Controversy Greets Dave Maggard at Miami

The man who wants to remake the Miami Hurricanes’ rogue reputation has spent his first four months on the job stymied by a simmering scandal.

For Dave Maggard, the initial indication of trouble came the day he arrived in town as Miami’s new athletic director. The people that had hired him broke the bad news.

“I was informed that they were looking at a possible irregularity in one Pell Grant form,” Maggard said.

That was shortly after the university hired Maggard from Cal in February to replace Sam Jankovich, who had departed to take charge of the NFL’s New England Patriots.

One falsified application for a federal Pell Grant -- student financial aid -- wouldn’t have been a scandal. But one form became 60, with most of the applications filed for football players.

The FBI and U.S. Department of Education are investigating the case, and an NCAA probe could be next.

“I don’t think anybody can gauge what the depth is at this point of what it is we’re looking at,” Maggard said. “There may be some difficult days for us.”

Tony Russell, a former assistant academic coordinator in the athletic department, has said that he falsified the Pell Grant applications over a two-year period without anyone else’s knowledge.

Even if the scope doesn’t expand, criminal charges and NCAA sanctions are possible. So are defections by fans and athletic department personnel, Maggard said.

“Are we going to lose some people because of it? I can’t tell that yet. We’re going to have a chance to see what we’re made of -- the University of Miami and the fans and athletes and everybody else.”

It’s ironic that Maggard is spending his first summer in Florida amid turmoil; his 18 years as athletic director at Berkeley were scandal-free. The football and basketball programs were under .500 during his tenure, but Miami officials liked the Maggard package: a former Olympic shot putter from a strong academic school.

That last part was important because the Hurricanes needed an integrity infusion. On Jan. 1, coach Dennis Erickson’s football team capped a season marked by taunting, gloating and fighting with a Cotton Bowl-record 202 yards in penalties while beating Texas 46-3.

Erickson, upset that his efforts to stop such behavior had failed, said the Cotton Bowl fiasco capped what had been the worst year of his life. University president Edward Foote promised that the search for a new athletic director then under way would lead to someone who “cares as much about winning right as he does winning, period.”

Maggard was hired, but the clean start for the Hurricanes didn’t last long. The Pell Grant case means their image is bound for a further bruising.

“I don’t think these things ever help you,” he said.

But the image will change, Maggard pledged, because the Hurricanes’ on-the-field behavior will change. He declined to discuss how Erickson might punish offending players, but Maggard expects no more celebratory pelvic thrusting, no more dancing in end zone tunnels, no more finger pointing at the opposition, no more fights during pregame warmups.

“For some reason, there has been this feeling that this is what we have to do to win; this is what we have to do to get our kicks,” Maggard said.

“If you have people who believe that they have to compete in your face, you’ll have no respect for the program. In-your-face kind of stuff doesn’t prove anything. That isn’t toughness.”

Toughness, he said, means something else. This summer at Miami, it means riding out a federal investigation.

“This is going to be a good test for us,” Maggard said. “You want to talk about toughness -- we’re going to find out how tough some people are.”