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We tend to think of the NCAA as a cold, soulless, singular entity, but it’s really just an organization made up of people — good, well-meaning, overworked people. And people don’t like it when the integrity of their work is challenged.
But if the NCAA wants to change the poor perception of its enforcement process, end the notion that it punishes small schools while letting the giants off easy and counter charges that it simply makes up the rules as it goes along, the answer isn’t launching a website and staging a frivolous mock-infractions hearing.
Sick and tired of being called unfair, the NCAA should consider a much simpler remedy: Stop being unfair.
Trying to repair its battered image, the NCAA invited more than a dozen reporters to Indianapolis on Tuesday for “The Enforcement Experience,” a simulation of a major-infractions case from start to finish. Media members were given a fictional set of violations and ushered through all parts of the process from the investigation to the penalties.
“We know our detractors believe the process is unfair, and they accuse the staff of being selective and biased,” vice president for enforcement Julie Roe Lach said in an NCAA release. “We saw this as an opportunity . . . to correct the record.”
Though the NCAA should be commended for trying to shed light on how it delivers justice, it’s useless when the practical application grows more and more bizarre.
In the midst of a robust year for high-profile violations involving Ohio State, Tennessee, Connecticut, North Carolina and Auburn quarterback Cam Newton, the NCAA saved its most significant charge — the dreaded “Lack of Institutional Control” — for Boise State.
In a report made public earlier this month, Boise State was accused of 22 violations across several sports, the most egregious of which were committed in women’s tennis. In football, where Boise has made an unlikely impact on a national scale, the school was accused of providing housing, transportation and meals to 63 players over five years with a total value of $4,934. Those violations included incoming freshmen illegally sleeping on floors of teammates during the summer and getting rides to the airport. One of the “extra benefits” was valued at $2.34. It might be the most frivolous “Lack of Institutional Control” case in NCAA history.
It’s been decades since Jerry Tarkanian said that the NCAA was “so mad at Kentucky, they put Cleveland State on probation,” but college athletics can’t escape the essence of that iconic quote. The NCAA thinks it has a perception problem because people don’t understand how the system works. It’s really just because the system doesn’t work.
I was not invited to attend the “Enforcement Experience,” but the reporters who did — many of whom I consider friends and all of whom are talented professionals — had an overwhelmingly positive response to the seminar. The NCAA accomplished what it set out to accomplish. But no matter how much insight they gained into the nuts-and-bolts of an infractions case, it doesn’t answer the obvious inconsistencies in how the NCAA punishes and enforces rules.
Just think about the headlines we’ve seen in the past year. UConn basketball received only minor, meaningless penalties for using an agent and a booster to recruit a high-profile player. Even as his father admitted to soliciting a pay-for-play scheme, Newton was never suspended, and no school has been accused of violating rules. Oregon paid $25,000 to a “scouting service” run by an alleged street agent, who had connections to two high-profile players in Texas. The North Carolina football program has been probed for both academic misconduct and connecting players with agents.
All of that, and Boise State is the one getting hit with Lack of Institutional Control? That’s an assault on common sense.
We’re in a different era now in NCAA enforcement, with more media outlets than ever writing about violations. Many of the biggest scandals of the last few years – including the massive extra benefit case involving Reggie Bush’s years at USC — originated not with NCAA investigators, but reporters. Now more than ever, the general public knows the difference between sleeping on a floor in Boise and having agents recruit your players.
It’s good that the NCAA recognized the need for more transparency in its infractions process. One compliance source who was involved in a recent, high-profile infractions case said that conversations with Lach and new NCAA president Mark Emmert left them hopeful that the system will improve over time.
But if you’re Boise State facing Lack of Institutional Control after winning two BCS bowl games in the last four years, how do you not feel picked on? Or how about Memphis, which had its 2008 Final Four appearance stripped without the NCAA presenting any evidence that Derrick Rose cheated on his SAT? Watching the likes of UConn and Auburn celebrate national titles this year, it must have felt like the same rules don’t apply.
The NCAA is full of good people, but the real “enforcement experience” has been a failure over the past few years: too many cheaters, too few punishments, too much room for injustice. If the NCAA thinks a mock hearing changes anything, it will continue to be a mockery.
