NCAA Policies Need Major Reconstruction

As the collegiate football season nears an end, it can be hoped that the NCAA will now review its policies regarding sanctions against schools in violation of NCAA rules.

In light of many of the NCAA’s actions, one must wonder at the organization’s integrity. Certainly its intelligence is brought into question.

A few years ago the NCAA handed Southern Methodist University’s football program the “death penalty.” Not only was SMU, a member of the Southwest Conference, stripped of all its athletic scholarships and its eligibility to appear on TV or in postseason bowl games, it was banned from fielding a football team for a couple of seasons. This was a punishment from which the university has not yet recovered.

As a result of the harsh sanctions against SMU, the entire Southwest Conference has suffered. Houston, Florida and Oklahoma are the other schools whose football teams labored this year under bans denying them eligibility for postseason play.

Who is really punished by such bans as those administered by the NCAA? When you consider that Houston, Florida and Oklahoma all finished among the top 20 teams in the nation, it seems that not only were those schools and their alumni penalized, but so were football fans everywhere. We will not have the opportunity to see any of these schools in any bowl game--because of infractions committed by players and coaches no longer connected with the schools.

The legal system of our country does not condemn an entire community because of the presence of a few criminals. Nor should the NCAA penalize an entire school, an athletic program, or an entire team because of the presence of a few violators of the rules. Sanctions should be enforced only against guilty individuals . . . players and coaches. Sanctions should be strong enough to remove those found guilty of infractions but should not be of such a nature as to destroy any phase of a school’s program.

There is big money in collegiate sports, and the revenue received from athletic programs support many academic, non-athletic programs. To deprive any institution of the maximum income its athletic program can generate is unfair in that it works hardship on countless students not involved in athletics. It is time for the NCAA to stop punishing schools and programs and to impose its bans only on individual wrongdoers.

ART MAGEE

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