The NCAA bemoans, but doesn’t reform
The most jarring collision in college sports doesn’t happen on a football field. It happens when the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics meets with the NCAA. It’s there that aspirations for fair and honest college athletics slam into the incompetence and hypocrisy of the group that theoretically governs college athletics.
The collisions have been going on since UNC President emeritus Bill Friday and Notre Dame President Rev. Theodore Hesburgh served as the first chairmen of the Knight Commission in 1989. After such meetings, the NCAA usually absorbs many of the commission’s proposed reforms and then proceeds to preside over the further debasement and corruption of major college sports.
The reformers and the enablers met again Monday in Washington, D.C., with the same painful, but almost comical results. Two of their subjects were the NCAA’s decision that it couldn’t punish the University of North Carolina for academic fraud that kept athletes eligible and the NCAA’s failure to detect alleged bribery involving the recruitment of high school players and the steering of college players to preferred financial advisers and agents.
On the first issue, Arne Duncan, a former U.S. education secretary who now co-leads the Knight Commission, expressed bafflement that the NCAA could not sanction UNC for phony classes that helped athletes because NCAA rules say the accused school must determine if classes were academic fraud. UNC first said they were and then said they weren’t. The NCAA said: case closed.
“We are calling on the NCAA to change a rule that now effectively allows an institution under investigation to make its own determination – let me repeat that, its own determination – about the academic legitimacy of its courses,” Duncan said. “The NCAA should not be handcuffed in its authority to consider independent assessments of academic fraud.”
The NCAA way
Duncan may be an educator, but he certainly is not schooled on the ways of the NCAA. Mark Emmert, the governing body’s president who met with the commission Monday, provided him a lesson. Sure, Emmert said, “only a very small portion of Americans” believe that the NCAA’s committee on infractions made the correct decision in the UNC case, but the NCAA has to look past academic fraud to protect academic independence.
“As a former university professor and president you don’t want or need anybody telling you what academic fraud is,” Emmert said to reporters after his remarks to the commission. “That’s something that you have to decide for yourself.”
Got that, Arne? Now you’re seeing how the NCAA way. Logic is always secondary to hypocrisy when it comes to protecting the revenue stream from major college sports.
Poll on sports, money
Emmert went on to underscore that reality in discussing a recent NCAA-commissioned poll that found that 79 percent of Americans think major colleges put money ahead of the interests of their athletes and more than half of Americans think the NCAA is part of the problem.
“We need to act. We need to demonstrate that we are, in fact, capable of resolving these issues,” Emmert told commission members. He said so without a hint of irony that the NCAA doesn’t seem to feel any urgency about policing college sports. It won’t sanction academic fraud and it failed to detect an alleged web of bribery related to athletes, coaches, agents and shoe-company money.
What will the NCAA do to restore public confidence in major college basketball? That will be up to a NCAA committee formed in response to the FBI investigation into the bribery allegations. It will be led by former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Reforms will be proposed and adopted. Money will remain king. The NCAA will remain ineffective as judge, jury and benefactor from college revenue sports. And the show will go on.
This story was originally published October 31, 2017 at 6:46 PM with the headline "The NCAA bemoans, but doesn’t reform."