NCAA infractions committee looks to get tough on serious violators
Updated 10/29/2008 10:24 PM | Comment | Recommend E-mail | Save | Print | Reprints & Permissions | Subscribe to stories like this
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By Steve Wieberg, USA TODAY
Responding to complaints that it has been too soft, the NCAA's infractions committee is preparing to come down harder on college athletics' serious rules violators — returning to television sanctions, giving closer consideration to postseason bans and widening the use of scholarship cuts.
It also wants to levy monetary fines.
Josephine Potuto, a Nebraska law professor who is the immediate past chairman of the infractions committee, will lay out the recommendations Thursday to the association's Division I Board of Directors, which meets in Indianapolis. Though NCAA rules already provide for many of the measures, Potuto said the panel is looking for a go-ahead to move more aggressively than it has in recent years.
"The committee feels that, over the years, the penalties really have gotten out of synch with the magnitude of violations," Potuto said Wednesday.
"Increasingly, there were people on campus saying, 'There's no teeth here. Did they lose any scholarships? Were they taken out of the postseason? Were wins vacated? And if not, it couldn't have been a big case.' … Only certain penalties really signal seriousness to anybody."
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The NCAA's penalty structure has gone largely unchanged since 1985 and invited skepticism — some of it internal — that it effectively deters cheating in an era when the financial stakes and pressures in major-college athletics continue to rise.
Even in serious cases involving illicit extra benefits, recruiting and other competitive-edge violations, the punishment sometimes don't measure up to sanctions now in place for teams' academic deficiencies. Those start with scholarship cuts and escalate to recruiting and practice restrictions and ultimately postseason bans.
The prospective crackdown would subject offenders to:
• The first bans on TV appearances in Division I since 1996. The restriction would extend to "all modes of video transmission," including video streaming and other internet appearances.
• More scholarship cuts. Now limited to cases involving financial-aid violations, they would become "the norm" in all serious cases.
• Fines, which the committee would assess sparingly but across a wider array of sports. They currently affect only basketball and programs forced to return shares of NCAA tournament revenue.
• More bans on postseason appearances. Among other things, that would become a "presumptive" penalty in cases involving academic fraud and repeat violations.
Tournament or football bowl bans have been assessed in eight of 40 major infractions cases involving Division I schools in the past 3 1/2 years. But in only three, most recently involving Texas Southern softball in July, was the action initiated by the NCAA (the five remaining bans were self-imposed by schools and folded into a wider array of penalties handed down by the infractions committee).
One trend unlikely to change is the NCAA's reluctance to hit offending athletics programs with its strongest sanction, a ban on practice and competition — a complete shutdown known as the death penalty.
"I know that, often, the media talk about the fact that the committee is not imposing it in cases that have been extremely egregious," Potuto said. "But the thing that set SMU apart (in 1987, the only time the death penalty has been imposed in Division I) was the institutional effort by high-level administrators to hide the fact that they were committing violations — and repeatedly hide it. In the cases at least over the time I've sat on the committee, we have not had that circumstance.
"It's still in there for the kind of case where there's not only a failure of institutional control but an unethical-conduct approach. But in other cases where there are really serious violations — particularly if we ramp up the penalties now — there are other ways to get at those violations without effectively shutting down a program."
Schools have learned to come clean and cooperate in investigations, most anticipating it will help their case and ultimately minimize sanctions. Notably, Potuto's committee also is asking the NCAA board to eliminate that tack as a damage-control strategy.
A proposed rules change would stipulate: "Full and complete cooperation in investigations and in disclosure of violations is an obligation of membership and does not mitigate sanctions imposed on either institutions or their staff members." Failure to cooperate would represent an "independent violation."
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