Kind of lost in the mess brought about by the rampant inappropriate conduct at the University of North Carolina is the best-as-anyone-can-tell unprecedented accusation of a failure to monitor Twitter.

It’s not specifically stated to be that way, but when you take a read, you clearly can tell the NCAA is bothered by what  it believes is UNC’s negligence in social media. Here’s a snippet from the ninth item in the Notice of Allegations:

“In February through June 2010, the institution did not adequately and consistently monitor social networking activity that visibly illustrated potential amateurism violations within the football program, which delayed the institution’s discovery and compounded the provision of impermissible benefits provided in Allegation No. 4-a, 4-c, 4-d and 4-e.”

Defensive tackle Marvin Austin liked to tweet about various luxuries and even shot pictures of them online. He was later dismissed from the team and two others were ruled permanently ineligible for accepting improper benefits and then lying to the NCAA. The NCAA suggests Austin was giving away clues about his misdeeds and that problem may have been stopped sooner and never mushroomed into what it became if UNC had its fingers on the mouse and its eyes on Twitter and Facebook and all the other networks like them.

And again, no one has even been slapped like this before. What happens next is the real story.

There isn’t a true precedent case to use to make a guess about how the NCAA may digest this issue or how it might penalize it. There’s no way to know what the NCAA expected a school to do to prevent it — and really, there’s almost nothing a school can do to prevent it.

WVU, like many other schools, monitors what its student-athletes do online, but it’s all but impossible to see everything from everyone every moment of every day of the week. WVU, and others, are reactive. They discover something that is or could be a problem, or have it brought to their attention, and address it. Sometimes they have to report it.

It’s about as proactive as you can be in a reactive approach — and that’s not a criticism of the system, but rather, I think, the best way to describe it. Schools have their hands tied in this matter because of manpower and resources in compliance departments.

The trouble is the NCAA may very well say it’s not good enough. Not now, in this day and age, when UNC has apparently shown how much can go wrong, but also how much a school could be expected to prevent it.

“If they say UNC never, ever went out and looked at any kid’s page and that’s not reasonable, yeah, I can get there,” Cunningham said.

“If they’re going to say, ‘Oh, no, they should have been out there for this prescribed time period watching this many student-athletes,’ that’s where the red flag comes in. Perhaps they say it’s a failure to monitor because they had enough information to send them to those sites and see for themselves. We just don’t know yet, but I think the UNC issue could potentially dictate something a lot more standard.”