Reminder for USC: Redshirts Are In, T-Shirts Are Out

The No. 1 problem in intercollegiate athletics strikes again.

The dreaded T-shirt surplus.

Apparently, many major university athletic departments have warehouses filled to overflowing with T-shirts stamped with the school’s logo.

“I want those dadgum T-shirts out of here!” the coach screams to his assistants. “We don’t have room for weight training or team meetings, what with all these T-shirts.”

And so the frantic assistant coaches grab boxes of the shirts and start giving them away. Unfortunately, the freebie T-shirts sometimes wind up in the hands of blue-chip recruits, a violation of NCAA rules.

Next thing you know, the school is in big trouble.

It happened to the UCLA basketball program a couple of years ago, when it was convicted of NCAA violations that included T-shirt giving.

And now it’s USC, in trouble with the NCAA and the Pac-10 for handing out free T-shirts to recruits, as well as other violations.

Now isn’t that silly?

I’m pretty sure that USC would like us all to think it is silly.

Listen closely to USC Athletic Director Mike McGee, as he announced last week that an assistant football coach had been fired after a joint investigation by the Pac-10 and USC revealed NCAA recruiting violations.

McGee said: “The more significant violations established were making excessive contacts with three recruits . . . and providing recruits with T-shirts after they signed national letters of intent.”

Now if the T-shirt giveaway was indeed among the “more significant violations,” what were some of the nit-picky violations?

Free shoelaces? Free hair combing at the campus barber shop? Postcards of Tommy Trojan?

The truth is, some wrong things were being done at USC.

How serious were the violations? Serious enough to cost an assistant coach, apparently a valued and loyal employee, his job and his reputation.

If USC believed that the violations were not serious, the school had a moral obligation to stand behind the assistant coach, keep him on, and tell the NCAA and Pac-10, in effect, “Kiss our T-shirt.”

If the rule violations were petty, why did USC bother to commit them?

So they were serious.

A popular tactic among schools caught breaking rules is to shift the blame to the NCAA rule book, which is apparently printed only in Chinese.

USC Coach Ted Tollner, seemingly an honorable man, said: “You go over the rules and try to stay on top of them, but obviously we fell short here. And there are a ton of rules.”

There are probably a ton of plays in the USC football playbook, too, but is a player excused if he doesn’t bother to read and learn and execute two or three of the plays?

The NCAA rule book is so complex that one Trojan recruit’s mother got herself a copy of the book and grasped enough of the basics to know that USC was fudging on visits to her son. The kid wound up at another school.

Maybe the Trojans should recruit the mom.

On the surface, the USC administration and athletic department seems to be handling the bad news manfully. Instead of rising up in indignation, as the school president did the last time USC was thumped by the college cops, McGee and Tollner seem to be shouldering the blame. I should say McGee and Tollner and assistant coach Russ Purnell, who was fired.

Whether this is a matter of good public relations, or an honest assumption of responsibility for screwing up, it is at least a refreshing change.

The sorry thing is that it had to happen at all. The USC athletic department, with its rocky recent history of rule skirting, needs to be extra clean. The Trojans have a reputation to live down, and an example to set for the entire student body.

They can’t afford to break any rules.

Even the T-shirt rule. If the sorrows of UCLA and USC have delivered any message to the nation, it is this: No more free T-shirts for recruits.

Let the athletic departments unload their stores of surplus T-shirts on the needy, like the down-and-out residents of skid row. Why should football and basketball players get all the free T-shirts when, based on the academic achievements of too many college athletes, skid-row bums attend class at least as often?

USC, meanwhile, can use this little setback to its advantage. The athletic department has already instituted several programs to prevent future violations. And some of the Trojan players are saying that they will overcome whatever adversity accompanies this latest bust. They say they will use the situation as a test of character.

That’s fine, as long as none of the players, in the grand old college athletic tradition, get someone to take the test for them.