Auburn commits minor NCAA violation, blames the media

You might remember that Auburn accidently posted a bio of football prospect Rashaan Evans, who ended up signing with Alabama, on its official website on national signing day last February.

Well, that turned out to be a minor NCAA violation. In case documents released Tuesday, Auburn blames unidentified members of the media for hacking into their system to "find' the code to pull up the bio."

http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2014/07/auburn_tells_ncaa_leaked_bio_o.html

Sounds logical, right? A guy (or gal) with the ability to hack into a secure website instead choosing to make $40,000 a year as a sports writer.

 

I've worked with IT guys at newspapers who could do this. I'd be lying if I said I understood how they did it, but if something isn't deleted properly, it can be accessed pretty easily if you know what you're doing.

This isn't exactly high-level "hacking" and using that word is probably irresponsible. The way it was explained to me (and this was about a decade ago) was "If you know where to look, you can find it."

 

I have no doubt Auburn will be completely exonerated.

 

Even if they were found guilty, this is so minor it's not even funny.

 

The list at the bottom of the story says it all. Gave athlete a glass of water is a violation? Death penalty for War Eagle? Stop the insanity!

 

Exactly. If you ever notice, nearly every major college athletics program will do this about once a year. They put out this laundry list of silly secondary violations that have accumulated throughout the past year or so, and the penalties typically range from "don't do it again," to "will attend a refresher course on NCAA rules." The most severe ones might result in a loss of a few phone calls or campus visits.
Most of the violations, you wonder how it's even a violation and some aren't their fault at all.
Hell, I think I could've gotten one school a violation once. I was walking on the field before a football game on a day they had a bunch of recruits on campus. All of the recruits, a couple hundred of them, were on the sideline watching warm-ups. I saw a couple of guys from my town, said hello and chatted for about 30 seconds. That's actually an NCAA violation -- recruits aren't supposed to have any contact with the media on those visits.

 

Don't forget the one where a photo was taken of a recruit with someone of "celebrity status".

And the one where a recruit's father was sent a text by an assistant, telling them he was going to be late for their in-home meeting.

 

I thought the rule was they couldn't facillitate any contact between media and recruits. If that's not the case than I've helped players break NCAA rules close to a hundred times.

 

In college when I covered football and basketball, I found a way to pull up bios of guys who had been kicked off the team or were no longer posted on the athletics site simply by using the url of another player's bio and changing out the names, then hit enter and it's show up under that url. Not sure if that's still possible to do nowadays (this happened about 4-5 years ago) but I don't think "hacking" into it is even necessary.

 

Right. I think the IT guys who were able to do it for me were able to access an older version of the page. They were doing things on the computer that the majority of us don't know how to do, but I would hardly call it hacking.

 

Even a player bio that has been deleted can be accessed through Google's "cache" function. I used it a couple of weeks ago when writing something about the two Miami players who were arrested.

This was something different --- a bio created in anticipation of a player signing that got "published" inadvertently.