“Double the Standard, Double the Fun”
guest column by Robert “Stroupinator” Stroup
No, Oregon shouldn’t have to run a clean program. Neither should USC or Ohio State. And (gasp) neither should Miami. The whole “clean program” spiel is a farce concocted by the well-intentioned, but woefully obtuse liberal media as long as the current system enforced by the NCAA remains. And I don’t feel great for arguing that (as I myself am a liberal) but it’s the truth. Upon reading a Californian or Oregonian publication, it would seem that the recruiting practices and institutional control issues of the collegiate middle class – and not the upper crust, mind you – are the underlying fault lines for the future of the sport to any reporter outside of the Sun Belt. It’s one ugly canard and everyone sort of knows it. The unwritten law is as follows: if you aren’t in the South, you are held to a different standard.
Furthermore, the fans and media are being led astray. There’s a suspenseful unexplained silence lurking like a dragon in the mist. The investigations from Charles Robinson lead anyone with half a brain to wonder why one source – and one source alone – is breaking all the news. Something isn’t fitting into place here, and objective observers are best served by listening very closely to the things that aren’t being said. In between the lines, the truth is more easily revealed.
Ask yourself this: what hasn’t happened this offseason? It’s a tough question to answer. Pac-12 school on probation. Another Pac-12 school in trouble. Mountain West school cited for lack of institutional control. Big Ten school loses coach, vacates an entire season. ACC school facing a possible death penalty and the Big 12 continues to crumble. With the sole exception being the SEC, which has the divine guidance and spiritual wherewithal to lead a life of purity, college football has proverbially sniffed its own fart.
So let’s eliminate the South. We already know ahead of time that they are in the clear because Charles Robinson hasn’t written anything about them whatsoever. No bagman found at Auburn and an Alabama booster silenced rather easily. And who are we kidding anyway? The real culprit, as we’ll likely soon find out, is the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, which illegally recruited five snowmen from Siberia with the help of alleged “freeze agent” Chilly Icicles.
Sarcasm aside, the silence out of the south – and not Miami – is the most damning evidence we’ve seen to date. The inherent ineptitude of the NCAA only couples and augments it. It was easy to harshly penalize USC and send a message that, to this second, looks worse with the hypocrisy of Paul Dee. But it was alarmingly difficult to nail Auburn after:
- Stanley McClover and three other former Auburn players testified to being paid on HBO’s Real Sports
- Kenny Rogers alleged that Cecil Newton asked somewhere between $100,000 to $180,000 for Cam Newton to play for Mississippi State.
- And Tiger megabooster Bobby Lowder’s company was seized by the FDIC for committing financial fraud that totaled $1.9 billion.
Furthermore, after ridiculous incremental payments had been estimated in McClover’s testimony, Yahoo! News’ Mark Paul wrote the following: “Four Auburn players recently said that they received payments from the school. Sadly, there is nothing new about this. NCAA payment scandals have been going on for a long time.” Immediately it seemed, while Oregon and Ohio State were still being investigated by the NCAA, Auburn’s investigation was at an end.
Now, as Gene Chizik rudely found out at SEC Media Days from Julie Roe Lach, an NCAA representative, this was not the case. But why, in the light of these alarming sums of money, did the story that captivated the nation in 2010 – namely, Auburn – suddenly disappear?
Part of this can be attributed to journalists, which had the naiveté to postulate, one too many times that “once the media turned on a program, [that program] was finished.” On such a whim – and with the NCAA doing a Ben Stiller-worthy performance of Simple Jack – an intrepid group of columnists, national and regional, got the eye black out, donned it, pumped their fists, sat on their asses and waited for Yahoo! News to call back. What they received was Oregon, Ohio State and Miami. No Auburn, no SEC cash cow implicated, no problem. The articles were written, the NCAA was pushed to reconvene and, as Frank DeFord so eloquently put it, “50 college presidents pledged to make sure that college athletics [remained] firmly in the past, in the antiquated amateur hours.” In short, nothing was changed at all.
And yet, amid the stagnation, sportswriters nationwide commended each other and toasted to their “Mission: Accomplished,” and rightfully so. While every conference (outside of the SEC) had been either penalized or enervated, the headlines and papers, conversely, witnessed an unprecedented demand in subscriptions and insider memberships. Injustice had never been in higher demand.
You double the standards, you double the fun. That is the lesson everyone learned this offseason. The suspensions for Cliff Harris and Kiko Alonso? They don’t happen in the South. Ohio State’s coaching vacancy? It wouldn’t happen in the south. And the LSU brawl would lead to teamwide suspensions, not wind sprints, outside of the south. The journalists remain the problem and not the answer; they’re not at the heart of corruption because they’re either (1) uninformed or (more likely) (2) blocked from access. And that’s where we stand in college football until the NCAA is disbanded and started anew: at the mercy of a football Enron. At the mercy of corruption personified.
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