When the NCAA investigate and punishes, no one wins and no one comes away looking good.
Yesterday, Chris Carlson had a great write-up about how the ultimate result of the NCAA investigation into the Syracuse Orange basketball program and subsequent punishments only reinforced how little college athletics' governing body really knows what it's doing while also showing the lengths it will go to enforce it's rules regardless. And that when the NCAA investigate and punishes, no one wins and no one comes away looking good.
There's some choice quotes in there but I like this one in particular:
"The system itself is just so broken," said B. David Ridpath, an NCAA critic and president-elect of the Drake Group, which promotes academic integrity in college athletics. "What happened at Syracuse is probably not as bad as what's gone on at some other places. But there has to be some sort of standard and (Jim Boeheim) clearly could have done better. I don't know if we'll ever reconcile that. As I often say, the only thing that is consistent with the NCAA is its inconsistency. … There are villains and there are victims and sometimes they are one and the same."
We're seeing the inconsistencies first-hand as we watch North Carolina get a veritable slap on the wrist for something (IMO) far worse than what went down at Syracuse. There's also Louisville, Florida State, Miami and plenty of other schools whose actions and punishments don't quite fit when you compare everyone to one another.
I feel like this is one of those topics we can talk to death and never get anywhere. The NCAA will continue to make it's case as the true power of college sports. We'll all agree they're a corrupt organization whose purpose is to make sure the right money is made by the right people and given to them instead of those people. And then when they come down on schools like Syracuse, we'll forget that and weirdly get on the NCAA's side while we demonize the institutions that get punished.
Go read the whole piece, get mad and then we'll do this all again the next time it happens.
