Five Ohio State players were found to have broken NCAA rules by receiving benefits and will be suspended for the first five games of the 2011 season. They will remain eligible for the upcoming Sugar Bowl.
The linked article claims the NCAA is just making up rules as they go, and it’s hard to argue against that. Punishments are so wildly inconsistent as to be blatantly obvious that the NCAA cares far, far more about making $$$ than actually enforcing its own set of rules. Certainly, if Pryor and other Ohio State players would have let their parents collect the benefits, I’m sure we’d have no issue at all. As it is, suspension that begins next season for transgressions that took place a year ago for these Ohio State players is absurd. Can anyone take the NCAA seriously?
Even individual rules that make sense seem absurd when you look at more serious violations that go unpunished.
Terrelle Pryor is being punished MUCH more harshly for getting a free tattoo than Cam Newton was for demanding money from schools (oh yeah, right, his DAD did that, and he had NO idea anything was happening!).
The NCAA IS a joke. But, they are the joke in power, and they keep themselves in power, which is kind of fascinating to me (kind of like a company’s HR department, but I digress).
The fact they are permitted to play in the bowl shows that the NCAA cares about the MONEY (that is the common thread through life, remember kids.), and not about any rules. If the suspensions were serious, kick them out of the bowls for game one of the suspension.
I hate the NCAA, and college football and basketball in general because of the NCAA. They ruin everything they touch.
off the topic, but it shows the stupidity of the NCAA… for most of my life, football programs were designated Division I, 1-AA, II, III, and whatever. Now, Division 1 teams are FBS teams. Which means Division I, but not really. FBS stands for Football Bowl Subdivision. For the BCS, the Bowl Championship Series. Division I-AA is now referred to as The Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), formerly known as Division I-AA.
How long until a big university, or even conference, says to hell with the NCAA? Could some teams break away from the NCAA and do their own thing? Obviously, because of the dollars involved, it is very unlikely. But stuff like this makes me wonder if university presidents and ADs could ever get fed up enough with NCAA to do something about it.
I remember a few years ago there was a quiet congressional investigation into the NCAA for potentially abusing its tax-exempt status as a non-profit, did anything ever come out of that of note?
I’m curious: If they had given these rings, etc. to their parents, and their parents sold them “without their knowledge”, and later gave some of that money back to their sons for college spending money, would there have been any punishment?
And while we’re here, what are the rules for student-athletes working? I could easily see a booster giving players jobs at their car dealership where they sit in a back room studying for $30 an hour.
They made a multi-zillion dollar industry out of NCAA sports and everyone makes a humpty grillion dollars except for the players who are actually playing the games.
I cannot imagine how this couldn’t result in corruption. It seems brutally inevitable.
There has been some talk that if the spate of conference realignments continues, maybe there will only be four or five mega-conferences, and they’ll tell the NCAA to go to hell because they won’t need it anymore. That hasn’t happened yet, but who knows. If that doesn’t happen, though, I don’t see why an individual school would break away from the NCAA. Its rules and decisions vary from weird to capricious to total bullshit, but its decisions are usually biased in favor of the schools, not against them, and at the moment individual schools probably have a lot more to gain from being involved with the NCAA than they could gain from going against it.
For a while there was a group called the CFA which was the same as the BCS conferences. They did not quit the NCAA but they signed their own TV deal outside the NCAA.
These cases and the Cam Newton case bear no similarity to each other.
1)These guys were actively involved in selling their items. Cam Newton was not present in the Mississippi hotel lobby when his father and Kenny Rogers discussed money.
Most obviously, these guys got money. In the Cam Newton situation, nobody got money.
The punishment for Georgia player A.J. Greene selling his jersey was a four game suspension, very similar to what the Ohio State Five are faced with.
The NCAA may be something like Democracy. Democracy has its flaws but is still better than any known alternative.
I’ve never been too hip to college football to begin with, much preferring the NFL, and one of the things that made me that way was the fact that schools violate the rules with relative impunity, ask others to take their word for it, and then invariably get caught out on something else.
I absolutely believe in my bones that Auburn did pay Cam Newton. Can I prove it? Of course not, I’m not an investigator. But what I am is a sports watcher who has seen it happen so many times that I have no reason to believe that it didn’t happen this time. And the truth is that enforcement is absurdly selective. In fact, just this month ESPN’s 30 For 30 series showed a documentary/retrospective on SMU and the Death Penalty. I was 11 when it happened, and I know 23 years later it’ll never happen again. People who have the responsibility to decide such matters have said so publicly. Teams know that if they get caught they’ll get another in a series of wrist slaps and get right back to business, and they also know that everybody does it and the NCAA only rarely makes examples out of teams so their odds of having anything substantive happen is absurdly low.
If you think your favorite Top 25 college football team isn’t cheating you’re a sucker. Show me a winner and I’ll show you a cheater. At least the pros are up front about it.
I agree. The whole idea that Cecil Newton tried to get Mississippi State to pay him for Cam’s services but let him go to another school for free makes no sense to me. And I don’t think the NCAA is treating Cam Newton like they’ve treated other players in the past. College sports is pretty crooked in general and football in particular because there’s more money involved, and if you read anything about what non-official player representatives and recruiters can do, it’s impossible to believe the NCAA really has any of it under control or that the rules are working.