OT- South Carolina hit with 'Failure to Monitor' citation from NCAA
Gamecocks hit with failure to monitor, per ESPN.
Any thoughts?
being the SEC.
small potatoes. Unless you have USC'esk scholarship cuts and postseason bans, these kind of punishments mean nothing...
I saw this a couple days ago and basically just wrote it off as the NCAA being stupid. Seemed like a pretty good amount of money as impermissable benefits yet a pretty lame ass punishment. The NCAA infractions committee is a joke and everyone knows it. To be honest, you almost have to "cheat," somehow, some way, to win these days. It's really unfortunate, and the punishment after-the-fact is somehow not enough to deter people from accepting that risk and initiating, or continuing to, cheat. Ugh....
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.
No not at all. I'm referring more to the teams that win the MNC. I think Hoke has done it perfectly right from the start. His goal is to win the B1G. He doesn't care about anything else. It's almost genius, b/c if you set the goal at MNC, you will undoubtedly lose and underperform. If you set it on the B1G, you compete with your rivals, and if you succeed, you will most likely get a shot at the MNC every once in a while. I love Hoke, but it SEEMS like to compete for a MNC these days, you've got to be doing something corrupt. Whether it's poor player discipline (lookin' at you Urban), oversigning, "paying" players (Auburn), or shady player recruitment (Tressel). Something shady has been going on at a lot of these places, and I'd rather focus on the B1G and not have to do that crap then focus on MNC and lower the overall standards of what we believe to be a far superior University.
I reacted the same way as the person above (thinking you were referring that Hoke has cheated). Obviously none of us think that has happened nor do any of us believe that will be necessary to win at Michigan.
I agree, i would much rather win the B1G Championship over winning the NC, knowing that the coaching staff/players cheated to get to that point. Plus, i have always followed Bo's idea about the conference championship, you can control winning your conference, but the players cannot control the voters (computers now as well) so focus on winning the conference and the rest will take care of itself.
if you go by the letter of the NCAA rules, Hoke is indeed cheating. The same way every other coach at every other competitive institution (in any sport) is cheating, and the same way Rich Rodriguez cheated. How is that, you ask?
"Voluntary" workouts, "voluntary" team activities, and other "voluntary" preparation. Yeah... those don't actually exist.
April 29th, 2012 at 10:06 PM ^
They're voluntary in the way the majority of college classes are voluntary. No one is going to make you go, but if you can't pass the tests (read: show up for camp out of shape, not knowing the playbook, failing to have advanced in strength/conditioning/skills, sans rapport with wide receivers), that's on you. So sure, they're voluntary, but anyone who is serious about being a good football player should (and will) go. Not to mention, there's that whole peer pressure aspect. Who's going to tell Denard no?
April 29th, 2012 at 10:13 PM ^
go together.
because you can be your ass if you don't go, the coaches know about it, and you are punished in some way for it. They are, in effect, manditory. Which is a violation.
I can't hold a practice, call it math class, and get by with it. But they do it all the time in athletics by calling things "voluntary", then taking attendance. It happened in all the sports I've ever played. Off-season organized conditioning with the team is voluntary. But guess who doesn't see the field come time to play.
Don't know a lot about the case. I am getting pretty worn out on how the NCAA has this arbitrary criteria about who is cooperative and who isn't and throws penalties around based on that.
So some school got caught red handed doing something they should have known about with minimal effort, and THEN the become really cooperative knowing that their penalties will be a lot lighter. There's something not right about that.
Doesn't cooperation also include working hard to be abiding by the rules in the first place?
Then you have a case like USC where they have a reasonable case that no one on the staff knew Bush was self-dealing with an agent. They stand their ground and apparently get sacked harder because of it.
So if I am a school trying to create a break through with football, the formula is: break the rules enough to get an advantage, look the other way and then if we get caught, kiss the NCAA's rump and admit everything fast.
I wonder if Saban is guilty of anything, and it just hasn't been brought to our attention.
My impression of Saban is that he will do anything and everything the rulebook doesn't prohibit to win. I think he knows that there's no way to keep a secret anymore with every Twitter user being a potential informant.
That's just my guess, but he seems like he couldn't give up the control necessary to cheat effectively.
"The penalties could've been much more severe. Banowsky, commissioner of Conference USA, said South Carolina chose not to manage information and protect itself from NCAA investigators as other schools have done when faced with allegations of rule breaking." - from the article
It might seem cynical of me, but South Carolina's reaction to this seems pretty disingenuous, but at the same time, it somehow does not shock me at all that the NCAA Rules Committee accepted their self-imposed punishment. You would think that, if teams really respected the committee, they would follow the rules in the first place, and if the committee was worth respecting, then teams would make sure that their compliance folks slap around, on an internal basis, anyone suspected of wayward behavior.
It seems like schools practice this faux openness whenever they are caught, and the problem is that it seems to work, and by then, the goal has typically been achieved for the program in question. Especially in the SEC, it seems like the only school that would be sincere in an "OMG, I am SO sorry..." approach would be Vanderbilt, if that ever could happen there.
We got more of a penalty for practicing too much. They give their team $60,000.00 in benefits and get less than us? Ridiculous
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.
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.
Isn't OT but yeah I was a little surprised. I think you can win the National championship without being corrupt. We were on pace in 2006 and if we didn't slip up we would have been there.
No. I don't believe it. Not in the SEC. No way.
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.
Interesting way to put it, and similar to the way I look at the SEC. I do think Miles is almost in the same sleaze league as Saban. But you make a great point about the culture.
I think Ohio – alone among Big Ten schools – has a culture closer to the SEC. Boosters seem to have an outsized role there, and much of the fan base would be a better fit in the SEC if their food was better and their women more attractive.
April 30th, 2012 at 12:05 AM ^
April 30th, 2012 at 12:26 AM ^