It gets the hose again? NCAA says nay.

Like when we violate speed limits? Which most of us do every day?

There are 100 laws on the books in every city that are stoopid. What do we do? Demand the whole city government be usurped?

Again -- you wanna ditch the NCAA, pay players and rid ourselves of the pesky hypocrisy that is imperfection in government? Fine. Good luck with the insurgents. You want Russian tennis overlords? You'll get them. They'll just be repping 14-year-old basketball players.

 

Sounds like you didn't have access to the same ho's.

 

If you did manage to get that access, I'd bet the women would feel violated.

 

What kind of water was coming out of the faucet that she was charged $20 to use it?

 

Except the city government has shown little inclination for changing the 100 stoopid laws.

As far as the Russian overlords, they already exist. Only they're known as "uncles" or "family advisors" or "longtime family friends".

 

I don't want to get rid of the NCAA, I want the NCAA to police college sports to keep the cheating at a minimum.

During the 1980s and 1990s it seemed like they did this. Lately, it's been a joke.

I'm sure it's a combination of schools getting better at cheating and the NCAA getting worse, but it's been laughable for the last decade.

 

That's entirely inaccurate. The NCAA tried to overhaul recruiting rules in a big way and got stuffed on the attempt. It had every inclination of changing many of the biggest, hardest-to-enforce rules.

As for those uncles...if you dissolve the NCAA and go to an Olympic-style system, I'm just telling ya...you've seen nothing yet. There are marriages forged in foreign countries -- male coaches, female athletes -- based on helping secure funding.

 

I don't believe it's worse, Mizzou. I believe you have a number of national reporters (plus Jay Bilas) who hate the NCAA, you have a culture that worships libertarianism more than it realizes, you have the O'Bannon lawyers making their noise, and you have a dick in Mark Emmert that no one likes.

The 1980s were the Wild West by comparison to today, if only because crack laws weren't then what they are now.

Sports journalism has just changed. For good and for bad, it's vastly different.

 

I'll agree that having the NCAA is better than not having the NCAA, but that doesn't mean it doesn't need a serious overhaul and needs to completely change the way it's doing things.

How many of us have covered college teams and seen obvious violations? I covered a college team where players were regularly driving $60K cars. Hell, I had done a story on one of the players on signing day and wrote about how his mother raised six kids in poverty and the kid showed up on campus a few months later in a car that was at least $45K. It was registered to a church and when I went there and asked about why they would "loan" a player, who was not a member of that church, a car I was told to mind my own business and stop picking on minority players and that I wouldn't be asking these questions if the player in question was white.

That's the norm at a lot of these colleges and I don't doubt that some of these schools are every bit as dirty as the SWC schools were in the 1980s, but they've gotten better at hiding it and the NCAA has gotten too lax to pursue this kind of stuff.

Coaches rarely report other coaches. I know Spurrier has done it in the past (at Auburn, I believe) and Fulmer ratted out Alabama and the Dan Mullen reported Auburn, but it doesn't seem to happen very often because most coaches know if someone took a good, hard look at their own programs they could probably find something that could get them into trouble.

I don't think journalists pursue those stories very often anymore either. Dohrmann has done a great job and Charles Robinson has done a great job, but it's not like the 1980s where you would pick up SI and see a story written by Yaeger or Looney or Keteyian and that school would usually have a bowl ban within the year.

Most of the big cheating scandals only come out when someone hands over taped conversations like at USC or when someone in jail spills their guts like with Miami...

 

The recent SI article on Nevin Shapiro sheds some light on this and one reason why the NCAA has trouble policing itself.

Basic summary is that the NCAA has hired too many enforcement personnel in Indianapolis - now, more people are working on cases, and cases are being pushed through faster.

In the 1980s and 1990s, NCAA cases were typically investigated by one person and took longer. The investigators had more time to be thorough, and with one person in charge, there were fewer instances of investigators stepping on each other's toes, or employing rogue tactics to push things through faster (like in the Shapiro case).

SMU is an example of a case employing the one-investigator system.

When I was working at a D-I school a few years ago, not long after the start of the Emmert era, our AD used many "scare tactics" on us - one of them was that the NCAA was hiring "an army" of compliance personnel, and that "they will be watching our every move." Obviously that has backfired to some degree, if you believe the reporting in the SI piece.

 

I'd argue there was far more cheating the 1980s, and, hence, more stories about it. But who knows.

Part of the reduction in stories today is, let's face it, a philosophical world view that cheating is morally defensible in the face of a system that doesn't pay players. Do you recall Looney ever writing a "how to cheat" piece like Andy Staples did?

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/andy_staples/07/05/cheating-for-dummies/index.html

I understand it's sort of "satire," but in light of the consistent, withering attacks Staples has lodged against every facet of the NCAA in the last few years, I mean, do you really think he's going to break a cheating scandal story, Mizzou? Really? He'a already reached SI, so there's really no need for him to break a cheating story to get notice from some big news outlet, like Dohrmann and Andy Katz did. And Staples is one of the better CFB writers.