NCAA Infractions and Compliance: Physician, Heal Thyself

Well folks it had to happen sooner or later. You start renovating a house, you are going to run into some problems. Timber’s may be rotted, termites may have infested, your electrical system and plumbing is not up to code, those kinds of things. Any carpenter or contractor worth his salt will tell you that whatever you budget for a project, add 20-30% for cost overruns. And if you are a lousy carpenter like I am, throw in another 10% for mistakes.

Mark Emmert now wants to renovate the NCAA. He wants to upgrade, modernize, reinforce, and maybe even restore some of the luster the organization once had. Problem is, he has some serious rot in his walls. The termites which infest the NCAA have laid claim to taking down some serious programs in the years that Paul Dee was head of the infractions committee. USC suffered the wrath of Dee like no one before or since. Now, I do not claim for an instant that USC was clean, or should be vindicated in any way, but the hypocrisy that comes from the very idea that Paul Dee handed down an infractions penalty or was involved in investigating anyone is sheer lunacy.

Dee oversaw a program which received, “sex, money, meals, some jewelry, whatever they needed …”, quoting Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports. Is this the model for which Emmert is using to determine “expanded benefits” for NCAA players? And how is it that the NCAA knew nothing about Miami’s exploits before they put Dee in place anyway? Where was the background check? Who was minding the store when this one went down? And how does a man who’s program received the kinds of NCAA violations that Miami actually got during his fifteen year tenure get to be the head of the infractions committee? Is this not the most glaring case of the fox guarding the chicken coop that anyone has ever seen?

Dennis Dodd from CBS Sports does an even better job of making this out than I do, mostly because he tries to maintain a much more civil tone than suits me at this point. I try my best to get behind Emmert and his reforms, simply because they have the intent of making things better on the surface. But I find myself torn more and more each and every day between reform and refuse. Maybe we just need to take out all the trash and start over.

Most folks who know me understand that I have a disdain for just about everything the NCAA represents, simply because I don’t think that you can have the people committing the violations in charge of investigating other people who are committing violations. Anyone seeing a pattern here? A guy puts in 20-25 or 30 years in collegiate athletics, braking every rule in the book, and his reward for sticking it out all that time is to get to go run the NCAA’s infractions committee??

There has to be a MAJOR change in the NCAA and it needs to happen right now. Mr. Emmert, if you really want to be taken seriously, resign from the University of Washington effective immediately, remove every NCAA staff member that has any ties to any school that are more than incidental, and start over. If you want to run the show, fine. But you take every school everywhere completely out of the picture and start making some really hard choices. It is the only way the NCAA is ever going to regain it’s credibility.

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