There’s Plenty to Share Blame for Northridge Football Folly

They are nameless yet clearly named.

From a former head football coach, who gets much of the blame, to a former athletic director to a former compliance officer, all share space in a hard-hitting NCAA infractions report on Cal State Northridge released Thursday.

The admonishment and sanctions imposed come frequently attached to references of “lack of institutional control” of the school’s athletic department, specifically the football program.

That was the program marred in turmoil last summer for violating numerous NCAA rules, including some major ones.

It took several months for the NCAA to sort out Northridge’s report on the mess and bring down the ax: Three years of athletic probation and no playoff appearance for the football team in 2000, among other penalties.

And Northridge has to tighten its institutional controls to prevent similar fiascoes in the future.

Such loose reigns contributed greatly to Northridge’s woes. For years, the place was a disaster waiting to happen.

Until Kathleen Heitzman arrived in April 1998, Northridge didn’t have a qualified compliance officer. The task was handled by administrators already assigned other duties, who sometimes failed to red-flag potential problems.

Heitzman, who left in August to become assistant athletic director at San Francisco State, walked into a land mine.

Until Dick Dull arrived last July to take over for former interim athletic director Sam Jankovich, Northridge desperately needed someone qualified to run the department. Former athletic boss Paul Bubb hardly fit the bill.

Dull, a former athletic director at Maryland, is working to put Northridge on the right course.

Until Jeff Kearin was hired before last season to take over the football team, the Matadors were struggling to regroup after former coach Ron Ponciano was fired.

The NCAA infractions report places substantial responsibility on Ponciano for, among other things, illegal recruiting, using funds from an unauthorized booster club and arranging air transportation for an out-of-state recruit.

Ponciano, now a Valley College assistant, was sanctioned heavily. He can’t be hired by an NCAA member institution until July 2001 without NCAA approval.

All along, Ponciano has characterized his dismissal from Northridge as a vendetta, a witch-hunt. He has maintained from the start that the truth eventually would come out and absolve him of serious wrongdoing.

But the NCAA report presents a much different picture. It paints a coach who blatantly defied the rules and didn’t see anything wrong with it. It depicts an unbending man unwilling to accept reality, even when slapped with undeniable proof.

The evidence is indeed clear, but it’s not as Ponciano claimed. It also shows Northridge administrators were sorely inept, failing to control the coach and boosters, and to identify obvious NCAA infractions.

In the report, the NCAA says “several football coaching staff members [at Northridge] reported that compliance education at the university was minimal, particularly prior to 1999.”

Last August, when Northridge released its report on an internal investigation into the infractions, interim school President Louanne Kennedy showed how uninformed the administration was about institutional controls by proclaiming, “This is over.”

She can safely say that now. Let’s hope Northridge administrators learned a lesson, albeit the hard way.