The "New" NCAA

[50's PONY]

Schools' self-policing lets NCAA ease up
Tulsa World (OK)
May 31, 2006
Author: JOHN KLEIN Senior Sports Columnist
Oklahoma basketball's recent brush with the NCAA infractions committee would have been treated much differently 20 years ago.

What was once a bitter battle has been transformed into a much kinder and gentler meeting between a school and the NCAA enforcers.

The trend toward cooperation between offending schools and the NCAA has been ongoing for the past decade.

These days, it is much more likely to be the school policing itself.

That type of investigation would seem to be so ripe for abuse.

But the multitude of investigations in the late 1980s led many to believe that the NCAA has neither the personnel or the desire to enforce its huge book of rules.

As a result, an investigation of rules violations these days is more likely to follow the pattern of the recent sanctions imposed on OU basketball.

Oklahoma broke the rules and got a competitive advantage by far exceeding the allowed number of calls to recruits.

So OU investigated itself and imposed sanctions upon itself. The NCAA upheld those sanctions last week.

The NCAA talked tough, but in the end did what it normally does in these situations. It accepted what had already been done.

The NCAA no longer invests the time and money it takes to enforce its own rules. It now does what it always wanted to do. It hopes that schools, who make the rules, enforce those rules.

That means a school that broke the rules gets to punish itself.

The NCAA learned in the late 1980s that trying to enforce the rules was far too difficult with a limited staff and time.

In the late 1980s, nine of the 11 major football-playing schools in this region found themselves in deep trouble.

Oklahoma and Oklahoma State went on probation for football-related rules violations. So did seven of the nine Southwest Conference schools.

The only schools that avoided the NCAA ax were Rice and Arkansas.

Southern Methodist got the so-called death penalty, suspension of the football program by the NCAA.

The result was a backlash against the NCAA.

Many felt it was selective enforcement. And it was.

The NCAA slammed the schools it could catch. The others went about business as usual.

It was at that time, although it was never publicly announced, that many NCAA schools realized the rules were so far-reaching that they could not be equally enforced.

There are just too many schools and too many rules. Keeping track of all the schools was just too much for the limit ed resources of the NCAA.

So started the trend toward the type of investigation and penalty that was recently finished at Oklahoma.

OU breaks the rules. OU does the investigation. OU sets the penalties.

Then, the NCAA does a review of the case and renders a final decision.

OU was delighted with the decision. It should be. The Sooners made the decision.

It would seem a rather strange way to enforce the rules, but that is the trend for NCAA enforcement in the 2000s.

Former Oklahoma basketball coach Kelvin Sampson and his staff were found guilty of making 577 impermissible phone calls to recruits. It was considered a major violation by the NCAA infractions committee.

The penalties included the loss of two scholarships for basketball this year and one next year. Also, it called for a reduction in recruiting visits, phone calls and recruiting days over the next year.

OU athletic director Joe Castiglione said, "We are pleased with the outcome."

He should be. It was the outcome OU dictated.

The sanctions should have little or no impact on Oklahoma basketball.

Even the sanctions leveled on Sampson, now at Indiana, should be barely felt.

That's the way it is done these days.

That's a far cry from the sanctions OU and OSU football got nearly 20 years ago. Those sanctions sent both football programs into a decade-long recession.

But this is the modern NCAA. Self-policing has become the model, for better or worse.

[PonySnob]

It will be interesting to see how harsh the penalties that SMU levies against itself due to the incidents that caused the Tubbs embrolio.

[NavyCrimson]

LOL

sort of like the fox guarding the hen house