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The NCAA accused Michigan of failing to comply with practice time
rules under coach Rich Rodriguez, who admitted making "mistakes"
but will be back for a third try at bringing college football's
winningest program back into the national title hunt.
Incoming athletic director David Brandon disclosed the NCAA
conclusions Tuesday, but said there were no surprises in the
report. He expressed full support for his coach, who is 8-16 in two
disappointing seasons.
"Rich Rodriguez is our football coach, and he will be our
football coach next year," he said.
In its notice of allegations -- which Michigan received
Monday -- the NCAA said Rodriguez "failed to promote an atmosphere
of compliance within the football program," and tracked neither
what his staff was doing nor whether his players were following
NCAA rules. It also said the athletics department failed to make
sure its football program was complying with NCAA regulations.
Brandon said the department "clearly made mistakes," but
"there was no charge of loss of institutional control" - an
allegation that in previous cases has led to NCAA sanctions for
other schools.
Michigan has 90 days to respond and will appear at an NCAA
hearing on infractions in August. Michigan is seeing how its
internal investigation matches up with the NCAA findings and will
consider implementing self-imposed sanctions.
The NCAA said last October that it was looking into the
program following an August report in the Detroit Free Press. The
newspaper, citing anonymous football players, reported that
Michigan exceeded NCAA limits regarding practices and workouts in
2008 and 2009.
Rodriguez, who signed a six-year deal worth $2.5 million per
season, tearfully defended his program just five days before the
season-opener, saying he and his staff have followed the rules. He
suggested the complaints were an attempt to "tear up" his
rebuilding effort following a 3-9 season.
On Tuesday, the coach said if the football staff
misinterpreted NCAA rules, "That's on us."
"We're looking at it to see why we misinterpreted and why we
made mistakes," he said.
NCAA regulations allow players to spend eight hours a week on
mandatory workouts during the offseason. Players told the Free
Press they spent two to three times that amount on required
workouts, though the NCAA report released Tuesday said players more
often exceeded the limit by two hours per week in most cases.
The players also said the amount of time they spent on
football activities during the season exceeded the weekly limit of
20 hours and often exceeded the daily limit of four hours. They
said football staff often watched seven-on-seven offseason
scrimmages that are supposed to be voluntary and that only training
staff are allowed to attend.
Near the end of last season, the school released embarrassing
details of an internal audit that discovered Rodriguez's team
failed to file forms tracking how much time players spent on
football during his first season and the following offseason.
The audit looked into compliance areas for several Michigan
teams, including the football and men's basketball programs.
Auditors reviewed practice logs for a week during the season and a
week in the offseason.
It found "a concern" that the football program failed to file
monthly Countable Athletically Related Activities forms created by
the school to track how much players work out and practice. The
forms are a tool to comply with the NCAA rules.
The school report did not find issues of noncompliance -- a
key issue for NCAA investigators -- but acknowledged the practice
logs for football were not available to be reviewed when the audit
was conducted. The forms since had been turned in on a timely
basis, according to the school.
"My reading of the situation is we had a breakdown of
communication," Brandon said Tuesday. "We found we were not being
vigilant in the way those (time records) were being filled and
managed."
The time record system that the football staff designed "was
too cumbersome to manage" and is being changed.
Brandon, who takes over as athletic director on March 8,
called Tuesday "a tough day" and said the Ann Arbor school was
taking "full responsibility for those events that brought us to
this point."
"We will dedicate ourselves to learning from this and doing
everything we can to prevent it from happening again in the
future," said Brandon, the outgoing chairman and CEO of Domino's
Pizza.
According to his contract, Rodriguez can be fired for cause
if the NCAA, the Big Ten or the school determines he has committed
a major violation of NCAA rules or he has intentionally committed
any other type of violation of NCAA rules.
