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Topic Title: Opinion: Kansas, Arizona and other blue bloods should be worried after NCAA hammered Georgia Tech , USA TODAY
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Created On: 09/26/2019 04:30 PM
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 09/26/2019 04:30 PM
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Central Floridave

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Opinion: Kansas, Arizona and other blue bloods should be worried after NCAA hammered Georgia Tech
Dan Wolken, USA TODAYPublished 3:22 p.m. ET Sept. 26, 2019 | Updated 3:27 p.m. ET Sept. 26, 2019

USA TODAY Sports' Dan Wolken breaks down the allegations against Kansas basketball and Bill Self. USA TODAY

Be afraid, Kansas. Sleep with one eye open, Arizona and LSU. Watch your back, Auburn. The NCAA is coming, and this time, they might actually mean business when it comes to punishing college basketball programs that have run afoul of their rule book.

If the NCAA is going to hammer Georgia Tech for some narrow, relatively insignificant violations as it did on Thursday, what's going to happen when the Committee on Infractions sinks it teeth into the cases spawned by the FBI's investigation into college basketball?

For years, administrators around the country have bemoaned the weakness of the NCAA enforcement process and pushed for harsher penalties that will scare coaches straight (at least until it comes to their own school). Well, maybe that time has finally come.

Here's the nutshell of Georgia Tech's transgressions: Former assistant coach Darryl LaBarrie arranged for Wendell Carter, who ended up at Duke, to have impermissible contact with Tech alum Jarrett Jack including a visit to a strip club where Carter and his student host were each given $300 in cash to spend.

Then, in an unrelated incident, a con man named Ron Bell - who had befriended head coach Josh Pastner - provided two Georgia Tech players and a potential transfer with $2,424 worth of shoes, clothes, meals and plane tickets to visit him in Arizona, making him a booster.

For that, Georgia Tech basketball got kneecapped. Though the headliner was a postseason ban for 2019-20, the Yellow Jackets also got hit with a fine of 2 percent of their basketball budget, loss of one scholarship for four straight years and various recruiting restrictions that include a two-month ban on communicating with prospects.

The breadth of those penalties shocked Georgia Tech and Pastner, largely because the school felt it had handled both situations as aggressively as it could have. LaBarrie was fired almost immediately after the school learned about the strip club trip, and Pastner immediately turned in the violations by Bell to the Georgia Tech compliance staff once he learned about them (Bell informed Pastner his players had taken those benefits as part of an extortion attempt).

The NCAA didn't accuse Georgia Tech of lacking institutional control and didn't accuse Pastner of failing to promote an atmosphere of compliance. There was no pattern of rule-breaking or insinuation that anyone at Georgia Tech attempted to cover it up. These were two pretty narrow issues that the school dealt with promptly and forthrightly. And still, it didn't prevent the NCAA from issuing some significant penalties.

"While we regret that these violations have occurred and appreciate the NCAA Committee on Infractions' work on this case, we are disappointed with the severity of the penalties imposed, some of which will have a direct and unfair impact on current student-athletes," athletics director Todd Stansbury said. "We are exploring our options and giving serious consideration on whether to appeal some aspects of the decision."

Because this seems less about the substance of the case and more about the moment, which the NCAA understands is a critical one for the credibility of the organization.

Once the FBI's wiretaps pulled back the curtain on how things really get done in recruiting - shoe company consultants shoveling money toward prospects and their families, assistant coaches steering players to financial advisers for kickbacks, runners for agents trying to orchestrate deals to place players with coaches who will run interference for them when the player turns pro - the NCAA couldn't come up empty on real reform.

The fruits of that effort as it relates to the enforcement process are just now being revealed as Kansas received a scathing Notice of Allegations this week while Arizona, LSU, Auburn and others brace for theirs in the coming months.

MESSAGE SENT: NCAA to Bill Self: You're a cheater and we want you out

Georgia Tech has nothing to do with the FBI investigation, but it's hard not to look at the aggressiveness of the penalties as foreshadowing for what's to come.

"I don't think there's any effort on our part to be more stringent or strict than we were in the past," said former Minnesota athletics director Joel Maturi, who was the chief hearing officer for Georgia Tech's case.

But as much as Committee on Infractions members have always talked about taking each case individually and considering only the facts presented to them, there's little doubt about the self-awareness of this group of people. They understand college athletics. They know the mood of their colleagues and the NCAA membership in general. They consume the media narratives about how weak the NCAA has looked in past attempts to root out the cheaters. It's only natural that the pendulum would swing hard the other way. This feels like the committee sending a message.

Few will cry for Georgia Tech, a bottom-tier ACC program that hasn't made the NCAA tournament since 2010 and just happened to land in the NCAA's crosshairs at precisely the wrong time. But if you can extract these penalties proportionally to a place like Kansas - where Bill Self is named directly in three Level 1 violations and lack of institutional control has been alleged - it would be pretty easy to envision a batch of sanctions that will cripple the program for years to come.

Though the levels of proof may not be exactly the same, the allegations against Kansas are far, far worse than what Georgia Tech was dealing with. And unlike Georgia Tech, where the head coach was not accused of having any knowledge of what was happening, the NCAA has hit Self directly based on text messages with Adidas fixer and bag man T.J. Gassnola, who paid multiple players to go to Kansas.

We won't know for sure what allegations other schools are dealing with until their Notice of Allegations becomes public, but the early vibe on the post-FBI mood of the NCAA is pretty clear.

They're done messing around.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/...blue-bloos/3777760002/
 09/27/2019 06:01 AM
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johnnyboy

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Joined Forum: 07/22/2003

I have always wondered how so much of the recruiting process is invisible to them. It's a start.

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"One of the reasons why propaganda tries to get you to hate government is because it's the one existing institution in which people can participate to some extent and constrain tyrannical unaccountable power." Noam Chomsky.

 09/27/2019 06:36 AM
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waterlizard25

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