Roughly 16 years after SMU was hit with the infamous “death penalty” that crippled their football program for nearly a quarter of a century, then-Florida president John Lombardi said that the NCAA would do anything it could going forward to avoid sentencing another school to a similar fate.
“SMU taught the committee that the death penalty is too much like the nuclear bomb,” Lombardi said in 2002. “It’s like what happened after we dropped the [atomic] bomb in World War II. The results were so catastrophic that now we’ll do anything to avoid dropping another one.”
A decade later, thanks to an explosive exposé by Yahoo! sports, the nuclear option appears to be back on the table, and it could force the NCAA to play the football version of Harry Truman once again.
The level of malfeasance alleged in the investigative piece by convicted felon Nevin Shapiro is truly staggering and is only rivaled in recent times by the infamous SMU scandal, when the Mustangs were Pony Express’d back to the football dark ages in the mid-eighties. Shapiro, who once had a players lounge named in his honor at the Coral Gables school, alleges he gave impermissible benefits that by his estimation totaled in the millions and millions of dollars to more than five dozen Hurricane football players -- including a dozen current ones -- over an eight-year period beginning in 2001.
Cash, prostitutes, jewelry, clothing, electronics, yachts, mansions, strip club junkets and, in one instance, an abortion. You name it, Shapiro alleges he provided it for many, many a Hurricane player.
Perhaps most damning is the Yahoo! report claims four former football assistants as well as three football support staff members had direct knowledge of or participated in the violating of multiple NCAA rules, including sending high school recruits to Shapiro’s multi-million dollar mansion or accompanying Shapiro and recruits to strip clubs. Shapiro’s physical confrontation with UM’s head of compliance in the press box of a 2007 game wrought a background check by the university, which revealed he was the co-owner of a sports representation agency. Still, the university did nothing.
Juxtapose those Miami allegations against the SMU case two-and-a-half-decades ago and, more recently, USC.
Already banned from bowl games in 1985 and 1986 as well as any television appearances for the latter year due to recruiting violations committed by boosters and at least one assistant, SMU was found in 1986 by the NCAA to have created a slush fund -- which paid football players upwards of $700 a month -- that was controlled by a booster and sanctioned by officials from the athletic department all the way through the school’s Board of Governors. For that, the NCAA canceled the Mustangs 1987 season -- the school canceled the 1988 season as well due to lack of players -- banned the school from bowl games and television appearances through the 1989 season, as well as stripping them of nearly 60 football scholarships over a four-year period.
At first blush, the situation in Miami appears to be the work of a lone rogue booster who inexplicably flew underneath the school’s radar -- allegedly -- for eight years. SMU’s case was an organized, systematic pay-for-play scandal involving multiple layers of individuals both inside the athletic department and out, even bleeding into the political arena.
Is that enough of a difference to keep the NCAA from pressing the nuclear button and leveling The U football program?
If it’s looked at through a prism of blacks and whites, the allegations leveled against Miami are the worst to hit major college football since SMU in the mid-eighties and would appear to deserve something that approaches the same level of sanctions. As the NCAA has shown since slapping near-historic sanctions on USC, though, the NCAA seems to work with varying shades of gray that only they can see. And comprehend.
To illustrate that very point, the Trojans were stripped of 30 scholarships over a three-year period and banned from appearing in bowl games for two after the NCAA found one player -- Reggie Bush -- and/or his family had received in the neighborhood of $300,000 from two would-be sports marketers/felons while he was a running back at the school. One USC assistant -- not four as alleged in the Yahoo! Miami piece, or multiple members of the institution as found in the SMU case -- and one two-minute phone conversation led to the sanctions that have set the Trojans football program back at least a couple of years if not more.
After handing the Trojans some of the stiffest sanctions since SMU was obliterated from the football map, Paul Dee, chair of the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions, said the following when it comes to a school’s responsibility for dealing with outside influences on student-athletes:
Dee was the athletic director at the University of Miami during the time Shapiro was allegedly lavishing his student-athletes with gifts, cash and services.
Regardless of whether it’s too much like the nuclear bomb, and the catastrophic results Lombardi referred to be damned, the NCAA needs to drop another one on the Miami football program if they have any real desire to truly change the culture as they’ve openly professed in recent months. What would that entail when it comes to the ‘Canes? Miami’s situation -- if the allegations are proven, it should be noted -- would seem to fall somewhere between SMU and USC, but leaning decidedly toward the former side in terms of severity.
Leaning enough to warrant sanctions similar to what SMU received? Certainly this trumps Bush’s financial masterpiece, setting the bar for sanctions to come in somewhere well above what USC received. If that involves something close to the death penalty, so be it; at some point, there have to be significant repercussions for programs that don’t demand high-profile compliance for high-profile players.
One way or the other, though, the NCAA needs to take their hands out from under their backsides and show that what they’re spewing publicly aren’t merely words lacking any kind of meaningful action behind them. One SMU is too many. Two of them calls for a significant change to the structure of collegiate athletics.
And a sweeping change to the hypocrisy that Dee’s involvement on both sides fully displays.