Lingering Items--Penalties Edition

Whether the sanctions levied against Ohio State were too harsh or too lenient may be a matter of perspective. That won’t stop nearly anyone from questioning athletic director Gene Smith’s competency, however.

The biggest surprise levied against the Buckeyes was the 2012 bowl ban. Otherwise it seems like things pretty much went down as expected. When Ohio State self-imposed a litany of sanctions against the program, all they really did was give the NCAA a little wriggle room to make a few additional tweaks in order to look like it wasn’t just simply taking the Buckeyes’ word on everything.

So the tweak they made was not the one that was expected mainly because Smith was emphatic time and again that a bowl ban wasn’t on the horizon. So sure was Smith, in fact, that he didn’t even contemplate pre-empting the NCAA on that count by making the 6-6 Buckeyes sit home this bowl season instead.

What fans have now is a meaningless Gator Bowl to soothe their feelings when what they really wanted was to hit like the hurricane new head coach Urban Meyer promised for next season, play for the Big Ten title and possibly a national championship.

Smith is taking more heat for this then perhaps he deserves, though he does deserve some. It’s difficult to take Smith to task for the underlying infraction given former head coach Jim Tressel’s conduct. And assuming the conspiracy theorists are just that and Tressel didn’t take a bullet for Smith (what would be his incentive for that?), Smith’s only real sin was not level setting his bosses or the fans of the program.

The feeling always has been that Smith is wired into the NCAA in ways that other athletic directors are not. Every time he spoke, in that semi-sincere, semi-arrogant way of his, it carried the imprimatur that he knew from where he spoke. It turns out he was just as clueless as nearly everyone else in this whole matter.

One of the cardinal sins you can make in any organization is to overpromise and under deliver, which is exactly what Smith did here. Had he kept his mouth shut and just said that he hopes that the university had done enough to satisfy the NCAA, I doubt anyone would have been surprised by the bowl ban. After all, the NCAA is a random, feckless, morally undisciplined enterprise rife with conflicts of interest and wholly incapable of governing a church picnic, let alone a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

But the one thing to remember is that the NCAA Committee of Infractions ultimately is a group of individuals with their own feelings and emotions and the last thing individuals with their own feelings and emotions want is someone who carries the imprimatur of authority, like Smith, telling them what they should or shouldn’t do.

In many ways, Smith’s constant proclamations that a bowl ban was not in the offing served almost as a dare to the NCAA. So where’s the surprise that they did knock the battery off of Smith’s shoulder only to watch him flinch?

I have very mixed feelings about the sanctions overall. Much of my trepidation is with how the NCAA treated Tressel, a very fine man and educator, who made a serious mistake. But a 5-year “show cause” finding is particularly harsh. It may be that Tressel wasn’t going to coach again in college anyway, but to basically be told that he can’t earn a living at his chosen profession for the next 5 years is an astounding penalty given his one indiscretion.

As for the bowl ban, that seems harsh if only because while the Buckeyes did play in last year’s Sugar Bowl, part of their sanctions was to forfeit the game and give back the money earned. Effectively, it’s as if they have been banned from two bowl games.

Yet the NCAA isn’t going to do much to explain its reasoning mainly because it doesn’t have to, which gets to the other side of my feelings about this. I understand that the conduct engaged in by the Buckeyes’ players broke a rule and I understand that Tressel covered it up deliberately. But the rule makes no sense in any context but one in which the NCAA doesn’t want anyone else earning money that could have instead lined their pockets. The fact that Tressel covered it up just proves the adage, though, that the cover up is often worse then the underlying breach.

I know that a lot of fans are calling for Smith to be fired and maybe he should be as part of the overall housecleaning. I’m not sure he could have ferreted out Tressel’s misconduct but some of the other activities that went unchecked are a failure that occurred under Smith’s watch. He should have had more robust systems in place.

Ultimately, though, the NCAA matters are now finally behind the Buckeyes. Sure they’ll linger because of the bowl ban and scholarship reductions, but the football program itself is on solid footing right now. Besides, it gives Meyer and the players the added chip on their shoulders for the 2012 season and should set them up well for 2013 and beyond. The hurricane may be delayed, but it’s still a good bet that it will hit ground and leave appropriate damage in its wake.

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James Harrison, the NFL’s reigning and most clueless thug, seems to have reluctantly accepted the fact that his vicious hit on Colt McCoy was illegal. The revelation came to him apparently about the time he lost his appeal and the rest of his Pittsburgh Steelers teammates, while publicly supporting him, privately sate him down and told him that his brutish ways were actually hurting the team far more then helping. That it happened in the wake of a bad loss to the San Francisco 49ers is just a bonus.

But Harrison, as is his wont, doesn’t go down without a fight and thus surmised that the Browns as well should be fined or otherwise penalized for not properly attending to McCoy. So we have Harrison adamantly denying he did anything wrong for most of the last two weeks suddenly getting religion and becoming the voice of concern for McCoy?

Harrison is like the criminal who in the course of robbing a house gets bitten by the watch dog and then sues the homeowner. Lacking an ability to process either irony or context Harrison should just shut his mouth and play within the rules, assuming he can which actually may not be a safe assumption at all.

Meanwhile the Browns were indeed let off the hook for their malpractice when it came to safeguarding their starting quarterback but the rest of the NFL must now pay a price by staging so-called independent athletic trainers in the press box to oversee all the vicious hits and make suggestions to each team’s medical staff as to which players they may want to administer an exam to.

I’m happy whenever the NFL creates additional jobs, particularly for athletic trainers. I wonder, though, exactly why the NFL went macro on this instead of focusing specifically on the fact that the Browns medical and coaching staff screwed up. Indeed, the Browns’ medical staff for the last several years has a distinct history of putting its players in jeopardy but yea, it sounds like the NFL has an institutional problem.

It may very well be that the Browns and their medical staff needed some tough love in the form of some kind of penalty given their history but then again what we know most about the NFL is that they are very reticent to punish management and very pleased to punish the players.

The person to feel sorry for here is McCoy. He’s about to miss his second straight game and whatever grip he had on the Browns’ starting quarterback job. More than that, though, he very easily could have lost his life or at least suffered some permanent damage when he was sent back into the game seconds after getting his brains scrambled.

There was a teaching moment here just not the one the NFL focused on.

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The Cleveland Indians continue to make their quiet offseason noise by signing any retread with a pulse that they can find. The latest contestant in this year’s version of “Who Can Fill the Shoes of David Dellucci?” is Andy “Don’t Call Me Either Adam or Dave” LaRoche.

This LaRoche, the son of former Tribe closer Dave LaRoche, a mediocre pitcher from the mid 1970s, brings a resume that includes a .247 average with 5 RBI in 40 games last season. But there’s more. LaRoche’s high water mark, batting average-wise, is .258.

If it makes you wonder why anyone would continue to sign LaRoche given his age (28) and the fact that he’s never done anything of note at any time for any major league team he played for, just follow the money. LaRoche, like so many that the Indians sign every offseason, is on a minor league contract. The team pays more in laundry bills then it would have to pay LaRoche.

If by chance he makes the big league team out of training camp, and if he does, look out, then he’ll make the major league minimum, which for 2012 is slightly more than $400,000. In other words, what LaRoche lacks in skills he more then makes up for in the fact that he works cheaply.

The one good thing to keep in mind in all of this is that Eric Wedge is no longer the team’s manager. LaRoche is just the kind of player that Wedge loved, mainly because LaRoche’s baseball skills approximate those that Wedge possessed as a player. That would have meant only one thing: a spring and early summer of screaming at the television every time LaRoche grounded out weakly with runners in scoring position.

**

The Cavs start their season in a few days, which leads to this week’s question to ponder: Will the Cavs take Jared Sullinger with the first pick in next year’s draft?

Happy Holidays, everyone.

Shades of Scarlet and Gray

Somewhere, Cam Newton just smiles.

Maybe the Ohio State Buckeyes players suspended Wednesday by the NCAA just should have had their fathers negotiate the memorabilia sale. That's the lesson I think the NCAA was trying to send when it suspended quarterback Terrelle Pryor and four of his teammates on Friday for selling their own personal items to a shady Columbus tattoo parlor owner, as if there were any other kind of tattoo parlor owner.

Assuming that Pryor and his suspended teammates return for their senior season, the Buckeyes will have to muddle through the first four or five games without them as they ponder their sins if they can just figure out exactly what they were.

See, the NCAA, with a rulebook as thick as the skulls of the people that enforce it, had to figure out for themselves why it is that student-athletes can't sell items that are rightfully theirs for whatever the market price might be. They eventually landed on something and now the players will be carrying a scarlet and gray A on their records for the rest of their lives.

Meanwhile, Cam Newton just smiles.

The danger of pointing out the ludicrous nature of what just took place at Ohio State is that you'll be labeled a Buckeye apologist. But the alternative is to assume that the rules in this case are black and white, which they aren't, and that nothing about this situation yields even the slightest shade of gray. In truth, that's all there is here, every shade of gray imaginable.

Let's put this into context, shall we? Pryor and Company didn't break any laws, at least the kinds of laws that you and I adhere to each and every day as we muddle through life. What they did was violate a NCAA rule that when bent to read whatever you want it to read says that items you were given for your accomplishments on the field aren't really yours until you leave college. Thus if you try to do with them what millions of others do with similar items via EBay each and every day, your eligibility will be in jeopardy.

Meanwhile, Cam Newton just smiles.

What I'm still having difficulty understanding, and I'm a lawyer, is exactly what Pryor and company did wrong. Personally it bothers me that the group placed such low value on awards they received like Big 10 championship rings and gold pants awarded for beating Michigan each season that they had no qualms about selling them. (OK, I understand the gold pants because, frankly, how many do you really need?) But that's a moral issue of sorts, not legal.

Surely if a player has a 1998 Ford Escort or a bike he wants to sell, the NCAA would not have a problem or perhaps a far lesser problem anyway. But because these were awards each earned on the field, suddenly it's a problem, a really big problem, the kind of problem that requires really, really harsh punishment.

Meanwhile, Cam Newton just smiles.

It's a fine line and one that doesn't exactly make sense. One guess is that the NCAA is most concerned about the uniqueness of the items (except, of course, the gold pants for beating Michigan which, after the last 10 years, are as plentiful as grains of sand on a Florida beach) because they garner a higher price from the shady sorts trafficking in memorabilia that makes the NCAA nervous. But if that's the issue then it's easy enough to say when awarding the items that it is against the NCAA rules to resell them while still in college, except that there is no NCAA rule on the book that actually says just that.

Which is why even if you understand the policy implications at work the action that took place here still doesn't make sense.

That a generic NCAA rule would be interpreted thusly came as a bit of a surprise to everyone involved, including, by the way, the NCAA. It admitted in doling out this particularly harsh punishment that its education on this rule at exactly the time it was supposedly violated was less than stellar. Then it went ahead and whacked the players a tad harder because they didn't report their misconduct, which they didn't know was misconduct, sooner. This circular logic makes sense only in the context of the NCAA giving themselves enough wiggle room down the road to negotiate down the punishment a bit as a concession to the fact that their decision is questionable in the first place.

Meanwhile, Cam Newton just smiles.

This is what aggravates most. Newton escaped any punishment whatsoever even though the NCAA had verifiable proof that the person closest to him, his father, was trying to sell him to the highest bidder. In the NCAA's view, it wouldn't be fair to punish Newton because he could smile and say. “gee, I didn't know my dad was doing that. He just told me where to go to school and I showed up.”

Pryor, Posey, Herron and Admas will get no such leeway. They knew they sold their stuff and they knew they made a little money off of it when doing so. They just didn't know it was a violation of any rules. Why would they?

The scuttlebutt is that the players, or at least some of them, sold the items to help out their families. It's a nice little twist to the story that makes their decisions a little more understandable (assuming it's true), but even if they kept the money for themselves I still struggle to understand the problem.

As scholarship athletes they get their education free. I've paid plenty of tuition to plenty of colleges so I understand the value of what the athletes are given in exchange for performing on the field like trained seals. It's not insubstantial. But they don't get a cash stipend as athletes and they don't dare work part time anywhere because of all the problems that can cause with the NCAA. Not all of them come from even middle class backgrounds and thus don't have parents with enough means to front them the spending money that nearly every other non-athlete has as they go about their college lives.

Meanwhile, Cam Newton just smiles.

As a lawyer, I understand intimately that ignorance of the law is never an excuse. Imagine if it were? But this isn't the law, it's a freewheelin' NCAA rulebook whose application changes seemingly every other minute. And if you don't believe that then just consider how the NCAA dug out an even more arcane provision of that rulebook to make sure the 5 players weren't suspended for the Sugar Bowl.

Basically, the enforcement folks felt that punishing the players for the Sugar Bowl would have been to the extreme detriment to the Bowl itself and all the fans from both teams that plunked down cash to attend. In other words, the NCAA wanted to appear magnanimous in not punishing the innocent for the sins of a few.

It's a nice thought, certainly, but how about all the innocent players the the NCAA has punished over the years because their ex-coach ran afoul of NCAA rules? Is it fair that 80 or so players at USC for example must suffer the consequences of the real sins of Reggie Bush (a player who knew he was violating about the only black letter rule the NCAA has) and the athletic director and coaching staff that facilitated those sins? Aren't they innocent victims suffering far worse and for a far longer period of time than anyone who may have plunked down their dollars to see a meaningless Sugar Bowl game just because they thought Terrelle Pryor would be playing?

Meanwhile, Cam Newton just smiles.

What this all demonstrates, really, is that the NCAA enforcement process has grown beyond the ability of the current regime to handle it. The issues are more complex than a rulebook written in the 1950s can now handle and every time they try to apply outdated rules to modern situations they end up with answers that undoubtedly are going to leave everyone scratching their heads.

Now of course the Buckeye haters out there are relishing the suspensions because, well, they are Buckeye haters. Nothing breeds contempt like success. But the real cautionary note in all of this is that the inconsistent hand of the NCAA will come down anywhere at any time. So before you start feeling righteous about your team and looking down your nose at another's misfortune, just know that sooner or later that random hand will come down on your team as well. It always does.

Self-Flagellation, Michigan Style

It used to be that the biggest thing the University of Michigan football program worried about was whether or not it had enough firepower to compete for a national title. Now its chief concern is whether it can effectively stay one step ahead of the law.

After the Detroit Free Press last fall published a series of stories about various potential NCAA infractions within the Michigan football program under new head coach Rich Rodriguez, followed by the usual official but vague denials and the requisite teeth gnashing by the Michigan faithful, it turns out that the smoke really was coming from a fire blazing inside the program.

After conducting its own investigation, the University of Michigan slapped its own self on the wrist with a bunch of mostly meaningless “sanctions” as a way of wiping away the mess that Rodriguez visited upon its football program starting about 20 minutes after he got the job in December, 2007.

The story started when some of Rodriguez’s own players outed him and his staff for a variety of matters including having them practice in excess of NCAA imposed time limits. Once the NCAA got done with its preliminary investigation, it determined that Rodriguez exceeded the number of authorized coaches by 5, permitted staff members to monitor and conduct supposedly voluntary summer workouts, and had a graduate assistant coach lie to NCAA investigators about his role. The NCAA also accused Rodriguez of not monitoring his program closely enough and for essentially bullying the university’s compliance staff into not nosing around.

At the time the university promised to investigate but mostly downplayed the seriousness of the inquiry despite recent violations by its basketball program that threatened to turn the football allegations into a loss-of-institutional-control case. Rodriguez, ever the smarmy ne’er do well, admitted to nothing and said that hypothetically if violations occurred then it was all just one big misunderstanding.

Some misunderstanding. Fulfilling the prophecy of its knee-jerk reaction to the allegations in the first place, the university admitted that indeed infractions occurred, several in fact, but it’s all pretty minor stuff. Now a cynic might suggest that Michigan is downplaying the seriousness of this all because it doesn’t want to be labeled a repeat offender by the NCAA. But why be cynical? Let’s just give the big fat benefit of the doubt and let the facts do most of the talking.

At the very least, the investigation Michigan conducted revealed some sobering realities. Michigan has never had any allegations in the 100+ years of its program, that is until Rodriguez arrived. Moreover, it’s not as if Michigan admitted only to one or two items. There were multiple violations on a whole host of issues ranging from improper conduct of assistant coaches to poor recordkeeping to an internal compliance department that was subservient to the football program to an assistant who lied during the investigation. For all that to surface in the less than two years under Rodriguez doesn’t speak well for anyone associated with the university no matter how minor you think the violations might be.

As a result, Michigan self-imposed a variety of very minor penalties such as cutting practice time, cutting the number of assistant coaches and putting itself on probation. What exactly probation means isn’t quite clear because the university didn’t bother to explain it any better than that. Let’s just say that they didn’t vow to keep themselves out of any bowl games or cut scholarships or do any other kinds of acts that are usually the hallmarks of substantive probation.

The problem with the university’s response is that they are so busy detailing the differences between each cattail that they don’t realize they are in the middle of a swamp that Rodriguez brought to them. There’s a lot of “everybody else does it” to their defense even as they disclaim any attempt to justify their actions on the basis of other programs’ alleged violations.

They talk about how Rodriguez has increased the number of so-called quality control coaches (essentially paid go-fers) from what is was under Lloyd Carr but then say, hey, every team has lots of them. Then conveniently buried in a footnote is an acknowledgement that virtually none of these quality control types have had the requisite training or certifications they needed to be engaged in the activities they supposedly were responsible for.

It begs the question, what were they really doing? The university doesn’t address this point despite how central that really is to the underlying allegations that these go-fers were essentially spies for Rodriguez and the rest of his staff when NCAA rules won’t allow them to be around, such as during supposedly voluntary summer workouts or extra film sessions.

Something that’s bound to get the notice of NCAA investigators reading the university’s response is how quickly the university was willing to throw its own compliance staff under the bus in favor of trying to preserve Rodriguez’s credibility, a nearly impossible task at this point. The university acknowledges that its compliance staff asked the right questions of Rodriguez when it inquired about what exactly these quality control coaches were supposedly doing and why certain forms weren’t getting filled out but then blames that same quality control staff for not following up when Rodriguez and his staff stonewalled them for answers. That’s like blaming an assault victim because the 911 operator forgot to dispatch his call to the police.

The university’s considered decision to blame the compliance staff and not Rodriguez is all part of the larger defense of Rodriguez. Specifically the university goes to great lengths to deny any allegations that Rodriguez failed to promote an atmosphere of compliance within the program despite the numerous violations it admits to.

The university attempts to reconcile the conflict between the numerous violations and their belief that they nonetheless don’t have a culture of non-compliance by essentially admitting that instead they merely have a culture of stupidity. They suggest that the NCAA rules are just so gosh darn hard to understand sometimes and that Rodriguez is trying, he really is.

I’d say the university is completely tone deaf both in its official response and in what it said during its recent press conference as to the seriousness of the allegations but they are abject apologists compared to Rodriguez. Forced by the NCAA to issue his own response to the allegations made against him, Rodriguez goes to great lengths to put it all into his version of context. And that version? Compliance isn’t a one person job. A lot of people didn’t do their jobs and poor Richard was just one cog in that wheel of misfortune.

Rodriguez tries to distance himself from most of what occurred by saying that heck he didn’t even know that people weren’t counting training hours correctly and gosh he had no idea that his staff wasn’t responding to the university’s compliance staff or geez he was completely unaware that the NCAA had a rule about that, go figure.

He essentially paints himself as a well-intentioned babe in the Michigan woods caught wholly unaware by all the intricacies of the NCAA’s reach. That would have all played better if Rodriguez was a first-time coach. He wasn’t and spent much of the introduction to his response trumpeting his Division I experience, pre-Michigan.

For all of that the university did issue Rodriguez a written reprimand, a copy of which wasn’t included in the university’s response. I assume, however, that as Dean Wormer would say, this isn’t going to look good on his permanent record.

The university’s athletic director, David Branden, was asked at a press conference recently whether Rodriguez would be terminated. Branden acknowledged that violation of NCAA rules could be grounds for termination but said that in this case it wasn’t warranted because the infractions, essentially, weren’t all that serious.

There’s probably some justification to that position. Yet a more compelling case can be made the other way. In his two years at Michigan all Rodriguez has done on the field is shame the program. Now he’s shamed it off the field as well. I understand trying to make something work. But eventually Michigan will tire of trying to force this square peg into a round hole and Rodriguez will be gone, off to somewhere that should be more used to NCAA violations. Maybe they’re all just waiting for the USC job to open up again.