Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby came out guns blazing on Monday, offering pointed remarks about college athletics’ current model, the effects of the O’Bannon lawsuit and the NCAA’s toothless enforcement standards.
The latter of those topics produced a string of seemingly-frustrated quotes from Bowlsby:“Enforcement is broken,” Bowlsby says. “An understatement to say cheating pays.” No infractions comm meeting in over a year. Wow.
— kbohls (@kbohls) July 21, 2014
Bowlsby: “Right now, if you wanna cheat you can do it and get away with it and that needs to change.”
— Lindsay Schnell (@LindsayRaeSI) July 21, 2014
Tell us how you really feel, Bob.
Whatever your thoughts on “cheating” are -- that athletes should be paid, etc. -- rules are rules, and the NCAA seems pretty bad at enforcing the ones they have (see: the blown Miami case). If Bowlsby isn’t overstating things and the NCAA infractions committee indeed hasn’t met in a year, yikes. That’s pretty bad.
More from Bowlsby’s press conference today:
-- Bowlsby said the lawsuits facing college athletics, like the O’Bannon case, could lead to the elimination of some Olympic sports to cover the costs of compensating football and basketball players. That’d be unfair, Bowlsby said, given the work put in by non-football/basketball teams is the same but those programs don’t “have the advantage of an adoring public.”
-- Bowlsby, while admitting there’s a challenge in having a 10-team league, said he’s comfortable with not having a conference championship game.
-- The 62-year-old Bowlsby also had this to say, which sounds pretty depressing:Bowlsby: “I expect to be in court most of the rest of my career. I’ve been in entire meetings where we no talk sports.”
— Jimmy Burch (@Jimmy_Burch) July 21, 2014And this:
Bob Bowlby says he’s “not entirely” optimistic about future b/c it’s “troubling”
— Joe Schad (@schadjoe) July 21, 2014Change is necessary for college athletics, but no one said it’d be easy -- or very much fun, if you’re on Bowlsby’s side of things.