OT- South Carolina hit with 'Failure to Monitor' citation from NCAA

So are you suggesting that Hoke is having to cheat to succeed? I think a lot of the coaches take the easy way out. I also know that Spurrier was never on the straight and narrow at Florida as well.

I wonder if Saban is guilty of anything, and it just hasn't been brought to our attention.

S. Carolina docked itself six scholarships and seriously reduced numbers of official visits.  Plus the three years' probation that we got.  Plus an $18,500 fine, other voluntary suspensions of track coaches, etc., etc.

You make it sound as though the Gamecocks and/or their boosters were handing out brown envelopes with $60k in cash.  Did you read the allegations?

The NCAA tries (not always so well) to do 'like' penalties for 'like' offenses.  Hence, Michigan docked itself 2x the alleged practice time violations (which wasn't so bad, since the violation was so piddling) and reduced GA's by 2 for two years.

S. Carolina's self-imposed penalties are significantly more serious than Michigan's, and they focus on the nature of the alleged offense, which had to do with some short-term temoporary housing rates for some student-athletes and (I gather) some recruits.  Hence the scholarship losses and the severe limits on official visits in future years.

Now, if you read the Gamecocks' formal Response to the Notice of Allegations, it does sound sort of hinky; it is weird that they chose to put up a handful of athletes, and apparently even an athlete's mother, in the Whitney Hotel in Columbia.  But these were student-athletes who were entitled to dorm rooms, I imagine, so what we are talking about are errors or omissions in calculating market values versus allowable charges for players.  Anyway, whenever I hear sports fans going nuts over how dumb and inconsistent and arbitrary the NCAA has been in one of its investigations, I like to look at the actual documents, when it all begins to make considerably more sense.

http://www.sc.edu/ncaaresponse/ 

Exterior:

Single room (some athletes had one of these for approx 200-400 days):

Two-room suite (some athletes had one, some shared one, one shared one with his/her mom (?!), if my cursory reading of the NOI is correct; also for periods of 200-400 days):

The fancy mouthpiece lawyers getting South Carolina off the hook in this case?

Same guys who performed so magnificently for Michigan:  Gene Marsh and Bill King of Lightfoot, Franklin & White.

It is this; the Compliance Departments at places like Florida, LSU, South Carolina, or Tennessee aren't so bad, and their coaches aren't that corrupt (Nick Saban is the exception that proves the rule); but they exist in an environment that is almost antebellum when it comes to their beloved college football.  They have much bigger problems with overeager boosters than in the Big Ten and elsewhere.  They have whole states that live for nothing but college football.  And social structures that all point to support the team in every imaginable way.  They have a lot more knuckleheads doing bad stuff apart from the football teams.

I'm no apologist for the SEC; and I am a fan of the SEC mostly in the way that I am curious about a fascinating foreign culture.  When it comes to the SEC, my first reaction is to laugh and pour myself another cocktail, hoping that southern friends might invite me to a few of their tailgates.  I'd be in a much less humorous mood (and have been) when Nick Saban nabs recruits whom Michigan was interested in, with his 29th, 30th and 31st scholarship offers in a given year.