The Sports Curmudgeon®

Well the Maurice Clarett soap opera has taken a turn for the worse for just about everyone involved. It was announced yesterday that Clarett will be charged with a misdemeanor criminal charge for filing a false statement with the police regarding the value of stuff stolen from his car. Within the spectrum of horrible legal problems faced by athletes in recent years, this charge is pretty minimal. However, the charge does raise enough questions that it seems to have caused and to have become entwined with a full-scale NCAA investigation.

Here is the abridged version of what happened. Last spring, Clarett had the use of a car on the permission of an Ohio State booster. It was burglarized. Clarett claimed that among the stolen property was $800 in cash and $10K worth of stereo equipment and some clothing. There are a couple of potential problems with this report:

1. It is probably greatly exaggerated meaning that there was a false report filed with the police and the potential for a fraudulent insurance claim.

2. One has to wonder where all these goodies came from since Clarett claims to have filed the paperwork to get a free ride home to the funeral for a friend last year – and some of that approval paperwork involves him not having the means to make that trip on his own. Did he lie to the police or did he lie on those forms that he says he filed with the school? Enquiring minds want to know…

So the NCAA and the university are investigating his finances – and reportedly have been doing so since last spring. A radio report yesterday says that there might be “thousands of dollars of improper benefits” involved in this investigation. Maurice is probably not a serious student of US history but maybe this will be something he might want to keep in mind:

Al Capone was only convicted of one thing - - tax evasion. When they start looking into your finances, little if any good can come from that.

Coupled with the assertion that Clarett got “special treatment” in some academic endeavors, this matter has become a hot potato. Ohio State is trying not to let this episode take the school down and so it has suspended Clarett indefinitely; football coach, Jim Tressel, says that he will recommend that the university immediately approve any request from Clarett to be released from his scholarship. On the other hand, they say that Clarett can stay in school and take classes (pardon me while I smirk) and do all those “academic” things for as long as he wants to. Of course, he is probably unprepared, uninterested and unqualified for those “academic pursuits”, but that is a minor detail. The school will not pull his scholarship; but he ain’t gonna play any Big 10 football any time soon.

The news wires are buzzing about the fact that he might transfer to Grambling and coach Doug Williams has said that while Clarett has not contacted him, Williams would certainly take the call if it ever came. I don’t know what the NCAA term for “tampering” is, but if Doug Williams is not tampering then they don’t have a rule about that. What Williams has said is that since Clarett is not looking at being able to play any time soon, he should call Grambling and they’ll see what can be worked out. I sure hope Grambling has a “rolling admissions policy” because if he got accepted and enrolled at the school at this late date, I might have to draw the conclusion that he got a special benefit because of his athletic stature and that would bring the NCAA down on him and Grambling. Unraveling all this will make the release of the Gordian Knot seem like child’s play.

Here’s another sticking point. Clarett would not have to sit out a year transferring to Grambling since Grambling is a Division 1-AA school – if he were merely your run-of-the-mill transfer student. However, he would have to transfer there with this cloud over his head and would have to serve out any NCAA suspension at Grambling in a year when he was actually involved with the football team. He can’t go there and spend a year “taking classes” and then claim that he has been out of football for a year and so a one year suspension has already been served. If this financial investigation continues and finds anything even marginally “improper”, Clarett is probably not going to be carrying any footballs on Saturday afternoons in the SWAC any time soon either.

Oh, and by the way, no matter what Jim Brown says, this has nothing to do with anyone being a slave master and exploiting the kid. No one at The Ohio State University coerced or convinced Maurice Clarett to file a false statement with the police in the case of the car break-in. Read that last sentence again; it is critically important. Clarett is not the victim here; Clarett is the malefactor. He is a chronological adult and he seems not yet to have learned an important aspect of adulthood:

Adults make choices.

Choices have consequences.

Over on the basketball side of the NCAA sporting realm, each and every NCAA basketball coach is being called to Chicago on 15 October for a meeting on ethics under the pain coaches losing their free tix to the Final Four. I heard that John Thompson will be one of the invited speakers. If that is correct, I hope that someone records his words because I promise you that 80% of the coaches and 150% of the NCAA folks there will not be happy to hear what he has to say. I also hope that Myles Brand is scheduled to speak immediately after Thompson so that he has to share the dais with him. After Thompson tells folks some plain truths, they can then listen to Brand do his rhetorical soft-shoe routine. The contrast should be stark indeed.

The National Association of Basketball Coaches is calling the meeting and they are already spinning the meeting. One of the stated purposes is to set in motion ways to “restore dignity lost to our profession.” Look, that is really pretty easy to do. The NABC needs to stop covering for and explaining away members whose peccadilloes include smearing the reputation of athletes who have been murdered, drinking/partying with co-eds after road games and not fulfilling the contracts that they signed with their schools because a better offer comes along. If the coaches themselves – or the organization that embodies all they purportedly stand for – were to out these people, some measure of dignity could be restored almost overnight. But all that is going to happen is that they will have their meeting and announce their resolve to make all of this right – and then they will go home when they know damned well that more than a couple of the 327 attendees are scum-bunnies worthy of no respect at all. And the “dignity quotient” for the profession will continue to diminish…

I said elsewhere that there should be a clause in each and every NCAA coaching contract that says if they are found to have been guilty of a major NCAA rule infraction the coach will not be allowed to be involved in athletics at any NCAA institution for a period of 10 years and that any monies that may have been forthcoming under the exiting contract would no longer be owed to the coach. You know that won’t be a topic of discussion in Chicago next month. So here are some real things that the NCAA and the NABC and the universities can actually try to do that will begin to make NCAA athletics seem less like a cesspool than it does at the moment:

1. Negate and nullify any clauses in any coach’s contract that calls for NCAA tournament appearances or bowl game bids or else the contract can be terminated. These clauses exist and they motivate coaches and programs to cheat.

2. Cap the salary of coaches and ADs so that there are not mega-millions to be sought by coaches in the second tier of schools. And by the way, count in the “perks” and non-taxable “bennies” that coaches and ADs get in the cap value. Since the President of the United States makes less than $500K per year, why should a collegiate coach make three times that amount? Since coaches like to portray themselves as teachers and mentors, pay them in accordance with the faculty salary/benefits scale at the university in question. When the coaches balk at that draconian measure, make it a firing offense for coaches who claim they are teachers.

3. Cancel freshman eligibility immediately and irrevocably. So the NCAA may lose a couple of extra basketball players to the NBA; who cares? If a kid goes to college and harbors the dream of a professional athletic career, that freshman year will make him focus on studies too. Oh, and make the eligibility criterion for playing a 2.0 GPA after a freshman year that includes sufficient course work to earn 20% of the credits needed for graduation at that school.

4. Figure out a way to avoid penalizing a school in 2003 for transgressions committed by the athletic department and/or players and/or coaches and/or university presidents in 1995. If I get a parking ticket tomorrow and don’t pay it and then I sell you my car, you are not going to be liable for that parking ticket when they decide to come after payment in 2009. Makes sense, no? Well, the NCAA system penalizes the current coaches and athletes for the sins of their predecessors. Set up a system of fines that are REALLY serious. Make the athletic departments cough up fines in the mid- eight figure range a couple of times and things will get a lot more “under control” very quickly.

5. Suspend any student athlete who takes any improper benefits or allows himself to be assisted in an improper way from any intercollegiate athletic competition at any NCAA school for a period of not less than 2 years. Now a kid cannot just “take the money and run”.

All of these things can be done if there is the will to do them. But the NCAA is dedicated to form and not substance. Remember, the Maryland athletic department will be made to conduct mandatory training seminars for all of its people in the wake of the assistant football coach who gave cash to a potential recruit on four or five occasions. They are going to teach those folks that this is a no-no. Oh good; that ought to take at least 45 seconds; what will they be doing for the rest of the three-day seminar? Another triumph of form over substance.

Oh, and here is another piece of bad news for the esteemed Dr. Brand who still says that he and his university president colleagues will seize control of all these rogue athletic departments:

None of the problems in the Clarett case or in the Baylor case have anything to do with what you have called the greatest evil in America today - - gambling on collegiate sports. But you won’t bother to mention that will you?

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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For the record, I have long been in favor of an NCAA Football Playoff Tournament to determine a national champion. I devised several plans/schemes by which this end could be achieved and wrote two of them up in detail and mailed them off to the powers that be in the NCAA in the past. Naturally, I never got a response from the NCAA gurus; they probably had difficulty with some of the polysyllabic words in my communiqué.

I tell you that as a backdrop to my next statement. I am not a fan of the BCS. I appreciate what the BCS tries to do in terms of setting up a championship game and providing competitive match-ups in the other major bowl games at the end of the college season. That is a worthy objective, but once again the devil is in the details. Selection of the teams by some cockamamie computer analysis of ratings and strengths of schedule and biorhythms of the back-up left tackles is less than satisfactory. So I don’t like the BCS about as much as I did not like the old system whereby bowl games had contracts with conferences to have a conference champion play some other handpicked opponent. Neither system is any good.

Now comes a potential event that stands to make it a lot worse. On Thursday of this week, the Congress of the United States will insert itself into this matter. On that fateful day, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives will hold a hearing regarding the BCS. The Congresspeople will try to ascertain if the BCS is a violation of the antitrust laws or if it excludes the mid-major schools by some process that will be erroneously called “natural selection”.

I don’t care what your political leanings may be; but no matter where you are on the political spectrum of the US, there have to be at least a dozen problems that could use some Congressional impetus toward resolution that are 100 times more important than the BCS and the “legitimate access” that it may or may not provide to colleges that play football. In the grand scheme of things, this issue has all the gravitas of the next words to be uttered by any one of the Easter Island statues.

The Judiciary Committee will hear testimony on this matter. I really wonder if any of those folks cannot anticipate what the witnesses will say once they put the microphone in front of them. Representatives of schools and/or conferences that have teams regularly involved in BCS games will say that this is an attempt to give fans what they want – top flight match-ups. Representatives of schools and/or conferences that do not get teams into BCS games will say that it is exclusionary and a way to keep all that money flowing to the big schools to keep them on top of the heap. Trust me; you will not have to watch this on C-SPAN with your full attention to get these messages. This is what will be presented to the Committee and everyone with an IQ higher than a kumquat should know it before the words are uttered.

So, why does the Congress have to waste its time and energy on this? They keep saying that they are there only “to do the people’s business”. OK, let me try to believe that for a moment without giggling too much. If you want to do the people’s business, then go and do it. Start with the important issues and after you have resolved them – not passed some bill that will be a stop-gap measure that will require further legislation in a couple of years – then move down to the less important issues. When those are resolved, go on to the really trivial issues and solve them. After all of that, hold your hearings on the BCS.

Memo to the House Judiciary Committee:

1. You will have more time and be able to do more of “the people’s business” if you do not waste time in hearings where you already know what will be said.

2. If you do not already know the positions of the people on your witness list, then you are so out of touch with the world that you will only be able to come up with a solution to the problem by dumb luck. And if you are in that state of ignorance, then you would be eminently qualified to have “dumb” luck.

The Washington Post has already taken sides in this matter. In its September 1 editions, it points out how the poor and oppressed mid-majors have already beaten two ACC schools this year (Maryland lost to Northern Illinois and Georgia Tech lost to BYU) and how Colorado State almost beat Colorado. What they fail to point out is that no one – not a single person – ever thought that Maryland or Georgia Tech or Colorado would be in the championship game. It is wonderful to have small schools rise up and win a few of these early season mismatches – scheduled by the larger schools only to beef up their records. But if you match Northern Illinois or BYU in a championship game against a Miami or an Oklahoma or a school of that caliber, all you will get is a David vs. Goliath story line. Yes, I know how that bout came out in the Bible; I also know that there was some Divine intervention in that confrontation. Would there be an equal measure of Divine intervention in a collegiate football game? I’m not so sure…

The First Amendment of the US Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law…” and then goes on to list various freedoms that may not be abridged by those well-meaning folks who want only to do the people’s business. It would have been prescient indeed – and convincing evidence of Divine intervention in the formation of the US – if the Founding Fathers had added the phrase, “intercollegiate athletics” to that First Amendment. Too bad they did not; it would have saved all of us a lot of hot air and posturing and preening by our Congresspeople.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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