SEC commissioner Mike Slive
I started this article about two hours before Mike Slive took the podium on Wednesday in Birmingham. Of course one of my points was also major factor in the speech by Slive and I actually trashed the article. Then, I was bored last night, pulled it out of the recycling bin and re-worked it to this:
Six things I would change about the NCAA.
1) Find a way to get subpoena power
I’m not a lawyer, nor would I ever want to be one, but if you can’t go after a good majority of the people you are trying to interview, exactly what is their incentive to turn on the team that they love? Imagine if the police couldn’t punish any criminal that didn’t confess?
According to this NCAA article on the Investigative process, the only people that the NCAA can punish and force to provide information such as phone and bank records are those within its jurisdiction.
Those records and interviews can be obtained from institutions, student-athletes, prospective student-athletes and those employed by institutions because of the NCAA’s cooperative principle. However, the NCAA does not have subpoena power and cannot compel those outside of its jurisdiction (parents of student-athletes or prospects, agents, high school personnel) to cooperate in the investigative process. The NCAA cannot require individuals to turn over documents through discovery.
Simply put, make a deal with the devil (government) or whoever it takes and get subpoena power. This is the only way that investigations can be done properly.
2) Re-write the bylaws into something about ¼ the size
Every bylaw seems to have 20 exceptions that are all reactions to someone who previously skirted the rule. Currently it takes so much effort to understand all of the bylaws it’s ridiculous.
For example, if you just try to remember all of the phone call rules (bylaw 13.1) you quickly learn that it is an insane 18 pages long! In fact, the entire manual is 444 pages and available in pdf form here, a size that makes in impossible to memorize it all.
3) Make and control a National Recruiting Database
That’s right, get into the 21st century and create an online national resource for all prospective student athletes to make themselves available to schools. My recruiting database would be setup much like a social networking site. Students would submit their clearinghouse paperwork, transcripts, highlight tapes, etc.
Recruits would, and this is the big one, be able to control who could contact them and how. The prospective student athlete would be able to tell people how coaches may contact them, how often coaches can contact them, what hours they want to be contacted and by whom. It would instantly make the 18 pages of bylaw 13.1 unnecessary along with many other pages of the NCAA rulebook. It would put the power of contact into the hands of the recruit and free up a lot of the coaches time because they wouldn’t be unknowingly chasing uninterested recruits.
The additional bonus is it would eliminate the need for people like Willie Lyles, the crazy payments and the entire scandal that multiple schools are going through right now.
4) Don’t just vacate wins, heavily fine the schools
Unlike most people, I have no issue with the vacating of wins. If you cheated, then you don’t deserve to be recognized as a champion, winner of a game or a record holder. However, you have to hit programs on what they all are really after, money. A championship can be bring in millions of extra money in sales of merchandise, sales of tickets, booster donations and application fees by prospective students. This is why the NCAA needs to make fines that scare most departments away from cheating. Cripple the athletic departments through fines, then give the fine money to charities and member schools.
Now, it wouldn’t be fair to fine a poor athletic department the same amount as a well-to-do one, so the fines have to be percentages of average revenue over the past three years. So, if a department has overall three year average revenue of $10 million, then a 1% fine would be $100,000, where if the average revenue was $100 million, then the fine would be $1 million.
If you don’t believe me on this, try this article by Dave Pickle, a blogger on NCAA.org or one of the many articles he links to.
5) Make scholarships offers binding and multi-year
That’s right, if you are going to provide a recruit with a scholarship offer, only make it possible to repeal the offer under certain conditions, such as failure to gain acceptance to the school or criminal activity. Otherwise, the offer needs to be binding and the school must honor the scholarship.
No grey-shirting, no blue-shirting or whatever other kind of shirt, the offer must be honored when the student would enroll in the fall (or previous spring if they are an early enrollee). Stop playing games with athletes on over-signing, pulling offers because they got hurt, etc. I would also increase maximum scholarships to 90 in football to cover the few “busts” that might occur, and most other sports by 1-2 scholarships each.
Then, all initial scholarships would be for three years, renewable once for an additional two years. The renewal would be automatic provided that the athlete meets certain academic requirments and is still on the team. The NCAA would have set rules and would handle all appeals as to when an athlete felt that their scholarship was taken away unjustly.
6) Set penalties in writing
Instead of what appear as (are) abitrary penalties, given on a case-by-case basis with no consistency, make the penalties more consistent. Just like when someone convicted of a crime in the criminal court, there needs to be some sort of sentencing guideline.
For instance, make the penalty for using an ineligile player the vacating of all wins, championships and personal records, a .5% fine to the school and loss of 1 scholarship per every 25% of the season a player participated in. That’s in, no interpretation, no waiting for a COI ruling, just a simple set-in-stone rule. Imagine how simple that would be.
Final thoughts:
Most of my ideas here would probably hit 500 road-blocks, just like the experts expect to have to the ideas presented by Slive, and be changed so much on the way to becoming new NCAA bylaws that my new NCAA would become just like the current NCAA; outdated and inefficient. If that doesn’t show the the current model is broken then I don’t know what does.
