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NCAA showed teeth but not heart in punishing SMU, Brown
Question: How do you hit a home run and strike out on the exact same pitch?
Answer: It ain’t easy, but the NCAA managed to do both on Tuesday with the harsh punishment it handed down to the Southern Methodist University’s men’s basketball program and its Hall of Fame head coach.
After a sweeping investigation that centered on alleged academic fraud with former McDonald’s All-American guard Keith Frazier -- an elite recruit whose commitment to his hometown school signified Brown’s and SMU’s determination to compete with the big boys -- the NCAA on Tuesday handed down a punishment that mirrors the punishment given to Syracuse and Hall of Fame head coach Jim Boeheim earlier this year. Pending an appeal, SMU will be banned from postseason play in 2016 and lose nine scholarships over the next three years. Brown will be suspended nine games during the upcoming season, and the school must vacate wins and faces recruiting restrictions in the future.
When you read the 60-page public infractions decision against SMU, you can’t help but agree that the harsh punishment fits the crime.
But the timing of the punishment -- announcing the ban on postseason play for this season despite the fact classes already began more than a month ago -- is horribly unfair to student-athletes who were innocent bystanders. Pending an appeal, players like seniors Nic Moore and Markus Kennedy now must play their final season of college ball without any hope of a tourney bid -- and without any ability to transfer.
The NCAA punishment accomplishes the seemingly impossible: affirming the organization’s role as the integrity enforcer of college sports while at the same time undercutting its supposed mission of putting student-athletes’ interests first.
First, the punishment itself: Good job, guys! The infractions committee was spot on in coming down hard on the basketball program for the way SMU handled the alleged academic fraud part of this case, as well as the alleged attempted cover-up after the fraud was discovered.
There are other details in the NCAA report, including significant claims about the men’s golf program, but the part that raised the ire of the NCAA goes like this: Frazier was a coup of a recruit for Brown and an SMU program that hadn’t made the NCAA tournament since 1993. He was about to begin his freshman year -- Brown’s second year at SMU -- when an assistant men’s basketball coach encouraged Frazier to sign up for an online course that summer. Getting a good grade in the online course would let Frazier raise his core grade-point average from high school, thus meeting NCAA eligibility standards and allowing him admittance to the university. (In a bit of dark humor from the NCAA report, it turns out Frazier didn’t actually need the extra online course; when an honors course from high school was later recalculated into his GPA, it turned out he was eligible after all.)
The NCAA got the penalties right but the timing wrong when it punished Larry Brown's SMU basketball program.
This is where an administrative assistant at the basketball program stepped in, apparently without Brown’s direct knowledge.
Here is the most egregious part of the NCAA report:
“The former administrative assistant obtained the student-athlete's username and password to his online summer course. She also obtained access to his personal email account. Sometime between June and July 2013, the former administrative assistant completed all of the student-athlete's assignments and exams for the online course.”
There’s your smoking gun, folks. Coupled with an apparent effort to cover up the instance of academic fraud once the investigation began, that’s why the NCAA came down with the hammer.
And it was absolutely the right decision. Regardless of whether you agree with the collegiate system we have in America, where ostensibly amateur student-athletes make millions of dollars for their university in exchange for a free college education, you can’t disagree with the fact that blatantly cheating on academics flies in the face of that system’s mission.
As the report states, “These violations seriously undermined or threatened the integrity of the NCAA Collegiate Model.”
Unfortunately, the timing of the NCAA’s punishment seriously undermines or threatens the NCAA’s moral stance that first and foremost in its mission is protecting the rights and looking out for the interests of student-athletes.
A fellow college basketball writer, Kami Mattioli of Sporting News, put it best: “The NCAA may just as well have come out and said, ‘Screw you, Markus Kennedy and Nic Moore.’ ”
Yes, the NCAA showed teeth, and that’s important in a cut-throat business where cheating must be policed. But the NCAA didn’t show heart, and SMU noted that in its Tuesday press release, excerpted here:
“We are particularly concerned about sanctions that are punitive against student-athletes who were not involved in any infractions. According to NCAA Bylaws, SMU has 15 days to notify the Committee on Appeals or an intention to file an appeal.
“While we accept responsibility for violations, the individuals responsible for the infractions have been held accountable both by the University and by the Committee on Infractions. To punish the student-athletes in the men’s basketball (program) by prohibiting a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to compete in the postseason is simply wrong. It is not what our system of governance should be about and we are considering our response."
You could say Moore and Kennedy should have known this would be a possibility when they committed to play for Brown. After all, he had been involved in major NCAA sanctions at both UCLA and Kansas in the 1980s. When SMU hired Brown after he had spent the past quarter-century coaching professionally, the school itself admitted compliance was an issue where Brown needed to be reeducated: “You can’t just catch up over 25 years in an instant,” the school president said.
But you could also say that players like Moore and Kennedy were easily swayed by the impressive resume of Brown -- the only coach to win an NCAA title and an NBA title -- and by the SMU basketball staff, which is among the most charming, likable and talented groups you’ll find in college basketball. Personally, I’m not going to levy judgment on a teenager for making what armchair quarterbacks can now call a poor decision. That doesn’t show heart, either.
What all this gets to -- beyond the NCAA’s inability to get out of its own way, even when the organization is doing the right thing -- is the institutional problem with the amateur sports model in this country.
If Keith Frazier was not college material, why should he be forced to attend college in order to further his basketball career? (If you’re going to make the argument that Frazier could have went to the NBA D-League or played overseas, I’m going to point out two things: that those aren’t currently viable options for most teenage basketball players and that Frazier has a toddler son, meaning his decision to stay home for college makes a lot of sense.)
And why should academics be linked to sports in the first place?
Sure, there’s been an enormous amount of good that’s come from elite athletes getting free college educations. But that doesn’t mean it makes any sense at all to link the two.
Like most stories about college sports, this is less a story about one coach screwing up or one player cheating or one infractions committee bungling a punishment. It’s a story about a broken system. The NCAA has taken real and important steps in recent years to make the system more friendly to student-athletes. A lot of the silly NCAA violations of the past -- the impermissible text messages sent to recruits, the restrictions on meals for scholarship athletes, the punishing of programs for helping a student-athlete close the gap between his or her financial aid and the actual full cost of attendance -- aren’t considered violations today.
Violations like the ones Brown and the SMU men’s basketball program are accused of are not of the silly sort. These violations, and the just punishment meted out by the NCAA, get to the heart of why we believe amateur collegiate sports to be an essential part of the American landscape. That’s why the NCAA showed teeth on Tuesday. And good on it for doing so.
I just wish the organization had shown heart as well.
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
