You are here: Home / Archives for violations

No Good Solution to Unofficial Visit Issues

October 7, 2011 by

There’s really no need to rehash Pete Thamel’s excellent article on some of the problems caused by the unofficial visit. In the bylaws, an unofficial visit is:

An unofficial visit to a member institution by a prospective student-athlete is a visit made at the prospective student-athlete’s own expense. The provision of any expenses or entertainment valued at more than $100 by the institution or representatives of its athletics interests shall require the visit to become an official visit, except as permitted in Bylaws 13.5 and 13.7.

Official visits, those financed by the institution, do not start until a prospect starts their senior year of high school. Even then, a prospect gets five official visits and only one to each school. And in football, basketball, and baseball, an institution is limited in how many official visits it can provide each year.

Thamel’s article does not present many good solutions for solving the unofficial visit issue. One idea thrown out that is getting discussion this year is allowing official visits to begin at some time during the junior year. That might help some, cutting down on big “junior day” weekends that look a lot like official visit events and draw prospects from around the country, raising questions about how they paid for it. But with only five visits and one chance to see a school, the official visit is not the answer without significantly raising recruiting costs.

The reason the unofficial visit is such a vexing problem is that many coaches and recruits are fond of early commitments. There are a lot of coaches who are good at recruiting, but far fewer who truly enjoy it. Most would prefer to wrap up a couple classes as soon as possible so they can focus on the players who have already enrolled. Parents want the best situation or most money (in equivalency sports) for their child, so starting early gives them a leg up. Not to mention some recruits do not enjoy the process, and get it over with as soon as possible.

This gives an advantage to a recruit who has a family with means and sophistication to be proactive in the recruiting process. Until a recruit finishes their sophomore year, it is hard (within the rules) for a coach to reach out to them. Coaches can express their interest to high school or club coaches and show up regularly at the prospect’s games. But it is largely up to the prospect to call the coach and potentially visit the campus on their own dime in order to secure a scholarship offer and make a commitment.

To erase this advantage, prospects are turning to parties willing to finance an unofficial visit. That could be the institution paying under the table, the prospect’s coach, a handler, or a family friend. Sometimes it seems the prospect is almost an unwilling or unknowing participant in the visit, not realizing that their road trip with their club team is primarily a tour of schools that may or may not have paid for the opportunity.

The unofficial visit is such a hard problem to solve because both the solutions are unappealing. Deregulate the official visit sufficiently and you drag prospects out of school with alarming regularity and raise the cost of recruiting a great deal. Deregulate who can pay for visits and prospects who cannot afford their own visits are at the mercy of those willing to foot the bill. It might just be one of those rules that we have to live with and that has to give a few schools some lumps before monitoring catches up with the tricks.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog Tagged With: ,

Two Blunt and Ineffective Measures of Whether You Need to Cheat To Win

June 27, 2011 by

As the pace of NCAA violations picks up, so has the quality of play in college athletics. Never before has Division I athletics assembled such a collection of talent. Neither trend shows any signs of slowing down any time soon. So the question arises: do you need to cheat to win?

The perception depends on who you ask. When ESPN’s Dana O’Neil surveyed 20 Division I men’s basketball head coaches (sub. req’d) last year, the consensus a definite maybe, with most coaches having little trust in their peers, but most also believing that the vast majority of programs were not committing major violations. That uncertain answer is itself cause for concern.

The trouble with the NCAA’s technical and intricate rule book is that you also lose some of the correlation between cheating and competitive success. If a coach makes a hundred or so impermissible phone calls to a couple dozen prospects over the course of two-four years, how much a competitive advantage was gained? Even more significant violations have questionable true competitive impact. USC argued, quite logically, that extra benefits received by a student-athlete after enrollment do not lead to a competitive advantage since they do not induce her to attend or stay at USC or make him play better.

We can start the long process of answering this question at the two extremes. Using the strictest definition of “cheating” we have, the vacating of a national title, the answer in the two revenue sports is promising. Not until USC’s 2004 BCS and AP national titles were vacated had a football or men’s basketball championship been vacated. By the NCAA’s own definition, all the other championships are clean.

On the other end of the spectrum, we can ask how many championships were won by programs that do not have even the hint of impropriety. Put another way, how many national championships in football and men’s basketball were won by programs with no major violations? As you might guess, the answer here is a bit less encouraging:

  • Men’s Basketball: 8/73 titles – Georgetown, Holy Cross, Loyola (Chicago), Marquette, Oklahoma State (2), Stanford, Wyoming
  • Football: 4/89 titles (Poll Era) – Penn State (2), BYU (2)

Much like the answer from the basketball coaches, the results are inconclusive. Two data points on the extreme ends of the scale tell you exactly what you’d expect them too. My hope is someone takes this and expands on it to start finding more precise measures of answering this question and incorporating other sports.

Does it really matter if it’s true that you don’t need to cheat to win? Maybe. Perception is more important than reality. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is partially based on what you believe rather than reality. If we can start providing some answers to this question, there will be better information when a coach decides whether or not to cheat.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: ,

The Third Path

April 2, 2011 by

The line between secondary and major violations has been getting fuzzier for quite some time. No longer does a major violation mean that you did something intentionally wrong or violated a bedrock principle of the NCAAa. It’s possible to be cited for a major violation through mere sloppiness or by forgetting-albeit repeatedly-one of the NCAA Manual’s many technical and often confusing rules.

So it does seem like there needs to be a new type of infraction. Something between a protracted and stigmatizing major infractions case and a secondary violation that is often never even discovered by the outside world.

There are actually three types of violations already though. There are secondary violations, there are full-on major violation, and then there are major violations that use summary disposition. A summary disposition case comes with all the stigma of commiting a major violation, but without a hearing. They also take substantially less time and cost less as well.

Rather than distinct forms of violations, what’s needed is for the NCAA process to match what the NCAA says about cases. Each is unique and it’s hard to pigeonhole cases into categories where they can be compared against each other. While there will still be steps, cases could move more smoothly from honest mistake to the death penalty with relatively minor changes to the enforcement process.

By allowing the enforcement staff to apply the two penalties seen in virtually every major infractions case-public reprimand and censure and probation-in severe secondary cases, there would be a much greater stigma to violations generally. The biggest thing that seperates major and secondary cases is that the NCAA announces major cases. Having a penalty of public reprimand and censure for at least some secondary violations would mean a coach’s good name is at stake in any case.

If public reprimand and censure is to scare potential rulebreakers, probation would help bring some violators back to the right path. By requring schools to improve monitoring early on and report on their progress to the NCAA, perhaps some petty criminals never become felons. And it could be cheaper for schools too. Small upgrades are normally less costly than a complete overhaul.

A new enforcement process alone will not eliminate all bad behavior from college athletics. But also neither will a set of new and tougher penalties if the process is broken. The penalties and the process need to be tailored for both the type of behavior we’re looking to end and the strengths and limitations of the NCAA when it comes to rules enforcement.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , ,

Media Investigations Are Helping Compliance

March 11, 2011 by

“Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society.”
- Felix Frankfurter, former Supreme Court Justice

For a long time, the high watermark of NCAA investigation was the federal authorities. When the feds began sniffing around allegation of NCAA wrongdoing, it felt like only a matter of time before the case would be blown wide open. While it was over three years before the University of Southern California would appear before the Committee on Infractions, the fact that federal investigators were poking around the case as part of an extortion investigation made it seem more likely the original Reggie Bush report would result in NCAA sanctions.

Those two articles are just some of the many signs that there’s a new sheriff in town. Yahoo! Sports has proven to be stunningly, almost supernaturally good at uncovering NCAA violations by some of the biggest athletic departments in the country. They are the poster child, but they aren’t alone. While not in the field of compliance, Chip Brown of Orangebloods.com was in front of every move the Big 12 made during this summer’s conference reshuffling.

It’s only natural for compliance officers to have mixed feelings about the Yahoo! Sports team, and it’s hard to begrudge those that are hostile. When a reporter finds out about a potential violation before the compliance office does, it looks bad. There’s plenty of good reasons for it though. Maybe a source that wouldn’t speak to the compliance office will talk to a reporter. A compliance office has little reason to audit a coach’s emails due to the relatively loose rules, but a journalist might have a tip.

There’s also the feeling that the NCAA is “outsourcing” its enforcement responsibilities to the media. This means that larger schools are perceived to be targets because they bring more eyeballs and ad dollars. It also means that public schools, subject to open records laws, are at a disadvantage to private schools, who generally get to keep their documents under wraps.

As foolish as a compliance office might look, sometimes they are ahead of the media. While Yahoo! Sports gets the credit for being the first to report allegations that Ohio State head football coach Jim Tressel knew of his student-athletes receipt of extra benefits long before the violation was reported, the university had been on the case for almost two months at that point and was preparing a self-report of the violation.

Ultimately the team at Yahoo! Sports is a force of good in college athletics. The uncovering of violations and the sanctioning of offenders helps fix what is broken (sub. req’d) no matter who starts the process. We know that the NCAA and its members haven’t punted enforcement to the media and many talented and dedicated people are working from the inside. Outside help shouldn’t be turned away.

Plus the team at Yahoo! Sports is just like us compliance folk. How did the string of agent extra benefit violations this summer come to pass? Through the cultivating of sources by the Agents, Gambling, and Amateurism staff. Journalists aren’t getting this done with subpoena power and criminal charges. They aren’t using any tool that a compliance office doesn’t have at their disposal.

Instead of reacting to Dan Wetzel, Charles Robinson, Jason King, and the many others as threats, see them as a challenge. So avoid the feelings of schadenfreude when another school is in the media’s sights. And when the call comes to your school, accept that it will be good for college athletics in the long run and take the medicine, as bitter as it may taste.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , ,

The Big Problem is Process, Not the Penalty

December 15, 2010 by

In NCAA President Mark Emmert’s comments to reporters at the famed St. Elmo’s Steakhouse in Indianapolis, there was much about the infractions process. Specifically as Gary Parrish of CBSSports.com notes, the need to ensure that student-athletes are not being punished more severely than coaches:

“I certainly believe [the same guidelines] should apply, of course,” Emmert said. “[They should apply] at least as much [as they apply to student-athletes].” (parentheticals in original)

The article also points out that the NCAA has the power to suspend coaches from coaching in any game, including the NCAA tournament. That was highlighted 13 months ago when the Board of Directors endorsed increased use of coaching suspensions. In the interpretation issued, coaching suspensions are to be used specifically to combat a variety of ways coaches could funnel money to individuals that could influence a prospect’s decision of where to play basketball.

One problem though is timing. If a coach gives a student-athlete a envelope of cash, some of the institutional responsibility is clear. The student-athlete must be declared ineligible and then reinstated, potentially with some penalty. As America recently discovered, the student-athlete uses the reinstatement process. While that process is much quicker and more focused, the student-athlete in effect guilty until proven innocent (or at least how guilty).

A coach, as an institutional staff member, is part of the enforcement case. That process takes much longer, and whether an institution needs to self-impose a coaching suspension immediately is unclear. The best anyone can say is that it might impact the penalties handed down by the enforcement staff or Committee on Infractions as an element of cooperation in the case and whether the self-imposed penalties show the institution understands the seriousness of the infractions.

The answer then seems both incredibly obvious and amazingly complex: a reinstatement process for coaches. It would be a procedure where the coach’s personal responsibility for the violation would be determined and then penalties imposed in the form of suspensions and recruiting restrictions, and possibly more creative penalties like educational requirements and fines.

Many coaching eligibility rules already exist. Coaches must pass an exam every year to recruit off-campus. Coaches must sign a declaration every year that they have reported any violation they are aware of to their compliance office. Some coaching positions, like undergraduate and graduate assistants must be enrolled full-time in school. And football graduate assistants even have a seven-year clock to hold that position, akin to the five-year clock for student-athletes.

Any additional enforcement/eligibility procedure for coaches would have major issues to be worked out. It slows down the violation process. It gives an additional incentive for coaches to lie. And how would it operate in a post-O’Brien world where schools are reluctant to fire coaches until the entire violation process is complete?

It also wouldn’t address one of the chief complaints about penalties for coaches vs. penalties for student-athletes: that coaches always seem to have a way out by jumping to a professional team. But maybe that perception will change now that it appears there is a growing trend of student-athletes leaving the NCAA for the professional ranks as soon as they decide intercollegiate athletics is no longer for them (I’ll have much more on that at a later date).

The cost of operating such a system seem greater than the benefits in this case. Most of that cost comes from what is lost by attempting to determine a coach’s culpability outside of the process that has more important questions about how that culpability affects the culpability of other institutional personal and ultimately the institution itself.

Whatever the solution that the NCAA membership comes up with, and it sounds from President Emmert’s comments that we’ll be asked to look at this issue soon, the problem of punishing coaches vs. student-athletes illustrates something greater. Many of these great debates or scathing criticisms are actually just debates about technicalities and details.

The problem in this case is not that the NCAA has draconian punishments for student-athletes and lets coaches get away with murder. It’s that the NCAA membership needs to reexamine how we use tools we already have and ensure these two processes are operating as fairly as possible, keeping in mind that fair doesn’t always mean identical.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , ,

Closing the Cam Newton Loophole

December 7, 2010 by

The decision of the NCAA Student-Athlete Reinstatement Staff to reinstate Cam Newton’s eligibility with no penalty produced a response that was loud and clear. Not one, not two, but four commissioners of major conferences have spoken out. All disagreed with the decision itself and/or expressed worry about the potential impact of the decision going forward. That has prompted a response from NCAA President Mark Emmert stating that the NCAA membership will review the recruiting rules.

I don’t share some of the doom and gloom regarding the impact of the decision going forward. Case precedent, NCAA or otherwise, extends only as far as its facts. And here, the facts are that no money changed hands, the student-athlete did not know about the activity, and the student-athlete did not enroll at the institution where the solicitation occurred. Case precedent can always be extended to logically similar cases, but that takes additional decisions, each of which is a chance to stop a trip down the slippery slope.

There appears to be an unstoppable momentum behind some change though. That change could take one of three forms.

New Reinstatement Guidelines
It’s important to note that a violation was committed and it did impact Newton’s eligibility. It just did not impact his eligibility as much as some wanted. The Committee on Student-Athlete Reinstatement (which oversees the NCAA staff that made the decision) could establish stricter penalties, which would likely include a requirement that the student-athlete be withheld from at least some competition.

Slight Legislative Change
Legislation could be proposed that would address the exact situation in the case. Specifically, Bylaw 12.3.3, the bylaw cited by the SAR staff, could be editted to read something like this:

12.3.3 – Athletics Scholarship Agent.
Any individual, agency or organization that represents a prospective student-athlete or his or her parent(s), guardian(s), or immediate family for compensation in placing the prospective student-athlete in a collegiate institution as a recipient of institutional financial aid shall be considered an agent or organization marketing the individual’s athletics ability or reputation. (additions in bold)

Major Legislative Change
An alternate new version of Bylaw 12.3.3 may read very similarly, but would have a much greater impact:

12.3.3 – Athletics Scholarship Agent.
Any individual, agency or organization that represents a prospective student-athlete or an individual associated with a prospective student-athlete for compensation in placing the prospective student-athlete in a collegiate institution as a recipient of institutional financial aid shall be considered an agent or organization marketing the individual’s athletics ability or reputation.(additions in bold)

The phrase “individual associated with a prospective student-athlete” has a defined meaning, in men’s basketball at least, from the interpretations issued by the Division I Board of Directors in November 2009. It includes parents, guardians, family members, coaches and anyone who is associated with the prospect as a result of their athletics ability or reputation, or participation in men’s basketball.

Along with the amendment to the bylaw, that portion of the interpretation could be removed and placed in a separate interpretation (or incorporated into an actual bylaw) applicable to all sports. It would not however expand the new men’s basketball recruiting regulations to all sports, since they still mention men’s basketball in the interpretation and the relevant legislation.

None of these are mutually exclusive, and all three exist on a continuum with many other options in between. I have no idea what the Legislative Council, Board of Directors, or Committee on Student-Athlete Reinstatement will do. What I do know is that it would be foolish to act hastily.

The Board of Directors is empowered to propose and adopt legislation that is of an “emergency” or “noncontroversial” nature. An emergency exists when:

  • Significant values or harm are at stake; and
  • The use of the regular legislative cycle is likely to cause undue hardship to the Association or the Division I membership because of the delay in its effective date.

While preventing pay-for-play is a significant value in the NCAA rules, it’s hard to see the undue hardship that is suffered between now and January 2012, the next opportunity to pass brand new legislation if it travels through the regular legislative cycle. Especially if we’re talking only about the limited issue of not suspending student-athletes who didn’t know that an institution they didn’t go to did not give their parents any money.

Legislation is noncontroversial if it meets the following criteria:

  • Broader consultation and debate are unlikely to improve the proposal in any substantial way.
  • Significant disagreement or alternative points of view will not be generated.
  • Such proposals do not have a significant impact (unanticipated consequences, undesirable precedent) on existing legislation or proposed legislation.

Considering the options for dealing with this issue, there’s strong evidence that more debate will lead to a better decision and there are more alternatives than even the ones above. And considering the proposal is designed to strength penalties in cases where a prospect or student-athlete might not even know a violation is occurring, it seems unlikely that all consequences will be anticipated in such a short time.

For instance, imagine if a high school coach could harm a student-athlete’s eligibility at every institution just by discussing a pay-for-pay plan with a booster at one school, regardless of whether the prospect knows about it. Third parties gain a valuable tool to dictate where prospects enroll, and gain allies in boosters who have control of a stick, in addition to the existing carrots, to entice prospects to enroll at their favorite institution.

The idea of a student-athlete being shopped to colleges by parents, coaches, or anyone else is certainly outrageous, to use President Emmert’s words. And the notion of significant punishment for even attempted violations of the recruiting and amateurism legislation has merit. But just like the July recruiting period in men’s basketball, there are too many moving parts in this area to use a blunt object. Another year-long study with legislation to be voted on over a year from now won’t please many commentators. But it’s the best way to close a loophole without opening another.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , , ,

Copyright �© 2010-2012 NCAA �·