on the permanently ineligible list after an MLB investigation documented his betting on baseball, a direct violation of the sport’s Rule 21.

How sacred is that rule, which has been plastered throughout clubhouses for decades? If baseball had commandments, it might be No. 1.

“In my view,” Manfred wrote in a letter to the Rose family’s attorney, “once an individual has passed away, the purposes of Rule 21 have been served. Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game.”

Opinions will vary on that last point, especially if Rose ends up in the Baseball Hall of Fame despite his blatant disregard for Rule 21, his almost comical denials after getting caught and his defiant lack of contrition.

His enshrinement in Cooperstown is possible now that Manfred has found a creative way to pass the buck. It’s possible but far from a sure thing. If you’re into that kind of thing, you can probably find people setting odds and taking bets on the subject.

Rose died last September at age 83 so he’ll never get to bask in the glow of a Hall of Fame induction, which his playing career alone between the lines certainly deserves. His newfound eligibility has reinvigorated the debate over whether his excellent play should outweigh his abhorrent behavior, which extends beyond his repeated barreling over Rule 21 as if it were the American League catcher in an All-Star Game.

Granted, there are sinners of many kinds among the faces on those bronze plaques in Cooperstown, but few candidates for induction have had their worst traits dissected in as much detail for as long as Rose has.

Ultimately, his Hall of Fame fate will be decided by a Historical Oversight Committee, which must put him on an eight-person ballot, and a Classic Era Committee, a 16-person panel that will vote on that ballot. The next such election – for people whose greatest contributions to the game came before 1980 – will be December of 2027.

If Rose makes the ballot and receives at least 75 percent of the votes – 12 of 16 – he’ll be enshrined in the summer of 2028. Will that be too late? Better late than never? Or an insult to the integrity of the game? Does the game have the same integrity on this point now that it embraces gambling among its fans if not its players and managers?

The Hall of Fame asks its electors to consider a player’s record, playing ability and contributions to the teams on which he played. By that score, Rose is 3 for 3, but there are other stated considerations. In terms of integrity, sportsmanship and character, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that he’s 0 for 3.

In the Hall of Fame case for Pete Rose, that oh-fer will be and should be an awfully big donut to overcome.