As both a CU fan/alumn and a Michigan fan (grew up there), it's been interesting (and sad) to follow this story. It actually started out very similar to some of our troubles -- a local newspaper (the Detroit Free Press in this case) blowing a minor story into a huge, huge deal in an attempt to sell papers and make themselves look good. One of the Michigan blogs has a good comparison of the coverage of the story by both newspapers and (non-Michigan) blogs:
http://mgoblog.com/content/reaction-two-parts.
The original article was about the crazy practice hours the players were supposedly forced to endure, but the NCAA found that the extra time was somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes for some practices, or in other cases up to 2 hours per week, mostly due to incorrect interpretation of how stretching was supposed to be counted.
Not to defend the coaching staff totally, some of the other violations seem somewhat more serious, but I bet nothing more than any team could be caught doing if they had the same media problem. It just shows that while some of the major schools really do seem to have protection from local media/DA's offices/etc., we're not alone in having some unfavorable locals looking to bring the program down.