Commentary : NCAA Penalties Are Misdirected

OK, so the so-called death penalty has been invoked against Southern Methodist University’s football team.

So the Mustangs won’t be allowed to play this fall, interrupting their momentum in college football and perhaps rupturing their power to compete as they once did.

But will the NCAA’s ruling against SMU end crime in American college sports?

Will other universities and their booster groups quit cheating now?

Nobody thinks so. No authority on any campus is willing to predict that henceforth, no players will be paid, no NCAA rules will be broken, no coaches will violate the strict NCAA code.

Instead, the lesson of SMU--to players, coaches, parents and boosters everywhere--seems to be simply this: Be more careful. Get yourself deeper under ground.

As Arkansas Athletic Director Frank Broyles said the other day: “The signal is out to violators now: Stonewall it. You’re better off trying to hide something than to cooperate (with the NCAA, as SMU says it did).”

In its action against SMU, what the NCAA has come up with, ironically, is a penalty that is at once too tough and not tough enough.

Many of those harmed are innocent. Numbers of innocent SMU students, alumni, football players, faculty members and fans have been humiliated and made to pay for the wrongs of a few others.

That, surely, is an outright injustice.

But despite the seeming harshness of its action in Dallas, the NCAA was, at the same time, much too lenient. It was, that is, if its objective is deterrence. In the view of most football people, the kind of penalty chosen for SMU won’t deter the same kind of wrongdoers at other universities.

A member of one college booster organization, requesting anonymity, reacted predictably: “Most of us (at other schools) haven’t been caught once yet. They’ve got to get you twice to give you the death penalty. Nothing will change--except we’ll be more discreet after this.”

What’s ahead? Can the NCAA do anything to put an end to cheating in the colleges? What penalty would be tough enough?

One form of punishment seems adequate:

For the kind of rule-breaking that leads today to serious probationary penalties, the school’s three principle, relevant leaders--the university president, the athletic director, and the football coach--should be fired.

As everyone involved in college ball well knows--from athletes and investigators to assistant coaches--broad-scale violations just aren’t possible without the knowledge of those who administer school programs. An individual booster could still run amok, perhaps, but not at length, and not in depth. No organized cheating could exist.

Two of the major weapons that the NCAA now uses to punish the innocent are loss of team scholarships and loss of bowl game participation. Both are unfair.

Instead, for major infractions, the penalty should be both automatic and drastic: The president is gone, the athletic director is gone, the coach is gone.

In practice, of course, there wouldn’t be any firings. Threatened by penalties of such a scope, school administrators would make not winning but good clean football their first athletic priority, which it ought to be.

Asked to comment, David Berst, the head of NCAA enforcement, said: “This (proposal) has a lot of merit. It will be well-received on many (college levels). However, I have one concern, our relationships with (college administrators). They’d be less willing to cooperate if their (own jobs were at stake).”

As Broyles and others have testified, however, the death penalty for SMU probably has already ended the era of voluntary cooperation.

“SMU’s authorities went to the NCAA themselves with the (first word of their new) violations,” one college administrator said. “You won’t live to see that again.”

Dr. James H. Zumberge, the president of USC, would have been among those involved 10 years ago if school leaderships had then been held accountable for NCAA violations.

Zumberge was the president of SMU in 1975-80, when the Mustangs drew three years on probation.

According to the NCAA’s Berst, they were punished after SMU coaches and boosters “made improper inducements to high school football players” in three different years, 1975, ’78 and ’79.

Zumberge declined an opportunity to comment. He was approached by a Times reporter exploring the role of university presidents in a changing sports world, with reference to the six colleges he has served since 1950.

A geologist for whom Cape Zumberge in Antarctica was named, he considered the Times offer for 48 hours before declining.

“Nobody blamed college presidents in the ‘70s,” said Berst, referring to Zumberge’s period at SMU. “Their job then was to hire the best (coach and athletic director) available, and let them run it while they ran the (school). Today, the presidents have become intimately involved.”

The presidents were, in fact, responsible for implementing this year’s sanctions against SMU. Almost every U.S. college president has a voice and a vote in NCAA policy--though most of their schools don’t play football.

That’s one problem. The greater problem is that college football is incompatible with the American free enterprise system in these respects:.

--On the one hand, college athletes are skilled people who aren’t paid commensurately for their labor.

--On the other hand, the colleges can’t afford to pay them what they’re worth. Most schools would have to give up football if required to meet a realistic payroll for the valuable talent they employ.

The conflict is almost impossible to resolve. Most boosters can’t, or won’t, understand why it’s only legal to pay everyone but college athletes. Most professors can’t understand why gifted athletes deserve more than a free education.

The presidents have tried to resolve the issue with the death penalty. It isn’t enough. To end the abuses of college football, they’ll have to put their own jobs on the line.