NCAA Brings the Hammer Down on Public Enemy No. 1: Cal Tech

The NCAA is all kinds of stupid.

And as Ron White told us, you can't fix stupid.

 

Reminds me of the story Rick Reilly once told about Rick Majerus and Keith Van Horn. Apparently, Majerus was the one who broke the news to Van Horn that his father had passed. KVH asked Majerus to stay at the airport with him, Majerus bought him a sandwich, which is an NCAA violation.

 

I remember that story. Another stupid "violation."

 

Incredibly stupid. I think I heard another one about Majerus, that he could have been in trouble because his wife baked cookies for team meetings.

 

There was also one from LSU in the 1980s where a player's family member (I can't remember which one) died, and Dale Brown had a bus chartered to take all the player's teammates to the funeral. And the NCAA bitched about it, and Brown told them to go fuck themselves.

 

Do any of Calipari's players complete their spring semester, successfully, after getting drafted? I would assume the one-and-dones show up for their remedial classes in the fall semester and withdraw or drop out after the final four, to begin workouts for the draft.

 

And let's not forget the infamous Tiger Woods/Arnold Palmer lunch. Palmer takes Woods -- then a freshman at Stanford with about $6.65 to his name -- to lunch. Stanford coach Wally Goodwin gets wind of it and realizes there could be a problem, which -- given the stunning idiocy of the NCAA -- there was. Woods has to pay Palmer back for the lunch AND, IIRC, he was suspended for a few tournaments.

Two personal stories here. My officemate played football at a rival school in the same conference as Caltech. While the Beavers don't have a football team, he said his buddies who played other sports -- especially basketball -- lived in fear THEY would be the ones to snap Caltech's streak of conference futility.

The second: in my last paper gig, I did a story on a local girl who played basketball there. She was a bio-engineering major. When she described to me what her course schedule was and she did on her summer internship, I have never felt more stupid or intellectually lacking in my life.

Let's recap here. Caltech, one of the most academically demanding/athletically inept universities in the world; a university which hasn't made the postseason in any sport since the Pleistocene Era self-reports a "violation" that involves students actually going to class. But that's not good enough, so the NCAA goes medieval on the bitches of the SCIAC (Cal Tech's conference).

Meanwhile, the poster program for the phrase "lack of institutional control" skates merrily along.

 

Umm, think you might be exaggerating a bit with the "medievel" stuff. The NCAA didn't go hunting after Caltech, instead Caltech went to the NCAA and reported its own clear violations. And the NCAA's "punishment" here will be largely meaningless and have no real impact on a school in Caltech's position.

Truth is, Caltech ain't losing shit here. Probation/sanctions don't mean squat for a program that doesn't actually care about sports and never wins any games or experiences post-season anyways. The most significant effect from this is probably the favorable publicity they're now getting.

 

One of my old editors told a story about the absurdity of the NCAA. There was a high school football player who had committed, but not signed, with one of the big state schools. He died in a car wreck and my SE was writing the obit. The SE called a coach from the state school that he had known for some time, trying to get a comment about the player.
The coach wouldn't do it. Since the kid hadn't signed, the coach was afraid it would be an NCAA violation.
"But he's dead!" my SE pointed out.
Coach still refused to say anything. And, you know, he was probably justified in his fears.

 

Stoney, what the NCAA did was take a bazooka to a butterfly here. The matters were self-reported and the penalty was self-imposed. The NCAA piled on for absolutely no reason and the fact it is meaningless given Caltech's plankton-esque place in the athletic food chain makes it even more asinine.

In other words, it went medieval.

 

Yes, I can see how the baseball team being forced to vacate all their wins from that stretch when they went 0-112 (as part of a 237 game losing streak) will make quite a difference. And, man, the water polo team being forced to vacate its wins from that 0-66 stretch should sting something fierce. And, wow, how is that 2012-13 post season ban gonna affect those teams that had no hope for reaching the post-season anyways? But, hey, I guess there was the 5 grand fine.

C'mon, this ain't gonna make a dime's worth of difference for Caltech sports (as if anybody there cared about sports anyways). The favorable publicity they've gotten this week likely outweighs any real world harm done.