NCAA Bends Some Rules

The NCAA has a heart.

For years, you’d have gotten an argument on that.

But in a swift, compassionate and potentially problematic decision, the NCAA announced this week it would grant broad rules exemptions to schools and athletes affected by Hurricane Katrina.

The same organization that investigates how many times a coach telephones a recruit and once cited former Utah basketball coach Rick Majerus for buying a meal for Keith Van Horn the day his father died, now says athletes who are hurricane victims may accept food, housing and clothing from their schools.

More worrisome, they also may accept financial and other assistance from boosters.

The NCAA even says students can attend another university and still play for their own if the campus isn’t able to hold classes.

“For decades, the NCAA has been criticized as rigid and not responsive to human needs,” said Richard Lapchick, director of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida. “You read at times about student-athletes not being able to go to funerals of loved ones because they couldn’t afford it.

“I think this is part of the humanization of a bureaucracy that has been known for a strict interpretation of the rules.”

It is a situation with potential for abuse if, say, a booster thinks it is license to give a basketball player an Escalade to go with his new sport coat.

“I’m going to assume the NCAA will retain some control because of the history of boosters being out of control,” Lapchick said.

Long known for its labyrinthine committee structure and excruciatingly slow decision making, the NCAA has evolved into what is sometimes called “the kinder, gentler NCAA” under Myles Brand, the former Indiana University president who became NCAA president in 2003.

When Conference USA Commissioner Britton Banowsky called the NCAA, asking for leeway on rules as Tulane and Southern Mississippi sought to aid displaced athletes, the NCAA decided to announce it would be flexible now and work out the details later.

“Quite frankly, it’s impossible to predict the issues,” said NCAA spokesman Kent Barrett, saying the NCAA had not even decided on a list of affected schools.

“Maybe a school is not affected, but a majority of its athletes come from the area,” Barrett said. “It could even affect a school in California, where a freshman coming in is waiting on last-minute paperwork that would finalize their eligibility, and those schools don’t exist anymore, or their records don’t exist.

“Folks in the local area have a lot more to worry about than NCAA bylaws.”

And if someone decides to push the envelope?

“Frankly, our hope and desire is, people will look at this and take it for the tragedy it was and not use it to stretch rules or use these exemptions to gain an unfair advantage,” Barrett said.

“How awful would it be if a booster had a room available to give a student-athlete but was stuck worrying about whether it would render them ineligible? That’s not the intent of NCAA bylaws. Our bylaws are so outside the scope of this.”

He doesn’t have to explain that to Tulane Athletic Director Rick Dickson, who probably has committed at least 1,000 NCAA infractions since he evacuated more than 100 athletes from New Orleans to Jackson, Miss., then took the football team to Dallas and sent the women’s soccer team to Birmingham, Ala., after the power went out in the Jackson State gym where they were staying.

“I can’t even imagine, if I look back from when we left campus Sunday,” Dickson said. “I don’t even know what day it is. It seems like two weeks, and all the things we’ve had to do and provide and create in very adverse conditions.... Three of those days we were without electricity.

“Our first night, we were given keys to a gymnasium and had kids on hardwood floors and wooden bleachers. We went to Wal-Mart or somewhere to get something to sleep on. The next day we were buying 20 tubes of toothpaste and all these toothbrushes. And it was meal to meal. You couldn’t go anywhere in Jackson because there was no power. It was finding a security guard whose family knew a family that could make 50 sandwiches, and another group with bottled water.”

Friday afternoon, Tulane announced that the university would not hold classes during the fall semester. Its athletic programs will continue, with students competing while attending other universities.

“A student from Washington can go to the University of Washington. A team has to stay together,” Dickson said. “Our football team is at [Southern Methodist] right now, or possibly they could go to the University of Houston or Rice.”

There’s one thing he knows: Without an NCAA waiver, all those players would probably be ineligible.

In Katrina’s wake, waiving the rules is the order of the day.

In Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Friday, Gene Marsh, chairman of the NCAA Committee on Infractions and a professor at the University of Alabama law school, was helping arrange for about 25 law students from Tulane and Loyola in New Orleans to attend Alabama.

“I think we are bending or ignoring every rule in the book when it comes to getting these kids enrolled,” he said. “We have kids in some cases with absolutely no resources, and the university is waiving tuition.

“If the universities can make that happen and not worry too much about rules, I would expect the NCAA to do the same. The mentality people have right now in trying to do all they can is not in any way driven by some knucklehead who wants to do something because somebody’s a football player.

“Some people have only the shirt on their backs. God help anybody who comes complaining with the NCAA rule book in their hand. If they do that on this, they sure won’t get any attention from me.”

It is a new era of flexibility in the NCAA, and it is largely attributable to Brand, who has demonstrated a way of moving the seemingly immoveable.

He engineered the firing of Bob Knight at Indiana by setting up a “zero tolerance” policy under which Knight, eventually, essentially fired himself.

Brand took criticism from some quarters for not firing Knight earlier, and he has taken criticism as president of the NCAA, particularly over the recent Native American mascot issue.

Yet he remained more flexible than any NCAA president in memory. When Florida State, Utah and Central Michigan complained that their nicknames should not be banned when they were endorsed by the very tribes they represented, the NCAA removed them from the list.

Brand also has pushed for academic reform, with serious penalties for poor performance. But when schools complained that the Academic Progress Rate formula was unfair to those that lost players early to professional sports and those on the quarter system, the NCAA made adjustments.

“I think we’ve seen, in particular in Myles Brand’s tenure, those things that maybe historically got logjammed and didn’t get addressed, somebody will stop to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, what are we doing here?’ ” said Dickson, the Tulane athletic director. “It seems to me the organization is more attuned and the antennae are out, so when we get bogged down in the mud, somebody will step back and say, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

That’s essentially why Banowsky called the NCAA when he realized that helping athletes would result in NCAA infractions.

“The times are dramatic times,” the Conference USA commissioner said. “What we’ve seen here is there is great value in decisiveness in times of crisis. The NCAA stepped up and took action and people are able to breathe a sigh of relief.”