On Tuesday evening, SI.com's Don Banks and George Dohrmann broke the story of the NFL's investigation into possible Super Bowl ticket scalping by Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Tice.

On Wednesday morning, I placed a call to the cell phone of a professional ticket broker who has been in the business of buying and reselling big event sports tickets (he would ask that you not call him a "scalper,'' but that's up to you) for many years.

I agreed to not use my source's name for reasons that should be clear, but certainly will become obvious before you reach the bottom of this column. This was his first reaction to the Tice story: It's ridiculous. The story is ridiculous? No. Is it ridiculous that an NFL coach would scalp Super Bowl tickets? Big no on that one. Then is it ridiculous the NFL would decide to suddenly crack down on a rule that's abused more widely than offensive holding? Yes, and it's ridiculous that the rule against scalping Super Bowl tickets exists in the first place, given the NFL distributes the tickets to parties it knows probably aren't going to the game.

Let's start with some basics: According to statistics published in The Boston Globe before Super Bowl XXXIX, the NFL was responsible for distributing more than 19,000 tickets with a face value of either $500 or $600. Every player in the league gets two tickets, every player on a participating team gets 15 tickets. Owners, general managers, coaches and others in the food chain all get tickets. Those tickets have value. My source asks, facetiously: Does the NFL really believe everyone who gets a ticket from the league attends the game? Of course not, he answers logically.

Yet every year the stadium is full. Where did the tickets go? They were sold. Were they sold at face value? Think about it. This year, tickets with a face value of $500 or $600 were selling for an average of nearly $3,000 each on the street, according to sources in the ticket business. In a bad year, they sell for more than $1,500, and the street value of Super Bowl tickets in the past decade has been as high as $4,500, according to my source.

So the point is: Super Bowl tickets aren't just pieces of thin cardboard worth admission to the Big Game, they're valuable. (More valuable, apparently, than Tice realized, because he's accused of selling $600 tickets to a broker for $1,900 each, and the broker was probably able to sell them each for at least $1,000 each more than that.)

My source -- along with almost every successful ticket broker in America, and there are many -- has longstanding arrangements with more than one NFL coach and with many NFL players. Likewise, he has arrangements with numerous college basketball coaches who are given tickets every year to the Final Four, many of whom don't use the tickets but are more than happy to sell two seats for up to $5,000. Think of what that money means to a low-paid assistant coach.

I know what you're thinking: NFL coaches and players earn seven-figure salaries. Why would they risk their jobs for a few thousand dollars? (NFL employees sign a document promising not to scalp tickets.) Because it's easy, and they can. And they always have.

Now the NFL seems to have decided that they will crack down and Tice is in the league's cross hairs.

This is more than a bit hypocritical. Before Super Bowl XXXIX, the New England Patriots farmed out distribution of Super Bowl "travel packages,'' to a company called Prime Sport Packages. According to a story in the Feb. 1 Boston Globe, Prime Sport was selling $500 and $600 face value tickets for $2,200, and couching the markup as a package. It isn't surprising that Prime Sports was marking up the tickets; the company is one of the partners of RazorGator, a ticket brokerage that calls itself "the most trusted brand in the industry'' on its Web site. A cynic could make a very strong argument that the NFL, in cahoots with the Patriots, was engaged in ticket scalping of the very type for which it is investigating Tice.

The Super Bowl is annually the hottest ticket in America. People get into the stadium by paying telephone-number prices for tickets, because somebody with access to a ticket doesn't want it, or wants the money more. This is straight up supply and demand; red, white and blue commerce. It's been going on for decades and it's the only way many people can get to see a Super Bowl. It's also hard to imagine the NFL hasn't been turning a blind eye for many years.

If the league is really outraged, crush the system. Good grief, this is the NFL. It can do anything. The league could stop giving out tickets to players and coaches. Or use some sort of ID system to guarantee that the ticket is used by the person who initially received it. Or force spectators to produce receipts proving that they paid no more than face value for the ticket. All of this would be time- and cash-consuming, but it could stop the practice.

But the NFL isn't going to do any of this. Apparently, the league is just going to smack Tice around and let else everyone keep selling tickets.