Cast your vote: Death penalty for Miami?

[Stallion]

Its got to go higher than Coaches for the NCAA to even consider the DP. They aren't in business to interfere in the operation of a university. The NCAA would step in only when the leaders of the university have shown they refuse or are unable to control the program. That's the grown up answer-but go ahead and vent

[RednBlue11]

Its got to go higher than Coaches for the NCAA to even consider the DP. They aren't in business to interfere in the operation of a university. The NCAA would step in only when the leaders of the university have shown they refuse or are unable to control the program. That's the grown up answer-but go ahead and vent

based on what? our own unique circumstance?

good to know that you have a reliable finger to the pulse of what the NCAA will and won't do...the one previous example is certainly definitive

[RednBlue11]

and your signature leads me to believe that you are an apologist for abject failure

[EastStang]

The dreaded "G" word came up on ESPN about Shapiro. If he was betting on college games and had that kind of access and was giving those kind of favors to U players, and then people start to review a few sketchy endings to a game or two, and voila, you begin to start a fire.

[smudubs]

Interesting read from Yahoo!

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/n ... p-smumiami

[mrydel]

I have trouble understanding why a school has to meet the level of improprieties that occurred at SMU. Yes we were worse, it seems, than what has allegedly happened at Miami. But as with the real death penalty, you can be declared eligible if you kill one person or 50 people. IF Miami is found to have committed sins to the level the meet the standard for the death penalty, I think they should be given the death penalty. I do not think they have to meet the level that occurred at SMU.

[RednBlue11]

good point, using us as a standard is a bad idea because everyone of these situations is unique

[One Trick Pony]

HP coming to any games this year with your lovely daughter? ?

[ponyscott]

I have trouble understanding why a school has to meet the level of improprieties that occurred at SMU. Yes we were worse, it seems, than what has allegedly happened at Miami. But as with the real death penalty, you can be declared eligible if you kill one person or 50 people. IF Miami is found to have committed sins to the level the meet the standard for the death penalty, I think they should be given the death penalty. I do not think they have to meet the level that occurred at SMU.

I am so sick of listening to guys like Spencer Tillman on ESPN talk about how SMU was much worse....?...we just gave athletes $ to live on or cars to drive. Miami athletes got prostitutes on a yacht, abortions, girls at strip clubs, plus cash....how is SMU worse than that?

[mrydel]

As of now I believe we were worse from the standpoint of how high our cheating went. Board of Regents and Governor gets pretty elevated on the bad scale. Not knowing yet how high Miami went, is why I would say we were worse. But that still does not mean a school has to reach the same level to get the DP. As a matter of fact, had the NCAA put other schools on the DP back when the cheating was rampant in the SWC, and elsewhere, there probably would not be the problems that are happening today and the NCAA would not be such a joke.

[HB Pony Dad]

HP coming to any games this year with your lovely daughter? ?

She wants me to come for Father's Weekend in November 11-12.

Who are we playing?

I told her I wasn't coming for Family Weekend because the game is NW State.

Maybe for TCU if all else fails.

HB Pony Daughter is starting her Senior Year! Where do the years go?

Looking forward to seeing you and the rest of the crew.

[Insane_Pony_Posse]

NCAA investigation should end
with the death of Miami Hurricanes football

By Tom Hardesty

August 21, 2011

Remember the old game show “To Tell The Truth”?

You know, the one where four celebrities try to guess which of three contestants is the actual person they claim to be? And when the celebrities chose the contestant that each thought was the correct person, the three would alternately stand up, sit down, stand up, and then two would sit down and the actual correct person would remain standing?

Well, the real cheater in college football is standing: The University of Miami.

While others — such as Southern California, Boise State, Ohio State, North Carolina, LSU, Michigan and Oregon — stood and then sat back down to fool the fans and media, “The U” is standing tall.

But not proud.

The startling, shocking, mind-blowing and frighteningly detailed allegations this week by University of Miami booster Nevin Shapiro against the Hurricanes’ football program — and to a lesser extent the Miami men’s basketball program — is so far beyond the pale that it makes the 1993 movie “The Program” look like Captain Kangaroo.

“The Program,” of course, was a film about a fictional college football team that faces inner trials and turbulations concerning substance abuse, etc.. Nothing in that film — which many saw as a wild exaggeration at the time — could come remotely close to Shapiro’s stunningly well-documented accounts of Miami football players engaging in debauchery ranging from cash and gifts to hookers and sex parties to even, in one instance, an abortion for a stripper impregnated by a Miami football player.

And, perhaps most appalling, bounties were placed on opposing players, monetary incentives for the Hurricanes to purposely injure certain key players on other teams. That level alone would get Miami in serious trouble with the NCAA, but add it to the unholy list of jaw-dropping violations in the Hurricanes’ decade of decadence, and this is clearly an extinction-level event for the Miami football program.

Hurricane fans who think Shapiro is making this stuff up because he feels jilted by Miami players who went on to NFL riches and left him high and dry are guzzling copious amounts of Kool-Aid at best, and in need of brain surgery at worst — just to check and make sure their brain is still inside their skull. Most prosecutors go to their graves never accumulating anything close to the evidence Shapiro has against the Miami football program: Thousands and thousands of pages of documents, financial statements, cell phone records and photos.

In the courtroom, that amount of hard evidence is the stuff of fantasy.

If I was a Hurricane fan, I would be ordering Dolphins season tickets real soon — because, real soon, the Dolphins just might be the only football game in town. College football in Miami could well be headed the way of the dinosaur.

One look at the sheer magnitude and scope of this historic scandal — the likes of which college athletics has never seen — is enough to convince even the most casual of observers that Miami football is in deep, deep, deep trouble.

By all accounts, 72 Hurricane players from 2001 to the present, including 12 on the Miami roster as we speak, turned South Florida into their own personal Sodom and Gomorrah.

Shapiro said the cash and gifts he provided to Hurricane players — everything from jewelry to televisions to meals at pricey restaurants to rooms in posh hotels to strip-club excursions to parties on his own yacht to setting players up with prostitutes, with the price tag of the benefits totaling in the millions of dollars — was no secret in Coral Gables.

In fact, Shapiro — the convincted Ponzi schemer now serving time in federal prison in Atlanta, and who documented this stuff six ways from Sunday if you believe the Yahoo! Sports story that dropped the bombshell on Tuesday — said that some Miami coaches, administrators and other staff not only knew about the transgressions, but participated in them.

If true, and it seems like it most certainly is, then it’s checkmate for the Hurricanes.

And checkmate, in this instance, means the NCAA death penalty, last given to Southern Methodist University in 1987. The NCAA admitted following the publication of the Yahoo! report that it has been investigating Miami for the last five months, but there’s a catch. The NCAA does not have subpoena power, so therefore was very likely not privy to the kind of extensive documentation that Yahoo! was provided by Shapiro.

You can bet the NCAA has it now, and you can bet that Miami is in for it now. The NCAA investigation is about to kick into high gear, and that’s not good news in South Florida. At this point, free tattoos and a few rounds of free golf, which Ohio State is charged with, would look pretty good in Coral Gables.

The death penalty is undoubtedly on the table. The nature and quantity of the violations, the length of time they occurred, the number of players involved, and the knowledge and participation of university officials — whether those players and officials are still associated with Miami football or not — make the death penalty option No. 1 for the NCAA.

The question is: Will the NCAA have the guts to shut down the Miami football program?

Answer: The NCAA absolutely has to give the Hurricanes the death penalty. It hammered Miami back in 1995 with tough sanctions that put the Hurricanes on the canvas. It took the once-proud and arrogant program over half a decade to regain any semblance of its old, controversial, championship self.

This time, though, the NCAA needs to drive a stake through its heart. No way any program at any school should ever live to tell after transgressions this egregious. And if the NCAA doesn’t give Miami the death penalty, then the college governing body will forever lose credibility and relevance as an authority figure.

The NCAA’s very existence is at stake.

Let Miami off the hook — even with severe sanctions — and continue to field a football program, and the NCAA’s precarious, tenuous hold on college athletics will slip from its tiring fingers.

The NCAA is almost flat-lining as it is. From the alleged Cam Newton pay-to-play scheme at Auburn — which everyone outside Auburn, Ala. would bet their mortgage happened — to Oregon allegedly paying a guy to steer recruits to Eugene, to Boise State lavishing recruits to convince them to spend winters in Idaho, to Terrelle Pryor walking around Columbus with his hand out, to Notre Dame receiver Michael Floyd blowing a breathalyzer more than twice Indiana’s legal limit for yet another booze-related crime yet not slated to miss a single play of the upcoming season (and “suspending” a player during the off-season is not a suspension, Brian Kelly), the message being sent by players and programs alike is crystal-clear:

We don’t respect you, NCAA, and we don’t fear you, NCAA.

Allow Miami to continue fielding a football program, and the inmates will officially run the asylum.

This is where the NCAA makes its last stand. It must draw a line in the South Beach sand to mark the exact spot where college athletics will be saved.

After all, no amount of deterrent has worked so far, and it’s only getting worse. SMU got the death penalty, but only for a few years and was allowed to restart its football program — although it will never be the same. Other schools, most notably Southern Cal with the Reggie Bush fiasco, have been severely whacked with sanctions.

But the message isn’t getting through, because these schools know that, as bad as the sanctions may be, even SMU’s death penalty was temporary. They figure they can weather the storm, and once it passes, they will clean up the mess and carry on as before.

But this is one storm that must not be allowed to be weathered. The NCAA needs to put out a Hurricane warning in the truest sense: Kill the Miami football program permanently, and let it serve as a warning to others who think that it’s worth it to cheat on this level or anything remotely close to it.

Let the world of collegiate athletics examine the destruction of the Miami football program. Let them sift through the wreckage and debris and see what it looks like when a Category 5 pummels a university’s arrogant, deceitful, morally bereft athletic department, and let it serve as a lesson to those who don’t think it’s important to batten down their own hatches and take meaningful, serious precautions against the approaching tempest.

The real cheater in college football — the University of Miami — is standing. But it needs to be struck down, never to rise again.

Contact Tom Hardesty at [email protected]

http://www.recordpub.com/news/sports_article/5084703?page=0

[ALEX LIFESON]

said that some Miami coaches, administrators and other staff not only knew about the transgressions, but participated in them.

Very interesting.

[03Mustang]

You can't completely disallow football...I think you just take away their ability to give any athletic scholarships or any other assistance to football players for the next 5 years, let the guys who are innocent and currently on scholarship stay if they want (or transfer without penalty), no bowls for 5 years, and no TV for 3 years.

That's every bit as bad as the death penalty, and will set the program back at least a decade while not taking away football from the students and others that had nothing to do with Shapiro or others.

If that's not far enough, you can just make them follow the Ken Pye model for the 15 years after the 5 year "no scholarship" period, too...that way it's every bit as bad as what we got!

[HB Pony Dad]

This guy, Tom Hardesty, sounds like a disgruntled Seminole supporter and is "WIDE RIGHT" on his analysis.

You can't kill a University's athletic program permanently because of the behavior of a few miscreants.

Everybody cheats! Always Have...Always Will.

Do you remember the beginning of Pony Excess when Thad had film of some uni's alums in the bygone days discussing that no matter how, they will improve their school's FB program?

The 'caines are the recipients of a "Newspaper" war on a National level with instantaneous internet stories that makes the DMN v. Dallas Times Herald look like a local spat.

Couple that with being a "Private" who started beating the established programs quickly and the resulting envy reminds me of the Thadism that states "SMU was 'The U' before 'The U'"!

I'm calling it again right now...

The NCAA will never play the "Repeat Violator" aka DEATH PENALTY sanction for a big time revenue producing TV generator BCS Network affiliated FB program!