2011 The Year of the Scandal: NCAA Style

If you are a collegiate sports fan, you would have to be dead not to have seen or heard all the scandals which have surrounded the NCAA and it’s member institutions over the last year. As a disclaimer, this all actually started long ago, and you could well say that 2010 was the year it all went south, and you would be highly accurate. But 2011 is the year all of the punishment is being doled out, so there you have it.

Southern Cal, UT, Ohio State, all big time programs that are in a world of hurt with the NCAA right now, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Even the venerable Robert Montgomery Knight is calling the NCAA “idiotic” and that’s from a man who supposedly never had a violation in his career. So is there a real concern here for the direction that the NCAA and it’s schools are headed?

Mark Emmert, the new President of the NCAA says he is looking into “tougher” penalties for rule breakers. Great. But how much tougher? And what does that mean for the NCAA? Are they going to go from being a reactive body to being a proactive body? Are we going to see more streamlined processes for appeals, and more effective rules as a whole for governing the institutions it represents? And what of the athletes that the NCAA was designed to protect? Do they have a say in where things are headed?? Why can no one state a clear and discernible position for the NCAA to take? And why are the rules not clear-cut and definite when it comes to the behaviors of coaches and players alike? Why is the compliance department at the NCAA so small when it handles 90% of their activities? And when are the schools themselves going to say that enough is enough?

All of this latest round of violators serve to do is remind everyone that the outlaws are going to break the law until they are no longer outlaws. Many folks is the U.S. claim that legalizing marijuana will put an end to the crime involved with it, and that is true to a certain extent. When there are no more laws, there will be no more outlaws. I would love to think that someone in a white hat riding a tall horse is going to step in and save collegiate athletics from itself. But to be honest, I don’t think collegiate athletics want to be saved from itself or anything else. The truth is that no one wants to know, no one wants to hear, and no one wants to see what is going on right in front of themselves. The only time anything becomes a violation is when the press says so. When the press steps in, everything is up for grabs. And how can anyone expect the kids to follow the rules when the adults are so scared of failure that they won’t call them out on things?

Suffice it to say that when I started this article early this morning, I was not aware of the Hamilton resignation at Tennessee, nor was I aware of Terrell Pryor’s leaving Ohio State. So what do these incidents say about the current situation? Really it is simple. The people who break the rules will scurry about like rats on a sinking ship if it comes down to them or taking the fall . Tennessee got rid of everyone involved with both their basketball and football programs and started from scratch. Ohio State is not only letting their coaches leave, now the players involved are getting out. It is a sad commentary on the state of college athletics that scandals now control the news, and not the performance of the student athlete.

So where does this leave us? We have unfathomable amounts of cash being pumped into colleges and universities around the country from the BCS and the NCAA tournament as well. TV rights are all the rage now. Players want to be compensated for these millions they bring into the institutions of the NCAA, but no one knows how they can do it and control it. I must admit it befuddles me that control be the major issue with this when the schools cannot control the adults on their payroll the very same way they cannot control the kids that attend their schools. It truly disgusts me that this is what it has come to.

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