Current system of sanctions harms innocent athletes

All’s well that ends well for Eastern Washington – as long as the Eagles win out, the three teams ahead of them in the conference football standings carve themselves up in just the right way and the NCAA playoff bracket isn’t decided by moonlighting Big Sky referees or myopic educrats from the Committee on Infractions.

Otherwise, everything is properly aligned.

Well, everything except NCAA jurisprudence.

That’s irreparably broken, and no one in the membership – from EWU itself to Washington State and Gonzaga down the road to the Alabamas and USCs out there in athletic Never-Never Land – seems inclined to even launch a dialogue about blowing it up and starting over with something befitting the NCAA’s purported mission.

Service on behalf of the college athlete.

With three football games still to win to have a prayer, the Eagles were appropriately restrained in their glee Tuesday when the NCAA’s Infractions Appeals Committee (the good guys) overturned the ban on 2009 postseason play imposed in February by the Committee on Infractions (the bad guys). All the other sanctions for violations Eastern committed remain in place – the ban was the only thing the school found too draconian to accept.

The school was right. The rules violations (excess coaches, management of ineligible athletes) were sins of ignorance or inadequate oversight, though former head coach Paul Wulff shrugging them off as The Way Things Were Always Done merited stronger rebuke. EWU athletic director Bill Chaves said the school made the case to the appeals committee that, contrary to the infractions determination, no significant competitive advantage was gained, and that won the day.

“It would also seem in cases that ended in a postseason ban one of three things occurred,” Chaves said. “Either there was unethical conduct, academic fraud or the school was a repeat violator. None of that was involved here. We felt that was certainly an argument for us from a precedent standpoint.”

But even if any of those things had been involved, they were not perpetrated by the football players who would incur the pain of the postseason penalty – the ongoing injustice inherent in NCAA-style justice.

As implemented and approved by member schools – like Eastern itself.

Yes, the appeals panel got it right.

But for starters, the system is simply too cumbersome and glacial – more than eight months transpired between the first gavel and the final one. That left the Eagles in limbo through most of their season, a delay both unnecessary and unfair.

In the meantime, Chaves had to marshal the help of campus counsel Laurie Connelly and Deborah Danner of the state attorney general’s office, and lay out considerable coin to consultant Chuck Smrt, a former NCAA gumshoe who hires out to help schools through the corn maze he used to police. That’s money and time that could have been invested elsewhere.

Chaves, like virtually every athletic director, expresses weariness with the inflated NCAA Manual and the eye-rolling rules within.

“It makes sense to start legislating less,” he said. “It’s like being a parent with kids. If you have 117 rules, you’d better follow through on all of them – or are you better just having three overriding principles and basing your repercussions on those?”

But why can’t something be done about those repercussions so that innocent athletes will not be impacted?

“I don’t know how you get around that, to tell you the truth,” Chaves said. “If the institution is a member of the NCAA and it gets penalized, somewhere along the line the student-athlete will unfortunately bear the brunt of it.”

Well, that’s simply not a good enough answer. The athlete’s time on campus is finite. He has only so many competitive opportunities, and to make any of them less meaningful because the overseers making a living off his sweat can’t be bothered to brainstorm a better way is pretty pitiful.

When dodgy academics became an embarrassment to the NCAA membership, its leaders mounted a campaign that eventually produced the Academic Progress Rate – a flawed but well-intentioned tool that has at least made schools mindful of graduating athletes. Now that coaching salaries and other expenses are out of control, school presidents are using the Knight Commission as a forum to bleat for relief, and at the very least an economic summit will be convened.

Bloated bureaucracy, insipid rules and misapplied penology never seem to make the agenda. They deserve a conversation.