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June 13, 2022 By: Mark Knudson

NCAA punting away responsibility for big decisions while exercising wrist slapping authority

It’s been a pretty quiet summer so far, all things considered, for the NCAA.

It’s not over yet…not by a longshot. It wasn’t until late July of last summer that the bombshell news about Oklahoma and Texas moving to the SEC broke. So as always, stay tuned.

Quiet isn’t necessarily a good thing considering all that needs fixing in college athletics. A fan could hope that all the recent uproar about Name, Image and Likeness payments – Ohio State coach Ryan Day recently told his school’s supporters that they’re gonna need to come up with about $13 mil just for him to be able to keep his current roster and the verbal tussle between Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher – might get some attention and spur the organization to take some real action to fix this mess.

But no.

The NCAA seems content to let this catastrophe play out until the politicians that helped cause it figure out a way to fix it. That might take a while.

In other words, the NCAA appears to have pretty much decided to punt on third down.

In the meantime, they did flex their collective muscle and hit the Nebraska football program with penalties recently for a rules infraction. Keep in mind that Nebraska has a pretty squeaky clean rep in terms of NCAA compliance. Nonetheless, the Huskers were hit a few weeks ago with a “one-year show cause order and a five-day suspension during the championship segment” of the season for head coach Scott Frost for violating the “Countable coaches rule.”

And you didn’t think the NCAA had any rules anymore, right?

Yep. Nebraska is getting penalized – and fined $10,000 – for having one too many special teams coaches on the field and during a film session. The Huskers had a “special teams analyst provide unauthorized instruction” to players and Frost didn’t step in and stop the interaction quickly enough.

Big stuff.

Just so we have this all straight, it’s now okay for a Nebraska (or any other school) booster to dangle large amounts of cash in front of a potential recruit or transfer student in order to get that player to come play football at the school, but it’s really not okay – probation worthy in fact – for a coach (who’s special teams were abysmal the past couple of seasons) to have an extra set of eyes around trying to help him fix a hole in his program.

Am I the only one who’s wondering what the NCAA’s priorities are anymore? Worse yet, has the organization been rendered so toothless that they’ve been reduced to issuing pointless wrist-slapping penalties for trivial matters like a program allowing a coaching analyst to speak to players?

The damage is largely self-inflicted, due to inaction. They could have – they should have – acted before the politicians to put some sort of workable framework in place to monitor and fence in NIL…and its evil twin, the Transfer Portal. Instead, the organization sat on the sidelines and allowed all hell to break loose when it comes to boosters with large amounts of cash.

But they’ll still make sure you don’t have too many coaches on the field.

The future of the NCAA has been the subject of much debate. There have been major successes of course – the NCAA Basketball tournaments are among the most captivating events in all of sports – and plenty of success with other lesser known postseason. But the member institutions are becoming so vastly different in terms of size and branding impact that it’s very hard to see the NCAA as an overarching entity still being around by the time the Sooners and Longhorns officially join the SEC.

As they wrangle over another new version of their “constitution” it’s become clear that the NCAA – which has already advocated for member conferences to take bigger roles in major decisions regarding things like NIL – doesn’t want the task of oversight any longer. There are legal ramifications and even court cases that they want to steer clear of. They want things like NIL and the Transfer Portal to be decided by courts and politicians while they wait on the sidelines to hear the outcome…and not have any legal fees.

There appears to be more that the NCAA wants no part of than things they want to continue to oversee (unless it involves too many special teams coaches.)

Perhaps the steps the NCAA wants to take to reduce their oversight role are just the beginning of the end. Perhaps that abdication wouldn’t be a bad thing.