The Standard of Punishment in Collegiate Athletics (Or The Grayest of Gray Areas Governed by the NCAA)

Okay, okay. I know I missed last week’s Dumbass of the Week Award. What can I say? A girl needs a vacation every once in awhile. 🙂

I’m back now, though, and I’ve got a combo post for all of you. We’ll start with the group of guys that have certainly earned my Dumbass of the Week Award. Not wanting to be outdone by our last winners, the North Dakota State football players who got popped for voter fraud/petition forgery, the University of North Dakota men’s hockey team upped the ante by throwing a team party on Saturday night that was an alleged freshman initiation. Not that it’s needed, but let’s consider a list of the reasons this little soiree was a decision of unutterably stupid proportions:

• It happened in Walsh Hall, a residence hall on UND’s campus. UND’s dry campus, I should say. I know that hockey players are afforded a status on this campus similar to that given to Alabama’s football players or Duke’s basketball players, but the sometimes blatant assumption that they can get away with whatever it is they choose to do is insulting. If you’re going to be stupid enough to throw a party at which alcohol is present on a dry campus in a residence hall teeming with RAs, you’re asking to be busted.
• While true freshmen on a DI college hockey team are semi-rare, freshmen and sophomores under the age of 21 are not. When one considers the rules requiring students to live on campus until a certain again at most colleges, it becomes fairly obvious that underage drinking was going on. When this story first broke, the assistant state’s attorney was waiting to charge people until he got more information from the police who (according to the article I linked to earlier) were called because alcohol was present and someone was passed out.
• Initially, the school suspended the team’s four captains (Corban Knight, Andrew MacWilliam, Danny Kristo, and Carter Rowney)  for the season opener against Alaska-Anchorage on October 19. No word if the party was planned or thrown specifically by these four guys, but as the team’s captains, it appears the school is holding them accountable for teamwide oopsies. The school also specified that the entire team will be placed on probation, will have weekly alcohol education classes, will take part in a program-wide mandatory community service project, and will face severe penalties (along the lines of reduced scholarships, possible suspensions or even expulsions) should another player find himself on the wrong side of the rules.
• News broke online yesterday that the assistant state’s attorney got the information he needed as four players on the team will be charged with underage drinking (their names haven’t been released because the charges won’t be officially filed until Monday). Additional suspensions also came down as sophomores Connor Gaarder, Andrew Panzarella and Stephane Pattyn (all 21 or older) were taken out of the line-up for the team’s October 20 game against Alaska-Fairbanks. The team also gave Danny Kristo another one game suspension and suspended sophomore Brendan O’Donnell for violating team policy (unrelated to the party). Now, Kristo will miss the entire opening weekend, and O’Donnell will serve his suspension during the October 19 game. Their suspensions, coupled with a prior unrelated two-week suspension for sophomore Dan Senkbeil, has left the team starting off the season on all kinds of interpretations of “the wrong foot.”

So what does that leave us? A team facing the disappointment and disapproval of head coach Dave Hakstol (anyone who’s seen a UND hockey game and the stoic, perpetual “you call this your best effort” face he always wears knows how hard it must be to have to man up under that kind of scrutiny). A team who has reached the line in the sand for how far they can push before a university pushes back. A team who has messed up so many times before the season even starts that it will start that season one player short of a typical roster size (teams usually field 18 players during a game, but the suspensions will leave UND with only 17 available players on October 19).

Hey guys? That “think before you act” thing your mom always used to say? That was actually really good advice; keep it in mind next time someone thinks they’ve got a brilliant idea. Congrats, Idiots.

A lot of people have had a lot to say about the way in which the NCAA hands out punishment to athletic programs for missteps and bad choices. In recent years, it seems we’ve been faced with a number of examples in which heavy sanctions have been dropped on teams (football teams seem to be the biggest targets–whether that’s because they have more players and therefore a higher chance of someone screwing up or because they simply screw up more often and in bigger ways, I’m not sure). USC is heading into its first football season post-ban for “lack of institutional control” in regards to Reggie Bush, and Penn State is heading into its first of four football seasons without postseason hopes (among other things).

“Lack of institutional control.” It’s a phrase that seems to cover all manner of sins within college athletics. It’s a sort of catch-all when a player or program does something wrong that doesn’t clearly fall under any one NCAA rule but needs to be addressed in some way. Let’s take a look at Reggie Bush, for example. It was discovered that he had accepted improper benefits while a player at USC. While Bush hasn’t admitted to any wrongdoing, the NCAA, following their investigation, laid out the following penalties:

• Four year probation
• Two year postseason ban
• The vacating of the last two wins of the 2004 season (including the 2005 Orange Bowl) as well as the entirety of the 2005 season
• Loss of 30 scholarships over 3 seasons
• USC’s running backs coach was banned from off-campus recruiting for one season after it was made known that he was aware of Bush’s activities
• USC had to permanently cut ties with Reggie Bush

Sure “improper benefits” is a common enough phrase within collegiate sports these days, and there are several examples of individual players being punished for accepting such gifts. The difference maker in the case of USC (as an example-they’re certainly not the only ones) was the NCAA determined that the football program didn’t take the steps it should have to prevent or stop these things from occurring. According to the chairman of the NCAA infractions committee, Paul Dee, “High-profile players merit high-profile enforcement.”

Then we have Penn State. A completely unfathomable scandal out of a completely unexpected school. No one was prepared to read or hear about the gravity of the allegations being thrown around as the media got a hold of and ran away with the story. A former assistant football coach at a storied institution known for its tradition and legacy (especially on defense-Linebacker U anyone?) used his position and, sometimes, school facilities to sexually abuse countless young boys. When the depravity of Jerry Sandusky’s actions seemed like the worst it could get, suddenly the public was faced with the realization that people knew. A player-turned-graduate-assistant-turned-coaching-staff-member walked in on Sandusky with a child in the locker room at Penn State in 2001. That player told Joe Paterno. Joe Paterno told Tim Curley and Gary Schultz (athletic director and vice president for business and finance, respectively). The result of those conversations? Sandusky being told not to bring anymore children to the school’s facilities. All this after Sandusky had already been investigated (though not charged) for child abuse in 1998.

Needless to say it was an unbelievably tragic, messy story that ended with Sandusky being convicted on 45 counts of sexual abuse. How does the NCAA fit in?

• Five year probation
• Four year postseason ban
• Vacating all wins from 1998-2011, including conference titles
• $60 million fine
• Loss of 40 scholarships from 2013-2017, and no more than 65 total scholarships for that same time period
• Adopt all recommendations in the Freeh Report
• Take steps to guarantee university compliance with NCAA policies

These sanctions seemed to spark one of two reactions in sports fans: way too much or nowhere near enough. Either people felt like the penalties were far too harsh for a program/school that no longer employed anyone involved in the scandal (essentially the NCAA was punishing staff and players who had no part in anything that went on before Sandusky was arrested), or they felt like the NCAA was too lenient (many people called for the death penalty in which the NCAA completely shuts down the Penn State football program for a set period of time).

Here’s the thing: the NCAA had to do something because doing nothing would’ve been inexcusable. The court of public opinion would’ve tarred and feathered the powers that be. The egregious nature of what happened at Penn State demanded a response of some degree. Plus, the NCAA was able to justify many of their decisions. The vacating of wins took away Paterno’s record of career wins: he knew Sandusky had done something unforgivable, but didn’t take the initiative to call the police when it appeared the school officials weren’t taking the right steps. Paterno had already been fired, so the availability of other methods of punishment were limited.

The $60 million fine is approximately equal to the amount of revenue generated by the Nittany Lion football program in a single year. Plus, that fine is being put toward an endowment for preventing child abuse. It seems like an exorbitant amount, but this is a school and football program with money we can’t fathom at its disposal. They’ll recover from a fine of this amount, and the money is going to a great cause.

But what about the other side of the coin and those that say it wasn’t enough? The continued violations by Southern Methodist University that resulted in the death penalty issued by the NCAA was a learning experience, for everyone. It took decades for SMU’s football program to start to rebound (though the struggles were not solely due to the penalty), which was not the intention of the NCAA in issuing the punishment. Since then the NCAA has been hesitant to hand down the death penalty, though it has happened in lower divisions of athletics. Could they have issued it to Penn State? Of course. They admitted to seriously considering it. But a person has to consider the other activities at Penn State. A death penalty for Penn State football would be a death sentence for nearly every other sport at that school because it’s a football-heavy institution (unlike an Ohio State or Stanford that has annual powerhouses in multiple sports that bring in fans and therefore money). Yes these punishments seem to be taken out on football players who had nothing to do with what happened, but to some degree that’s unavoidable. What is avoidable is taking the $60 million or so that football brings into the athletics budget every year away from their other, smaller sports teams who rely on that money as well. So while the football players are suffering through postseason bans and reduced scholarships, their continued playing keeps the sanctions from resonating too much within cross-country, basketball, soccer, and other teams fielded at Penn State.

Harsh penalties? Definitely. Warranted? Of course. Survivable? Eventually. To me, the bottom line is that the scandal at Penn State went further than just the football program. As soon as school administration was made aware and began taking steps to cover their asses rather than call the police and help the victims, it became a school-wide issue. In that regard, the NCAA had to look at it as punishing an institution rather than punishing individuals. According to the NCAA, Penn State’s “football first” method of decision-making following their realization of what was going on “presents an unprecedented failure of institutional integrity leading to a culture in which a football program was held in higher esteem than the values of the institution, the values of the NCAA, the values of higher education, and most disturbingly the values of human decency.”

It’s never easy being the school used as an example to the rest of the class, but in this case? The NCAA had to take a hard line to show that athletics should never be put ahead of the best interests of players, students, fans, or the school itself. Will we ever see another scandal of this magnitude? I really hope not, but should this situation reappear in some format in future years, the NCAA had to ensure that there was no history of leniency in dealing with a school’s mistakes.

Agree, disagree, or indifferent, the other thing to keep in mind is that Penn State agreed to every sanction put forth by the NCAA. The school accepted its punishment and is working on reforming itself and its programs; it’s working to move on.

What it comes down to is the realization that the NCAA has to follow a case-by-case basis when doling out punishments for mistakes made by its member schools. While they do have set rules and policies that programs have to follow, a person has to keep in mind that breaking those rules or defying those policies is only limited by the creativity of the person doing it. Honestly? If you’re going to take on the NCAA’s policies, I’m thinking some of you can be pretty creative. So they may have an idea of how they’ll handle certain types of situations, but trying to come up with a rubric to follow every time someone messes up just isn’t feasible. I know we all have our choice words to say about the NCAA; I can’t help but think, though, that we’d have a lot more even less flattering opinions if they tried to shove every issue into the same few punitive reactions. Do they handle it right every time? Of course not. But assuming they should is unfair. Punishments in an organization like the NCAA can’t necessarily be standardized. Occasionally pissed off fans meet inherently frustrating gray area. It simply can’t be any other way (at least not any other way that would be any better).

Besides, the NCAA is a voluntary organization all these schools pay dues to be a part of, thereby implicitly agreeing to follow all policies and procedures of said governing body. If a school doesn’t like how the NCAA handled their mistake, they really only have two options: buck up and deal with the punishments (and/or the results of any subsequent appeals), or withdraw from the NCAA and suffer the consequences. I would tend to think schools would rather just do their time and move on.