Big Ten Seeks Ability to Fire Coaches
A coworker sent this article to me just now. Apparently due to the ongoing situation at Penn State, the conference has been mulling a proposal that would give the commissioner, along with the presidents and chancellors, the ability to "penalize individual members of an institution, should their actions significantly harm the league’s reputation."
I'm not sure how I personally feel about this without seeing the proposal itself, but it would obviously be unprecedented.
I don't think this means 'firing coaches' so much as a conference version of the NCAA's show cause penalty.
D'oh.
I can't imagine university presidents would ever go for this (if that's really the power that is implied). No way will a university want the big ten telling them who they can and can't employ
Is impose multi year suspensions (similar to a show cause) that would in essance be firing the coach. Legal loopholes FTW... or whatever the hell beacuse I don't think this is "win"
Not a fan of this at all. I don't want the other schools in the conference to have a say in how Michigan runs it's athletic department.
There's that, and there's also the fact that this further dilutes authority by creating another independent power center. University presidents and athletic directors will now be able to throw up their hands and say that they'll defer to the conference to handle personnel disciplinary issues. The Conference will be (correctly) hesitant to step in for fear of looking like an outsider and lacking capital with the university community. More distinct governing bodies = less capacity for enforcement, not more.
Not to mention the fact that, if this is being done in response to PSU, it's even more ridiculous. This wouldn't have helped the PSU situation at all. Shortly after the allegations came to light, PSU fired its President, Athletic Director, and Head Coach. What would the NCAA have done differently? Would Spanier have informed the NCAA of what he knew regarding Sandusky years earlier than it came out? Would the NCAA have had a better idea of what was going on at Penn State than the Penn State administration did? Hardly.
This is just somebody trying to look like they're doing something. It'll end up being worthless at best and counterproductive at worst.
I don't really even know how to react to this.
Jim Delany is an idiot. A money-making idiot, but an idiot nonetheless.
and then we can talk about whether there is a role for the conference with respect to coaches and other personnel..
Didn't they do just that? Gholston was suspended by the conference after MSU refused to do it themselves.
suspension possible (other than "none") for multiple, deliberate attempts by Gholston to injure Michigan players in a single game. If I recall correctly, the outcry on this blog was pretty loud that the conference did the minimum.
It is relevant to this topic because if they can't handle basic oversight related to player safety, then there should be skepticism about expanding their role regarding other oversight issues.
imagine what Bo and Woody's reaction would be to this?
Woody would have punched Delaney.
It's one of those "close the gate after the horses have escaped" solutions.
I read the article in Chronicle of Higher Education that was the source of the story; evidently the league is also mulling over whether to keep PSU in the league, or some other form of punishment.
No one really knows what to do with this situation. But the general feeling, evidently, is that they have to do something.
"Close the gate after the horses have escaped" is the perfect way to think about this. When I first saw this, I immediate reaction was "what possible circumstance could arise in which the conference felt so strongly compelled to fire someone from a university but that the university felt so strongly that this person should not be fired? If the Big10 feels the need to get rid of someone, more than likely that person's university is going to feel the same way." Paterno was the only person I could think of that held so much sway over his university that he could create this level of dissonance between the conference and the university. And I think it's fair to say that Paterno was a hugely unique figure in that regard.
"Any Big Ten university that employs or retains workers who intentionally falsify or deliberately fail to provide complete and accurate information during an investigation may be required to “show cause why its membership in the conference should not be suspended or terminated,” the Big Ten’s 2011-12 handbook says."
Someone who knows more about employment law can correct me if I am wrong, but the authority to hire and fire rests with the hiring or firing firm, so the Big Ten would have to be the employer if they literally wanted this ability, if I am not mistaken. The idea of punishing institutions for retaining employees who commit acts which are either against the bylaws of the conference, in the case of Penn State, outrightly felonious and sick in nature, I totally agree with that.
In any event, coaches are people with employment contracts on top of everything else, so there is the issue of "good cause" as well (and whatever peculiar terms exist in someone's deal), and the definition of that term is generally different across states, I believe. I don't know if the Big Ten is thinking this through if they even broach the idea of dabbling in the state-to-state variations in employment law. It seems like this would be virtually unmanagable for the conference at the level of the employee. They really should focus their efforts at the institutional level.
I cannot see any school being receptive to the idea of losing its authority to hire and/or terminate people, never mind the legal issues. I am not sure I want to imagine what the hiring process for coaches would be like, since the Big Ten would likely need to take that on as well in such a proposal if they even wanted to pretend this was kosher.
thats not necessarily true, and it's really just as simple as adding a clause into your contract, that your employment is subject to the the university and conference morality clauses. The schools can give the conference the power to police, and the conference would not actually be firing, rather giving the order for the school to terminate, which (if the schools agree to this) they will comply with.
Once again, the university would not allow the conference to involve themselves in trivial matters but likely more things like the Tressel siituation and obviiously Paterno. If someone wants to blow the whistle and are stifled by the univeristy beauracracy, they would have another avenue in which to report.
That being said, i think its very tricky and will likely not pass. Delaney will have a long sit down with his legal department before deciding that this could cost some serious dough.
but i dont love it.
as far as the Penn State situation goes though, i think this gives someone involved someone else to call in the situation that no one chooses to do anything within the university chain of command. I don't think they should have Goodell type power at all though. Anything beyond banning a team or a coach from conference title competition, seems a bit much.
At the same time, the result would be not that much different than how people wished things were. Had it been Tressel fired by delaney, would anyone here have objected since it was evident that anyone affiliated with Ohio wa gonna do it? The conference stepping in to enforce morality that the university won't is not 100% bad though. There is no need in thinking that a recruiting violation will be punished by termination, but more realistically the coaches that would get fired would be the ones that probably everyone thinks should get fired.
I doubt they would ever use the ability to fire coaches. Chances are the schools will do so first. Only time I could see it happening is if the athletic director and school president were completely obstinant and proud like USC's AD when the Bush/Mayo saga was going down.
That's kind of where I think the Penn State thing is going. I have to believe that Penn State will self-punish with guidance from the NCAA and Big Ten. It'll make their remorse look extremely insincere if they get penalized by one of those bodies without agreeing with the penalty. Plus, with the NCAA standing on shaky ground as far as precedent goes, it seems like that guided self-punishment thing will be better for everyone.
The notion that the league would need the right to step in because the schools might do nothing insults the integrity of every institution in the league. The Penn State situation was a cover up. Once it broke, the school fired the coach, fired the president and did what needed to be done. That doesn't excuse the school's failure to act previously, but what more could the league do at this juncture that it can't do already? The Tressel situation was handled tackily, but at least he was fired. What more would the league have done? Universities are run by grown-ups, most of whom I like to think are pretty conscientious, responsible people. To change the rules to allow the league to hire and fire a university's employees is an abdication of sovereignty that i cannot imagine any Trustee on any BOT would countenance.
More bureaucracy is just what we need to solve our problems. And diluting the soverign rights of conference member institutions.
Remarks like this can be interpreted as being unnecessarily political.
With that said, I think "more bureaucracy" (as if there exists some universal sliding scale) would have done Penn State a lot of good since the Freeh report argues that there was not a proper system of oversight in place between the board of trustees and the university leadership. Often time, bureaucratic systems and processes exist to hold people and institutions to account.
As for the "sovereign rights" of the schools, that makes no sense whatsoever. Most member institutions are PUBLIC and therefore have sovereignty over nothing.
As people have said, this may not be such a bad thing if it adds an additional layer of oversight to prevent the worst of the worst from happening. At least then there is another mechanism through which whistleblowers and concerned people can report what they've witnessed.
that makes their responsibility to the taxpayers, not to the conference. I feel that giving the conference apparatus itself the power to fire coaches is a bad precedent and does not solve the problems of institutional corruption faced at many schools.
Penn State had bureaucracy, but it also had people simply not fulfilling their legal obligations to contact the authorities as required by law. Moreover, at the time the current scandal broke, Penn State still had not brought itself in compliance with the 1990 Clery Act requiring disclosure of crime statistics on campus, among other things. The problem at that institution rested with the culture of noncompliance, not with the system of legal safeguards.
Absolutely NOT...I dont want anyone from ANYWHERE other than UM having a voice in who the coach should be....GOD... just like Bigger Govt...it just gets bigger and bigger...NO NO NO...and did I mention NO?