The University of Tennessee seems to agree that its basketball and football programs have violated NCAA standards, but it disagrees on the gravity of some of those violations.
There’s a difference, you see, in how the national governing body considers a violation, deeming it either secondary or major, with punishment decided by the seriousness of the offense.
What Tennessee athletic department officials are trying to avoid is the NCAA determining a lack of institutional control of the athletic department staff, which usually carries the most serious of penalties.
In other words, let the hammer drop on coaching staffs headed by Bruce Pearl and Lane Kiffin and a department headed by Mike Hamilton, none of whom are employed at the Knoxville school.
For example, the school recently argued to the NCAA its violations – paying for a recruit’s lodging for longer than the allowed 48 hours; making 16 telephone calls during a non-contact period; and failing to monitor a basketball team telephone recruiting contacts after some 100 impermissible calls had been made over a two-year period – should be viewed as secondary rather than major violations.
In its 190-page response, which can be found online, Tennessee answered charges stemming from a 22-month investigation by placing itself on two years probation and placing minor recruiting sanctions on both programs.
I’m thinking that’s not hardly what the NCAA will have in mind.
At issue in Pearl’s case, among other things, is that he continued to lie to NCAA investigators about improperly hosting prospective players at a barbecue at his house.
He did so even after being shown a picture documenting the get-together, further denying that he recognized his own yard and the wife of an assistant coach also pictured.
I guess when you’re not doing your own landscaping, it’s probably difficult to recognize your own back yard.
That, along with other impermissible recruiting contact by Pearl and his staff, led to his ultimate firing in March.
Kiffin, who coached just a single year before accepting the head job at USC, was charged with failure to promote an atmosphere of compliance and failure to monitor the compliance of assistant coaches.
What is striking to me about the entire situation is that an institution rather than asking for a mea culpa, leniency and producing a solid plan instituted to better bring the school into NCAA compliance, instead seeks to argue the seriousness of the level of the charges.
Do I think the coaching staffs intended to outright cheat in ignoring NCAA rules?
No. What I think even is more concerning is that everybody believes they have to operate right on the line of compliance and sometimes step over because that’s what is being done by other major sports institutions.
Coaches like Kiffin and Pearl, very successful at what they do, think it has to be done to compete in a league like the SEC, where I have been told nobody looks at reporting their neighbor to keep the wolves from the door.
Quite frankly, sometimes they don’t even want to know how close to the line a renegade assistant coach operates.
I can tell you a number of years ago we had just that situation at the University of Montana and it is amazing to me sanctions were not forthcoming, perhaps because the specific program was not enjoying much success.
And now comes the debacle at the University of Miami, which allegedly involves six dozen football players in the last nine years.
The system is broken and I don’t see a fix any time soon.