Look who has their hands dirty now.

Look who has the cloud of shame swirling about.

Look who has the country pointing angry, accusatory fingers.

That's right, some 15 years after UNLV was cast as Iago in the Shakespearean morality play that is college athletics, it's Othello who suddenly finds itself playing the villain.

So how does it feel Duke?

Of course, the Blue Devils had nothing to do with how UNLV was portrayed in the national media in 1990 after a series of minor off-court transgressions by its basketball team. Duke simply was the unwitting protagonist -- to the Rebels' "scandalous" antagonist -- when the two met for the national championship that season in Denver.

Asked the day before the title game his thoughts about the seemingly Hollywood-scripted, good guys-vs.-bad guys showdown, Rebels point guard Greg Anthony, now an NBA analyst for ESPN, quipped of the Blue Devils, "We don't see them as the bad guys."

Unfortunately and unfairly, many college sports fans saw UNLV as the bad guy, and had for a while -- dating to the late 1970s when coach Jerry Tarkanian began building the school's basketball program into a national powerhouse.

When defending champion UNLV met Duke in the NCAA Final Four semifinals in Indianapolis in 1991, the white hats-vs.-black hats scenario was revisited by the national media -- again, through no fault of the Blue Devils.

But that didn't stop the Duke faithful from once more smugly embracing the hero's role.

Fast-forward 15 years, and look which school is having its reputation sullied. Unfortunately, and yes, unfairly.

Longtime UNLV fans should find no joy in the rape scandal that hit the Blue Devils' lacrosse team and enveloped the North Carolina-based university this month. This is a serious matter no matter how it sorts out, whether a crime occurred and those responsible are rightly punished or whether the accuser is lying and the charged players, their teammates, the team's resigned coach and the school itself have been wrongly attacked.

Simply, there is no winner here.

But when you compare this story -- as well as the myriad problems quarterback Marcus Vick brought to Virginia Tech last year, the allegations of sexual assault and wild recruiting parties that brought down coach Gary Barnett at Colorado before that, the embarrassment that running back Maurice Clarett caused Ohio State football before that, etc. -- the "crimes" of which UNLV basketball has been accused over the years are picayune -- despite the media attention they drew at the time.

Raiding a hotel mini-bar? Joy-riding on a couple of purloined boogie boards while in Hawaii? Please!

Even some of the more serious things that occurred -- recruit Lloyd Daniels being caught in a televised drug string, an angry Isaiah "J.R." Rider throwing a strawberry milkshake back through a drive-thru window, the recruiting fiasco of Lamar Odom -- pale in comparison.

Not even the infamous "hot tub" photo that showed basketball players David Butler, Anderson Hunt and Moses Scurry partying with convicted sports fixer Richie Perry can be equated with alleged rape, a player waving a loaded gun in public or high school prospects being recruited with raucous sex parties.

"In this day and age, you feel very fortunate that some of those things haven't happened at your school," UNLV senior associate athletic director Jerry Koloskie says of the recent scandals popping up over the college landscape. "To our credit, though, we're doing a good job of educating our student-athletes about what's right and what's wrong.

"Young people are going to make mistakes; that's part of being young. But we work very hard to teach them about behavior that's acceptable and about not putting themselves in positions that could come back to hurt them."

That UNLV education includes a 16-week Champs Life Skills course for all incoming student-athletes, in which they're instructed about the dangers of alcohol and drugs, nutritional supplements, gambling and sexual issues, to name a few.

"We're always looking to hit the hot topic every year, but we keep going back to the basics," Koloskie explains. "We just have to keep (the student-athletes) aware."

Ron Futrell, a news anchor at KTNV-TV, who served as the station's sports director during UNLV's oft-troubled early 1990s, credits the school's commitment over recent years to hiring coaches who keep a vigilant watch on their players. Asked to compare the sins of past Rebels teams to what is happening at Duke today, Futrell chuckles.

"Even if these guys are found innocent," he says of the two lacrosse players arrested this past week, "they were doing some really minor stuff that if it happened at UNLV 15, 16 years ago it would've made national headlines and (ESPN's) 'SportsCenter.' "

That's because in any good morality play there has to be a villain.

Joe Hawk is the Review-Journal's sports editor. He can be reached at 387-2912 or jhawk@reviewjournal.com.