Rawls if he can hang onto it, I'd guesss
undies22
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| Date | Title | Body |
|---|---|---|
| 19 weeks 3 days ago | #1 and 1A |
1. "Ainge Packs Fudge" -'88 Silverdome, playoffs, not pictured.
1a. |
| 49 weeks 2 days ago | whoops |
whoops |
| 49 weeks 2 days ago | its never a good sign |
when you start a comment and breaking news happens that could alter your entire premise... a day before you’re done writing it.
In this case the golf incident reports mention the courses’ manager calling JT, but it also mentions someone under that fella first calling a few people he knew within the AD to make a report. Provided those names get named it’s a matter of phone records verifying those calls were placed and said employee being willing to spill his beans.
I think one solid hit like that to a school employee outside of JT is the crack that would open the flood gates.
Something the USC Report found very significant was a “culture” on the campus and within their AD that created, feed, and endorsed star treatment of star players. I think the NCAA stopped short of saying USC should have stamped out that culture. What they did say that culture was the institutions bed, and they were going to lay in it with Reggie.
It wouldn’t be difficult to argue a similar situation here. So why hasn’t the NCAA at least moved the 8/12/11 hearing? No way they’ll add the LIC charge at this point and keep that date. |
| 49 weeks 3 days ago | thanks |
I agree, some of what’s come out since the 4/21/11 Notice shows good potential. Esp whether the team was aware of how much gear issued to Pryor was going missing, and the golf course allegations. If the golf course allegations (as I understand them) boil down to the owner calling JT to report the situation, and OSU never documenting the report or taking action... OSU will argue that’s another pile of dirt that belongs on Jim’s grave, but its not connected to the school.
So much of what OSU has done fits in the ways you describe. I still believe that to date the most egregious examples of LIC are also the most clear cut from an evidence standpoint, and all stem from JT's involvement with Tategate and the school's response to all things Tategate. That being said, wouldn't the worst violations with the least controversial evidence have lead to that charge being in the 4/21/11 notice?
Best case scenario would be a new case (like the golf thing) that has good evidence and is an easy fit for new allegations. Otherwise, I hope there will be enough good evidence to support a pattern of institutional conduct that forces NCAA to look again at whether the charge makes make sense for past violations. |
| 49 weeks 3 days ago | I don't see anything to get excited about |
1. From the jump, OSU has been arousingly vague about how it uncovered the JT-Cicero emails back in Jan 2011.
2. OSU hasn’t gone into details with the press about its version of those events, but you bet the NCAA investigation did. Whatever OSU’s story was it MUST have satisfied the NCAA since OSU was never charged with failure to monitor.
3. Was OSU obligated to rummage JT’s entire email inbox going back to April 2010 in order to adequately investigate the Tategate violations? In Dec 2010 when OSU submitted its Tategate investigation/findings to the NCAA apparently they didn’t think so. The NCAA issued their punishments and said “case closed.”
4. OSU did ‘self-report’ the JT cover-up in Jan 2011 when the emails (allegedly) were first brought to their attention. They weren’t snitched on to the NCAA. OSU reported the possible violations by JT and started investigation #2 in conjunction with the NCAA long before the school was outed by Yahoo, which prompted their first reporting to the public.
5. No OSU on the record statements are directly contradicted by revelations in this Brooks story. How is responding to an FOIA request not “an unrelated legal issue”?
6. Buckner’s credentials are shinny but his statement is brain dead. “They’ll want to find out about how the institution found out about the allegations?” ORLY? Think so Dr.? Think that maybe the NCAA asked that question and got a satisfactory answer before their 4/21/11 notice of allegations? Also, schools aren’t expected to ferret out all violations. When something external “triggers the process” OSU isn’t exposed to ‘failure to monitor’ liability unless a gap in NCAA mandated monitoring protocol is responsible for the gap, or they had reason to believe JT had committed a violation that was ignored. |
| 49 weeks 3 days ago | Coming in way late, but... |
“Should” get off easier than USC? Not sure who’s willing to go there. “Will” get off easier? Mmmmm....Gauntlet Light.
[Author Note – Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean that really got out of hand fast. Started with an hour to kill between 4-5pm last Thursday.]
I cosign 100% with Brian’s statement that OSU should get much worse than USC. But nearly 100% of his OSU-USC analogy is off the mark. That statement tells all anyone reading this board all they need to know about how convoluted the NCAA investigation/sanctioning process can get. “Abandon common sense all ye who enter.”
Let me ballpark things up front. No lack of institutional control violations = No USC-level sanctions. IMHO, anyone who looks at the facts as they sit today and still believes a lack of institutional control (“LIC”) is headed OSU’s way hasn’t spent a couple days looking into and thinking about it from every conceivable angle. On April 21, 2011 the NCAA sent Gordon Gee its Notice of Allegations without an LIC charge, meaning such a charge will almost certainly have to come from evidence or violations uncovered after that date. As Brian points out, what’s come after the 3/25/11 outing of the Tressel-TP-Sarniak menage has been all Preparation and no H. Steepening the betting odds against USC-esque sanctions is that the NCAA’s treatment of McNair’s violations in the USC Report actually makes it more difficult to project a similar whack for OSU, and that unlike USC, OSU has not stonewalled the NCAA reporting process.
As far as USC level sanctions go... it looks like that corpse was buried at sea with once Jim and (to a lesser extent) Pryor slipped overboard.
1. No ‘lack of institutional control’ = no USC level sanctions. Given the NCAA’s reliance
on precedent and bizarrely strict adherence to an Old Testament-style system of punishment, without finding LIC, it won’t matter how much the NCAA wants to make an example of OSU.
In the room next door to UM fans is a tantalizing smorgasbord of punishments, that smells of bowl bans, scholarship losses, TV bans, and a carving station with perfectly medium-rare death penalty. Not too dry. We’ll never know for sure what delights lay just beyond without an engraved invitation stamped L-I-C. The room we’re in now has fridge with the culinary equivelant of leftover chinese food of indeterminate age. Some wins and a B10 championship vacated, probably.
If we’re real lucky the last pair of gold pants ever was handed out last year. Buy now while asking prices are still comically reasonable.
2. Failure to monitor. Failure to promote an atmosphere of compliance. That is how the
NCAA defines LIC. You’ve got to cram the violations of OSU the institution into one of those tents just to get to first base.
3. The LIC findings and punishments in the USC Report were not tied McNair in any way, shape, or form. Of this I’m like 96% sure. Its been awhile since I read that somebitch, but his role in the Bush scandal wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the institutional control section of the Report’s violations or punishments. Which sucks because he was found guilty of the exact things as JT. Namely, he knew major violations had occurred, never snitch, participated in a cover-up, and repeatedly lied to the NCAA about it. You scrub McNair completely from the USC report and it wouldn’t move the needle one way or the other LIC-wise.
McNair became the media’s focus of the USC Report because it was by far the sexiest angle. But the actual result of those nasty findings against McNair didn’t hurt anybody. Except McNair. And his poor, poor mother. A ‘Show Cause’ penalty is the coaches problem. Any damage to the program is collateral
3a. For anything to be different this with OSU, the NCAA will have to basically find that,
unlike RB coach Todd McNair, Jim Tressel was the institution. Could they? Cuss yeah! Is there precedent for it? Ehhhhh.... maybe for my next project.
Will they? Almost certainly not.
The day after JT’s initial presser the NCAA should rightfully have called Gee and told him, “LIC is on the table as of this moment. We don’t so much as discuss it coming off until I see a pike held high with the heads Smith and Tressel. We’d appreciate it if you could ‘get right on that.’”
That didn’t happen, so we must accept the JT as lone gunman defense as viable. The known record shows him as the only conduit between the school and outside sources of information linking the players to improper benefits. Allegedly, JT didn’t even tell the dirty players themselves he knew what was up. He simply informed the team as a whole, “Stay away from Fine Line and Rife.” To move Tategate from problem that dies with JT to a possible LIC charge would require showing either: a) the school had reason to know about the violations before the Fed’s letter in Dec 2010 and took no action; or, b) the violations and JT’s cover up went undiscovered as the result of weak compliance efforts.
There’s a very, verrrrry clear option “c” that should to be on this list. From an NCAA compliance standpoint the head coach and institution must be considered a single entity. You can argue over other members of the team staff, but as far as their sport goes, the head coach is the chief compliance officer. Period. Coaches report possible violations and the school decides what to do with that info. That’s the only permissible distinction. To treat the school employees responsible for hands-on oversee of a the team differently in any other way than the school employees responsible handing in compliance forms and calling the NCAA when there is a problem is a blue print for cheating the system.
3b. That doesn’t mean the institution has strict liability for the compliance sins of a coach. It does clearly mean an institution must have a zero tolerance policy for anything less than 100% reporting transparency from the HC when it comes to NCAA infractions. How can you operate otherwise and claim to “foster an atmosphere of compliance”?
That phrase may sound like it was written by the kindergarten teacher from Happy Gilmore, but what it really means is that the institution ensures employees are sufficiently scared sh--less of not reporting possible violations. Let alone committing them.
Here, OSU’s defacto head of football compliance (and the athletic department’s most high profile employee) walked in on an orgy of violations, tore of his clothes and jumped into said orgy*, then told oodles of lies right to the face of his parents, the cops, and the media, about whether he knew the orgy ever wend down. When all this was brought to his parent’s attention, they said, “Jimmy, you’re such a good boy. An angel among us. But we can’t let this slide. Its straight home after practice tomorrow and an elevvvv... make it 11:30pm curfew this Friday.”
OSU the institution, the capital “I” Institution’s collective response to all the revelations over Tategate has to been to squat directly over everything the NCAA claims to hold dear, and take a big, yucky, poop on it. The NCAA should be using OSU as an example of what every school should do if they want to do the exact opposite of fostering compliance.
OSU’s on the record statement of what they considered an appropriate institutional response was a kiss on the wrist. And the instutution’s statement never waived. 2 non-con games for the kids, 2 for the coach (JT’s $250k fine is 2 games with of salary), and a promise to really take this stuff seriously in the future. For realz this time. They never dropped their appeal of the player suspensions, and it was JT himself who bumped his game suspension to match their 5. Gee is on record that JT was never given an ultimatum, and resigning was all JT’s idea. The school’s actions in terms of consistently seeking penalties well below NCAA precedent speaks volumes about their attitudes toward compliance. But in this rare case Smith/Gee’s statements (ie, the institution’s statements) have actually spoken louder.
The “hope he doesn’t fire me” soundbite is the one that’ll live forever. For me the money quote was, “We trust Jim implicitly.” It encapsulates the essence of the distinction between the OSU and USC situations.
It should be a distinction without meaning. USC treated compliance like a joke and cheating got out-of-hand. OSU built the Titanic of compliance departments and continues touting it as unsinkable months after the ship had settled on the bottom of the ocean. The “We don’t care” approach vs. the “We don’t care if anyone performs their compliance roles competently” approach. Don’t both stances have a negative impact on the atmosphere of compliance?
OSU the institution has either constructed a ‘front’ for compliance, or been shockingly incompetent in the hiring and ongoing management the 3 biggest fish in their NCAA compliance pond (Gee, Smith, JT) and who knows how many more? Like, a 12 volt to the nuts shockingly. NCAA sanctions are supposed to punitive and corrective measures. Unless the NCAA pulls a 180 it will set the crystal clear precedent that willful blindness will get you gaffed, as where FAIL allow you to be gently let off the hook.
4. Apparently the NCAA sees this zero tolerance logic as less than bulletproof, since as of
the April 21, 2011 Notice of Allegations letter to Gordon Gee, everything I just wrote was widely known and long digested, yet LIC was not on the table.
The media at large has poo-pood this fact into the ground with the a perfunctory, “...but the NCAA can always add more allegations” that allows them to get on with the lambasting. And I’m cool with that.
But why does anyone believe the NCAA will add those allegations? Common Sense? The facts? Presumably the NCAA had both those in its hands on 4/21/11 when their Notice of Allegations went out without an LIC charge.
If there’s one thing we can solidly say about the NCAA its that they’re not in a hurry to do anything. Ever. So here they are on 4/20/11. In the midst of one of the highest profile NCAA investigation in history. Torches are lit. Pitchforks pointed. New allegations flowing like wine. The media and public in 49 states and the greater-Toledo area are thirsty for BLOOD. The rhetoric is flying, some of the strongest coming directly from the new NCAA prez himself, whose own institution is being ridiculed for allowing TP et al. to play in the Sugar Bowl while watching Cam Newton and Auburn ride happily into the sunset. Leading the new sheriff to actually says what everyone is thinking, namely, nothing would boost the NCAA’s image and restore authority like a very public hanging.
Yet, on April 21, 2011, the NCAA decided to go off half-cocked with a Notice that doesn’t include the most serious charge under consideration? Really? That’s how it went down?
On April 21, 2011, the NCAA was possessed of all the juicy details we know of regarding JT, TP, Ted, Fine Line, Rife, Cicero, Smith, Gee, et al. And more. There was no reason for the NCAA to rush out the notice at that time. On that date if the NCAA thought they had a case to beef OSU with LIC for their handling of compliance, the NCAA investigations in question, or how the school comported itself in the wake of these revelations, they should have had all the relevant evidence they needed to support such a charge.
They chose not to.
Assuming the time of that notice was the result of a sloppy mistake by the NCAA, or some unknown behind the scenes reason nobody has been able to figure out, nearly two have passed since the Notice was drafted. We’re now closer to the Aug 12th hearing date than we are to the issuance of that notice. The purpose of notice is to alert OSU the charges it’ll be answering to at the hearing with enough time to collect relevant evidence and prepare its defense. How long is the NCAA waiting to ‘spring’ the allegation on them and/or announce the Aug 12th hearing date is being pushed to conduct further investigation into adding such a charge?
5. The key elements in the USC Report finding LIC were its puny compliance department
and gross indifference to compliance oversight as a concept, obviously a huge difference between that case and OSU. The Report’s treatment of their stonewall approach and defiance in the face of significant evidence was not directly linked to the LIC finding, it was more of a kicker once things moved to punishment phase. OSU’s approach to compliance is the polar opposite of hiding and stonewalling, which would act as a mitigating factor at the punishment phase, and could add a significant layer of difficultly even if the NCAA was hellbent on nailing OSU for LIC.
USC’s defense was that if the had seen something worth looking into, they would have. In that context USC’s “you ain’t nothing but a lot of talk and badge” attitude toward the investigation was consistent with their defense. The NCAA said you lose anyway because you should have seen this stuff and probably would have if you followed NCAA guidelines.
OSU looks at everything but only sees what it wants to. Which, curses(!), was never major NCAA violations.
OSU pretends to care. Pretends to be proactive. Has a massive compliance staff. Ted Sarniak isn’t a back alley booster whose name was buried somewhere in Pryor’s file. His name was practically next to TP’s on page 1. OSU doesn’t pay lip service to taking compliance seriously. They can afford to pay for actual.... uhh, tongue (?) service. “Is compliance important to tOSU? Have you SEEN the size of our staff! Don’t you know they work out of an office built entirely from signed/notarized NCAA affidavits?” OSU’s compliance dept is a perfect mirror of JT himself. The surface is so compelling it not only hides what’s below, even when the underlying contradictions are laid bare you question if what you’re seeing could really be true.
When something like Tatgate or Pryor’s Wild Rides Round 1 hit in Dec 2010, OSU compliance does its thing. Document. Investigate. Report STAT. Follow up. Invite the NCAA to join the party. Cooperate. All good things and easy to document. Then they figure out the most desirable outcome for OSU and fill in the blanks behind it with whatever investigative ‘results’ are deemed least likely to attract future scrutiny, always leaving a plausible back door open just in case. These are bad things excruciatingly difficult to prove.
The NCAA has no subpoena powers. On the other hand, they also don’t have to deal with exclusionary rules of evidence. Put those facts together and the result is most evidence and findings in an NCAA inquiry like this one are circumstantial in nature. So while USC’s stonewalling approach didn’t lead to the LIC finding, in helped paved the way for that finding. The NCAA only had to pile up the individual instances of unreported violations high enough to say, “no way you should have missed this” in order to prove their case for LIC.
Here, OSU’s defense is going to be, “We tried our best. We put in the resources and lived within the letter of compliance efforts. We built a dam. True, a lot of water got through. Between us we were just as taken in by JT everyone else, and all these shennangins happened on his watch. We were about to finally fire him but he beat us to the punch. He’s gone now and we’ve learned some other lessons. This won’t happen again. Honest.”
That defense is a lot harder to topple.
6. What are we missing? Based on undisputed facts and reasonable inferences, I feel
safe in saying that on 4/21/11 the NCAA didn’t think it had the horses to go for LIC, and given that we’re less than 2 months from the hearing with no public changes on that front, its officially a longshot. Perhaps the NCAA saw a tactical advantage in holding that charge back. Perhaps they felt some pressure to get the allegations against JT on the table in time to schedule a hearing that would happen before the football season, and are now taking their sweet-ass time doing anything else.
For now my hopes are pinned to an FOIA request that leads us to OSU’s nazi gold, or a couple ½ decent witness stumbling forward to openly testify about contradictions between what the institution has claimed to know about, and when, with regard to Tategate and/or the other various perks OSU football players availed themselves of.
At this moment all those prospect are looking very dodgy.
*One of the widely accepted myths in the Tategate fiasco is that JT never committed any actual violations, other than those related to not reporting/covering-up someone else’s violations. That was the hatstand for OSU supporters who wanted to parse levels of NCAA culpability between the JT’s and the Bruce Pearl’s of the world. This premise was rarely if ever challenged by outside pundits who usually shrugged their shoulders and responded “who cares” if not “what JT did is actually worse.”
IMO - Isn’t suiting up players you know to be ineligible and playing them for an entire season a “violation” itself?
|
| 49 weeks 3 days ago | An unsolicited variation on Brian's challenge, accepted |
“Should” get off easier than USC? Not sure who’s willing to go there. “Will” get off easier? Mmmmm....Gauntlet Light.
[Author Note – Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean that really got out of hand fast. Started with an hour to kill between 4-5pm last Thursday.]
I cosign 100% with Brian’s statement that OSU should get much worse than USC. But nearly 100% of his OSU-USC analogy is off the mark. That statement tells all anyone reading this board all they need to know about how convoluted the NCAA investigation/sanctioning process can get. “Abandon common sense all ye who enter.”
Let me ballpark things up front. No lack of institutional control violations = No USC-level sanctions. IMHO, anyone who looks at the facts as they sit today and still believes a lack of institutional control (“LIC”) is headed OSU’s way hasn’t spent a couple days looking into and thinking about it from every conceivable angle. On April 21, 2011 the NCAA sent Gordon Gee its Notice of Allegations without an LIC charge, meaning such a charge will almost certainly have to come from evidence or violations uncovered after that date. As Brian points out, what’s come after the 3/25/11 outing of the Tressel-TP-Sarniak menage has been all Preparation and no H. Steepening the betting odds against USC-esque sanctions is that the NCAA’s treatment of McNair’s violations in the USC Report actually makes it more difficult to project a similar whack for OSU, and that unlike USC, OSU has not stonewalled the NCAA reporting process.
As far as USC level sanctions go... it looks like that corpse was buried at sea with once Jim and (to a lesser extent) Pryor slipped overboard.
1. No ‘lack of institutional control’ = no USC level sanctions. Given the NCAA’s reliance
on precedent and bizarrely strict adherence to an Old Testament-style system of punishment, without finding LIC, it won’t matter how much the NCAA wants to make an example of OSU.
In the room next door to UM fans is a tantalizing smorgasbord of punishments, that smells of bowl bans, scholarship losses, TV bans, and a carving station with perfectly medium-rare death penalty. Not too dry. We’ll never know for sure what delights lay just beyond without an engraved invitation stamped L-I-C. The room we’re in now has fridge with the culinary equivelant of leftover chinese food of indeterminate age. Some wins and a B10 championship vacated, probably.
If we’re real lucky the last pair of gold pants ever was handed out last year. Buy now while asking prices are still comically reasonable.
2. Failure to monitor. Failure to promote an atmosphere of compliance. That is how the
NCAA defines LIC. You’ve got to cram the violations of OSU the institution into one of those tents just to get to first base.
3. The LIC findings and punishments in the USC Report were not tied McNair in any way, shape, or form. Of this I’m like 96% sure. Its been awhile since I read that somebitch, but his role in the Bush scandal wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the institutional control section of the Report’s violations or punishments. Which sucks because he was found guilty of the exact things as JT. Namely, he knew major violations had occurred, never snitch, participated in a cover-up, and repeatedly lied to the NCAA about it. You scrub McNair completely from the USC report and it wouldn’t move the needle one way or the other LIC-wise.
McNair became the media’s focus of the USC Report because it was by far the sexiest angle. But the actual result of those nasty findings against McNair didn’t hurt anybody. Except McNair. And his poor, poor mother. A ‘Show Cause’ penalty is the coaches problem. Any damage to the program is collateral
3a. For anything to be different this with OSU, the NCAA will have to basically find that,
unlike RB coach Todd McNair, Jim Tressel was the institution. Could they? Cuss yeah! Is there precedent for it? Ehhhhh.... maybe for my next project.
Will they? Almost certainly not.
The day after JT’s initial presser the NCAA should rightfully have called Gee and told him, “LIC is on the table as of this moment. We don’t so much as discuss it coming off until I see a pike held high with the heads Smith and Tressel. We’d appreciate it if you could ‘get right on that.’”
That didn’t happen, so we must accept the JT as lone gunman defense as viable. The known record shows him as the only conduit between the school and outside sources of information linking the players to improper benefits. Allegedly, JT didn’t even tell the dirty players themselves he knew what was up. He simply informed the team as a whole, “Stay away from Fine Line and Rife.” To move Tategate from problem that dies with JT to a possible LIC charge would require showing either: a) the school had reason to know about the violations before the Fed’s letter in Dec 2010 and took no action; or, b) the violations and JT’s cover up went undiscovered as the result of weak compliance efforts.
There’s a very, verrrrry clear option “c” that should to be on this list. From an NCAA compliance standpoint the head coach and institution must be considered a single entity. You can argue over other members of the team staff, but as far as their sport goes, the head coach is the chief compliance officer. Period. Coaches report possible violations and the school decides what to do with that info. That’s the only permissible distinction. To treat the school employees responsible for hands-on oversee of a the team differently in any other way than the school employees responsible handing in compliance forms and calling the NCAA when there is a problem is a blue print for cheating the system.
3b. That doesn’t mean the institution has strict liability for the compliance sins of a coach. It does clearly mean an institution must have a zero tolerance policy for anything less than 100% reporting transparency from the HC when it comes to NCAA infractions. How can you operate otherwise and claim to “foster an atmosphere of compliance”?
That phrase may sound like it was written by the kindergarten teacher from Happy Gilmore, but what it really means is that the institution ensures employees are sufficiently scared sh--less of not reporting possible violations. Let alone committing them.
Here, OSU’s defacto head of football compliance (and the athletic department’s most high profile employee) walked in on an orgy of violations, tore of his clothes and jumped into said orgy*, then told oodles of lies right to the face of his parents, the cops, and the media, about whether he knew the orgy ever wend down. When all this was brought to his parent’s attention, they said, “Jimmy, you’re such a good boy. An angel among us. But we can’t let this slide. Its straight home after practice tomorrow and an elevvvv... make it 11:30pm curfew this Friday.”
OSU the institution, the capital “I” Institution’s collective response to all the revelations over Tategate has to been to squat directly over everything the NCAA claims to hold dear, and take a big, yucky, poop on it. The NCAA should be using OSU as an example of what every school should do if they want to do the exact opposite of fostering compliance.
OSU’s on the record statement of what they considered an appropriate institutional response was a kiss on the wrist. And the instutution’s statement never waived. 2 non-con games for the kids, 2 for the coach (JT’s $250k fine is 2 games with of salary), and a promise to really take this stuff seriously in the future. For realz this time. They never dropped their appeal of the player suspensions, and it was JT himself who bumped his game suspension to match their 5. Gee is on record that JT was never given an ultimatum, and resigning was all JT’s idea. The school’s actions in terms of consistently seeking penalties well below NCAA precedent speaks volumes about their attitudes toward compliance. But in this rare case Smith/Gee’s statements (ie, the institution’s statements) have actually spoken louder.
The “hope he doesn’t fire me” soundbite is the one that’ll live forever. For me the money quote was, “We trust Jim implicitly.” It encapsulates the essence of the distinction between the OSU and USC situations.
It should be a distinction without meaning. USC treated compliance like a joke and cheating got out-of-hand. OSU built the Titanic of compliance departments and continues touting it as unsinkable months after the ship had settled on the bottom of the ocean. The “We don’t care” approach vs. the “We don’t care if anyone performs their compliance roles competently” approach. Don’t both stances have a negative impact on the atmosphere of compliance?
OSU the institution has either constructed a ‘front’ for compliance, or been shockingly incompetent in the hiring and ongoing management the 3 biggest fish in their NCAA compliance pond (Gee, Smith, JT) and who knows how many more? Like, a 12 volt to the nuts shockingly. NCAA sanctions are supposed to punitive and corrective measures. Unless the NCAA pulls a 180 it will set the crystal clear precedent that willful blindness will get you gaffed, as where FAIL allow you to be gently let off the hook.
4. Apparently the NCAA sees this zero tolerance logic as less than bulletproof, since as of
the April 21, 2011 Notice of Allegations letter to Gordon Gee, everything I just wrote was widely known and long digested, yet LIC was not on the table.
The media at large has poo-pood this fact into the ground with the a perfunctory, “...but the NCAA can always add more allegations” that allows them to get on with the lambasting. And I’m cool with that.
But why does anyone believe the NCAA will add those allegations? Common Sense? The facts? Presumably the NCAA had both those in its hands on 4/21/11 when their Notice of Allegations went out without an LIC charge.
If there’s one thing we can solidly say about the NCAA its that they’re not in a hurry to do anything. Ever. So here they are on 4/20/11. In the midst of one of the highest profile NCAA investigation in history. Torches are lit. Pitchforks pointed. New allegations flowing like wine. The media and public in 49 states and the greater-Toledo area are thirsty for BLOOD. The rhetoric is flying, some of the strongest coming directly from the new NCAA prez himself, whose own institution is being ridiculed for allowing TP et al. to play in the Sugar Bowl while watching Cam Newton and Auburn ride happily into the sunset. Leading the new sheriff to actually says what everyone is thinking, namely, nothing would boost the NCAA’s image and restore authority like a very public hanging.
Yet, on April 21, 2011, the NCAA decided to go off half-cocked with a Notice that doesn’t include the most serious charge under consideration? Really? That’s how it went down?
On April 21, 2011, the NCAA was possessed of all the juicy details we know of regarding JT, TP, Ted, Fine Line, Rife, Cicero, Smith, Gee, et al. And more. There was no reason for the NCAA to rush out the notice at that time. On that date if the NCAA thought they had a case to beef OSU with LIC for their handling of compliance, the NCAA investigations in question, or how the school comported itself in the wake of these revelations, they should have had all the relevant evidence they needed to support such a charge.
They chose not to.
Assuming the time of that notice was the result of a sloppy mistake by the NCAA, or some unknown behind the scenes reason nobody has been able to figure out, nearly two have passed since the Notice was drafted. We’re now closer to the Aug 12th hearing date than we are to the issuance of that notice. The purpose of notice is to alert OSU the charges it’ll be answering to at the hearing with enough time to collect relevant evidence and prepare its defense. How long is the NCAA waiting to ‘spring’ the allegation on them and/or announce the Aug 12th hearing date is being pushed to conduct further investigation into adding such a charge?
5. The key elements in the USC Report finding LIC were its puny compliance department
and gross indifference to compliance oversight as a concept, obviously a huge difference between that case and OSU. The Report’s treatment of their stonewall approach and defiance in the face of significant evidence was not directly linked to the LIC finding, it was more of a kicker once things moved to punishment phase. OSU’s approach to compliance is the polar opposite of hiding and stonewalling, which would act as a mitigating factor at the punishment phase, and could add a significant layer of difficultly even if the NCAA was hellbent on nailing OSU for LIC.
USC’s defense was that if the had seen something worth looking into, they would have. In that context USC’s “you ain’t nothing but a lot of talk and badge” attitude toward the investigation was consistent with their defense. The NCAA said you lose anyway because you should have seen this stuff and probably would have if you followed NCAA guidelines.
OSU looks at everything but only sees what it wants to. Which, curses(!), was never major NCAA violations.
OSU pretends to care. Pretends to be proactive. Has a massive compliance staff. Ted Sarniak isn’t a back alley booster whose name was buried somewhere in Pryor’s file. His name was practically next to TP’s on page 1. OSU doesn’t pay lip service to taking compliance seriously. They can afford to pay for actual.... uhh, tongue (?) service. “Is compliance important to tOSU? Have you SEEN the size of our staff! Don’t you know they work out of an office built entirely from signed/notarized NCAA affidavits?” OSU’s compliance dept is a perfect mirror of JT himself. The surface is so compelling it not only hides what’s below, even when the underlying contradictions are laid bare you question if what you’re seeing could really be true.
When something like Tatgate or Pryor’s Wild Rides Round 1 hit in Dec 2010, OSU compliance does its thing. Document. Investigate. Report STAT. Follow up. Invite the NCAA to join the party. Cooperate. All good things and easy to document. Then they figure out the most desirable outcome for OSU and fill in the blanks behind it with whatever investigative ‘results’ are deemed least likely to attract future scrutiny, always leaving a plausible back door open just in case. These are bad things excruciatingly difficult to prove.
The NCAA has no subpoena powers. On the other hand, they also don’t have to deal with exclusionary rules of evidence. Put those facts together and the result is most evidence and findings in an NCAA inquiry like this one are circumstantial in nature. So while USC’s stonewalling approach didn’t lead to the LIC finding, in helped paved the way for that finding. The NCAA only had to pile up the individual instances of unreported violations high enough to say, “no way you should have missed this” in order to prove their case for LIC.
Here, OSU’s defense is going to be, “We tried our best. We put in the resources and lived within the letter of compliance efforts. We built a dam. True, a lot of water got through. Between us we were just as taken in by JT everyone else, and all these shennangins happened on his watch. We were about to finally fire him but he beat us to the punch. He’s gone now and we’ve learned some other lessons. This won’t happen again. Honest.”
That defense is a lot harder to topple.
6. What are we missing? Based on undisputed facts and reasonable inferences, I feel
safe in saying that on 4/21/11 the NCAA didn’t think it had the horses to go for LIC, and given that we’re less than 2 months from the hearing with no public changes on that front, its officially a longshot. Perhaps the NCAA saw a tactical advantage in holding that charge back. Perhaps they felt some pressure to get the allegations against JT on the table in time to schedule a hearing that would happen before the football season, and are now taking their sweet-ass time doing anything else.
For now my hopes are pinned to an FOIA request that leads us to OSU’s nazi gold, or a couple ½ decent witness stumbling forward to openly testify about contradictions between what the institution has claimed to know about, and when, with regard to Tategate and/or the other various perks OSU football players availed themselves of.
At this moment all those prospect are looking very dodgy.
*One of the widely accepted myths in the Tategate fiasco is that JT never committed any actual violations, other than those related to not reporting/covering-up someone else’s violations. That was the hatstand for OSU supporters who wanted to parse levels of NCAA culpability between the JT’s and the Bruce Pearl’s of the world. This premise was rarely if ever challenged by outside pundits who usually shrugged their shoulders and responded “who cares” if not “what JT did is actually worse.”
IMO - Isn’t suiting up players you know to be ineligible and playing them for an entire season a “violation” itself? |
| 2 years 45 weeks ago | yeah |
reading this again a better subject header or maybe an introductory paragraph would have helped. Wasn't thinking of it since this wasn't really a diary just some links and comments, but I went to "create content" and couldn't post a forum, diary was the only option. |
| 3 years 4 weeks ago | thanks for filing in After |
thanks for filing in After posting the question, I noticed the link in Brian's post and followed links until I figured this out. Sort of ironic as Walken has a classic Kareokee scene in Search and Destroy. |
| 3 years 12 weeks ago | nobody moves to from FL to |
nobody moves to from FL to michigan because they're from flint. there's a reason they left |
