USC Frustrated by Suspensions

News item: Four USC football players trade in their school-issued football shoes for exchange credits at a shoe store.

Question: Is anyone at USC reading the NCAA rule book?

Answer: Yes.

USC athletes in every sport, in fact, must attend classes and be tested on key parts of the NCAA manual.

But even football Coach John Robinson acknowledges, in the wake of four more Trojan suspensions, that whatever is being done to familiarize USC athletes with possible violations isn’t enough.

“What’s most upsetting about this latest thing is the lack of judgment that was shown, the absence of any sense of what to do and what not to do,” Robinson said Tuesday at his weekly media luncheon.

On Monday, starters Darrell Russell, Brian Kelly, Larry Parker and Sammy Knight were suspended for Saturday’s game against Cal after admitting having exchanged their football shoes for personal apparel at Nike Town Los Angeles in Beverly Hills.

On Monday, Robinson seemed as exasperated over the matter as he was over any of the several suspension that preceded this case in the last three seasons.

“These are good kids, kids I’d trust to baby-sit my grandchildren,” he said.

“But the fact they weren’t even cautious about this, the fact that lights didn’t go on in their heads, that they didn’t stop and think: ‘Maybe I’d better ask someone if I should do this . . . ‘

“I guess it’s my fault. Whatever we’re doing, instruction-wise, we have to do better.”

Every USC football player is required to sit in on at least two NCAA rules sessions each school year with faculty representative Noel Ragsdale and compliance director Leslie Daland.

To instruct athletes in the entire contents of the NCAA manual--roughly the size of a phone book--is simply too much, Daland indicated.

“I don’t recall ever telling the team, ‘Do not take your shoes to a store and exchange them,’ because it never came up in that context,” Daland said.

“The use of USC gear came up once before, but in a recruiting context.

“There just isn’t time to address every conceivable violation. But we try to give them a sense of awareness that, if something comes up, to ask before they do something.”

Said Terry Barnum, last year’s senior starting fullback and now working as an assistant compliance officer to Daland, “The players get a sense in the rules sessions that, at the least, lights should start blinking if they’re in an area they’re unfamiliar with.

“But they sure didn’t come on in this case.”

The NCAA rules tests USC athletes are given involve yes-and-no questions, short essay questions, oral testing and discussion sessions,” Daland said.

“With the football players, we meet with incoming freshmen as a group every summer, before training camp begins, then we see all the returning players,” Daland said.

“We spend a lot of time, obviously, on agent issues, and on academic eligibility issues.”

All four athletes have said they were unaware they were violating rules in exchanging their shoes for apparel.

“It comes down to internal control by the athletic department,” Robinson said. “We just have to do a better job.”