Southern Methodist University was the worst offender in a conference full of them. in the days of the Pony Express, they were laboring under their seventh stint of NCAA probation, when an intrepid investigation by the local television sports crew unearthed a long-running slush fund for payment of players. Exasperated at last, the NCAA handed SMU a ban on football for 1987 and a limit of 7 games in 1988 (all on the road, to fulfill conference obligations). It’s the only time the NCAA has ever shut down an entire football program at a member institution.
SMU chose to leave the program shut down in 1988 rather than play only on the road, and set about retooling their athletic department, but the damage was done. The program has never been the same, and the entire Southwest Conference broke up in the realignment of the early 1990s – some schools to the Big XII (itself now coming apart), some to the WAC, one to the SEC. This kind of ripple effect is probably the reason why nobody’s gotten the death penalty since, and probably the reason Miami wound up skating on its Pell Grant scandal in the early 90s.
Instead, the NCAA goes for the neutron bomb approach – kill all the people but leave the structures standing. That’s what Alabama caught in the early 2000s – and the justice of that penalty, with no finding of lack of institutional control and no finding of culpability on the past of any university employee, is still up for debate – and it’s what USC caught this year. Take away postseason play and a critical mass of scholarships, and you can devastate a program for the better part of a decade. For the Tide or Trojans, of course, there’s always a chance to come back, as Nick Saban demonstrated – the great powers usually have the means to recover.
The reason this is interesting now is because of Tennessee. The men’s basketball coach got an unprecedented half-season suspension from conference play from the SEC office – something they have never done before – because he lied to NCAA investigators. Said investigators have not reported back, possibly because they are also dealing with the slew of violations reported under Lane Kiffin in football and rumblings around the baseball program as well.
So is Tennessee in line for the death penalty? Probably not. The official NCAA standard is “two major violations in five years” but it’s unclear whether that standard could be applied if the violations are in two separate programs. (Alabama was literally threatened with it – “looking down the barrel” was the phrase the investigating committee used – but the first of the two violations was in basketball.) It’s a little bit mind-blowing how the athletic director in Knoxville still has a job, to be honest, but maybe they’re waiting for the official letter of inquiry so they can loudly and publicly sacrifice him. After all, if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that the only chance of surviving an NCAA probe is to immediately self-immolate and throw yourself on the mercy of the committee. Standing up for yourself only gets a harder smack.
And, as is ever the case, it does very little good. Sure, USC had to vacate a ton of wins and their 2004 national championship (the only actual one of the attempted three-peat, thanks to LSU), but do any of the fans care? Does Auburn get hooked up with a title? Does Cal get a retroactive Rose Bowl berth against Michigan? Does Vince Young get Reggie Bush’s Heisman? No, no, and no. So I ask you this: if the punishment is long delayed and never as bad as the crime was good, and if Vanderbilt has an endowment pushing $3 billion, why the hell haven’t we broke out the checkbook and taken this thing as far as it can go? Sure, they can vacate all that shit in five years, but if I was there at the Sugar Bowl, I’ll know better…