I'll confess to being a little bit torn.
I used to wonder why the late Jerry Tarkanian had such a bad rep. I'm not gonna argue the guy was the Second Coming of Christ, but a LOT of what he said about the NCAA made sense. Tark is the one who came up with the line that the NCAA was so mad at Kentucky (basketball) that they socked it to Cleveland State.
And he was right.
My problem with the NCAA is there has literally never been ANY sense of proportion with those dunderheads. I know I'm kinda sounding like an old geezer here but - a lot of y'all don't remember times like they were in the 1980s (especially), back when mere allegation would get you plowed up and planted under by the NCAA. The resolution to the Cam Newton saga is NOT what would have happened back in the day - it wouldn't have mattered. If the Cam thing happened at Auburn in 1990 (when the Eric Ramsey scandal happened), they would have been crucified upside down, buried, and been dug up and cremated just out of sheer vindictiveness. What's been going on recently with the slaps on the wrist almost universally (sorry USC and Ohio State) is that the NCAA was weakened by their decade long war with Alabama and another scrap with Mississippi State. And I'm one of those who would rather let a few things slide than hammer schools - since no matter what anyone says ("he was paid"), dollar bills don't catch footballs, don't block pursuit, and don't kick field goals. It's kinda like baseball steroids - yeah, it's cheating, but it does not create ability that is not there.
I covered the Jim Wacker saga in a post a few weeks back (it's earlier in this thread).
But here's some NCAA insanity for you. While Thug U (Miami) put together a really good football team that was talented but talked a lot of trash, everyone.....and I mean EVERYONE......knew that program was dirty. We knew Oklahoma was dirty, too. (And spare me race cards - the best-known player at OU was a white dude named Brian Bosworth, a guy who would later admit to spitting loogies on guys in tackle piles and just being a general jerk). We knew Miami was dirty when Jimmy Johnson was there, okay? This was LATER admitted - long after Jimmy had gone to Dallas and then gone on to NFL Miami. The Hurricanes didn't get hit with probation until 1995.
But there was another Hurricane program that by Gawd the NCAA was gonna make an example of:
NCAA Places Tulsa on 3-Year Probation
Get a load of this:
University of Tulsa officials and athletes expressed shock and dismay Tuesday over an unprecedented decision by
the NCAA to place the entire Hurricane athletic program on three years probation for violations in the school's track and field team.
And this:
In announcing its decision after a two-year investigation, the NCAA said Tulsa would have to forfeit its 1988 NCAA women's golf title, and that none of the Hurricane teams would be allowed to compete in post-season competition for one season.
What makes this absolutely insane is that the track team was the ONLY team with any NCAA violations!!! Imagine if we got stripped of the 2011 national title because an investigation showed that the women's softball team competed with an ineligible player. That's about how much sense that makes. ALL of their sports teams got title game bans even though NONE of them did ANYTHING wrong!!!!
THIS is what B1G is talking about.
The late Don James - who is, in fact, known as "the Bryant of the Pacific Northwest" and who coached Saban at Kent State literally quit just days before the 1993 football season when Washington got popped hard with penalties. This was the problem - schools would go hat in hand and TRY to be honest and say, "Hey, this happened, we didn't know, we're letting you know" and then the NCAA had the arbitrary nature of Darth Vader in deciding who lived or who died. Good men like Wacker and James, who TRIED to run clean programs would lay it all on the table and then basically be told they were scum for letting what they didn't know at the time happen.
I'm honestly not trying to pick on Auburn, but I lived through the Ramsey scandal, and it was in all honesty the most interesting and weird scandal ever - but only because Ramsey had tapes of the transactions. Auburn did just the opposite of what Washington and TCU did - they basically acted like they did in 2010 (well, not quite THAT arrogant) and Pat Dye vehemently denied knowing about anything and then his whole position altered from "I may not be in coaching when this is over" to "I will only speak through my attorneys" to "yeah, I actually did know about that" (and then the NCAA had the gall to say that since Dye was suffering from hemachromatosis, he might not have known exactly what was going on. Are you kidding me, they had Dye at the very least on tape telling Ramsey to go to the Colonial Bank and get a loan).
My point is that Auburn milked that scandal down to the end and except for the one-year TV ban, they got hit much less harder than TCU, Tulsa, or Washington, who all decided to cooperate and be reasonable and got plowed, if you'll pardon the cow college pun.
Miami got blasted, but only after Butch Davis was there and had to deal with it.
And the pettiness of the NCAA was easily demonstrable in the UNLV case. Yeah, UNLV broke some rules, nobody is saying they didn't. But that whole thing blew WAY out of proportion. In fact, that got so crazy that the NCAA wound up suing UNLV, Jerry Tarkanian, and the governor of freaking Nevada over a state law. (Who the hell died and made the NCAA in charge of what laws are right?)
In 1990, UNLV was defending champions. They wound up having a fight with the NCAA that turned into a plea bargain: "Okay, we'll let you defend your title in 1991, but we're hitting you with a hammer after that." But to do that, Tark had to drop a lawsuit that had been dragging through the courts for 13 years AND agree to a post-season ban AND no TV for the 1991-92 season. (UNLV - like Miami - was hurt by their locale; not hard to see shady dealings in a school in the center of USA legal gambling).
On the flip side - Ole Miss has all but dared the NCAA to fire a nuclear weapon, too. I don't want them overly crippled, but in their case there is so little sophistication to the argument. It's the old small town mentality at work, us vs them.
