Southern Cal suspends three football players for academics while Bush and Mayo investigations march on
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“We’re really disappointed these guys didn’t come through,” said Southern California Trojans head football coach Pete Carroll. “They had all the help in the world to get it done, and they didn’t do it.” via the Los Angeles Times.
No, Carroll is not referring to the results of the long-running NCAA investigation into his former player Reggie Bush, who is accused of illegally accepting thousands of dollars of gifts from marketers hoping to sign the 2005 Heisman Award winner once he went to the NFL.
Nor is Carroll speaking on behalf of the USC athletic department on the NCAA’s findings of its investigation into allegations that star Trojans basketball player O.J. Mayo similarly took cash and other high-priced gifts while playing under the guise of amateur college athletics.
The bad news coming out of Southern California is academics. Three football players for the Trojans didn’t do well enough in class to play Boston College in the school’s Dec. 26 Emerald Bowl game. Starters Anthony McCoy and Tyron Smith and utility defensive tackle Averell Spicer didn’t meet the NCAA’s low-bar academic standards to continue playing this Saturday.
As Carroll alludes to in his statement, it is true that NCAA student-athletes get everything they need to stay eligible — free tutors, athlete-only computer labs, priority class enrollment and so forth.
But it seems that at USC, student-athletes may be getting another type of help that isn’t allowed by NCAA rules — improper payments and support from boosters, agents and marketers hoping to cash in on certain athletes’ success.
Late last week, news surfaced that Trojans tailback Joe McKnight faces scrutiny from the USC athletics department for perhaps driving a car belonging to a local businessman, which is definitely against NCAA rules.
But one has to wonder what rules mean to the NCAA, if anything. Multi-year investigations into USC have revealed nothing.
The NCAA has been looking into the Reggie Bush matter since 2006. A New York Times reporter, Don Yaeger did not need much time to do his own investigation into the Bush matter. He published a book in 2008 about Bush’s suspicious relationship with marketers who allegedly curried favor with the running back and his family through exorbitant gifts while hoping they could earn his business when he went to the NFL. Yaeger’s book isn’t the definitive investigation of Bush, but it throughly documents a number of questionable transactions involving Bush and these sports agents, such as this receipt for $1,574 in charges for Bush to stay at a hotel — a $639 room rate coupled with a $42 breakfast room service and various other charges — on the agent’s dime while Bush was still supposed to be an amateur athlete.
So while the NCAA has been languishing on the Bush investigation, it decided to roll up the Mayo investigation into the Bush affair. But nothing has come of that, either. The Orange County Register reported last week that the NCAA is trying to build a case to demonstrate USC’s “lack of institutional control,” which is NCAA-speak similar to a judge telling a defendant, “I remand you to custody of the Bureau of Prisons.”
Except NCAA sanctions rarely have that kind of teeth. The NCAA found the University of Kansas lacked institutional control in 2006 due to several athletic department violations, but the school just got put on probation. That means a few sports will lose a couple scholarships and a promise that they won’t screw up again, but that’s about it.
Of course, the NCAA could be dragging its feet on the USC case because it may not have much of one. Maybe Bush and Mayo and McKnight are being railroaded unfairly. But anyone familiar with the NCAA and the way it handles investigations of big college sports programs, particularly successful ones, knows that these investigations have an air of finality to them. Little, if anything, will ever come of them. The NCAA can’t afford to to throw a program like USC to the enforcement wolves.
After all, it’s not like Bush and Mayo were flunking their humanities courses. Imagine if that had been the case.
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Two things to remember about the NCAA:
1. It has no subpoena power.
2. It is a membership organization.
No. 2 is the most important part. The NCAA is not some outside entity entrusted with enforcing college athletics rules. It is an organization paid for by its members — the schools it is supposed to be investigating. As such, it can only come down hard when the membership wants it to, on who the membership wants it to. Hence, the running joke that if some major school is in trouble, Cleveland State had better watch out.
Once the “death penalty” against SMU really did effectively kill it as a major football power, that was end of the membership demanding extreme justice.
The biggest problem with the NCAA investigation/adjudication process is that it’s entirely opaque and there’s no real standard for evidence or even consistency in enforcement. I’m not defending USC. In fact, to slam USC now would fly in the face of NCAA precedents set at other schools.
At the end of the day, the NCAA process is entirely arbitrary, suggesting it has more to do with old-boy politics and favor-swapping than anything else.
Frankly, this notion that Div. I college football and basketball players are “amateurs” is ridiculous. Lots of money is being made by conferences and schools on the backs of these kids. I say — take CFB and CBB out of NCAA world and give them semi-pro/minor-league status.
[...] NFL fortunes. If found guilty, that would be a second major infraction within five years, assuming the NCAA can ever get is investigation wrapped up. If that happens, the death penalty, which hasn’t been used in any meaningful fashion by the [...]
[...] it pertains to various investigations with ongoing alleged player scandals. The best known is the Reggie Bush Affair, where the former Heisman-winning running back has been accused of taking thousands of dollars [...]
[...] Matt Snyder wrote an interesting post today on  Here’s a quick excerpt  “We’re really disappointed these guys didn’t come through,” said Southern California Trojans head football coach Pete Carroll. “They had all the help in the world to get it done, and they didn’t do it.” via the Los Angeles Times. [...]