The NCAA wants to be actual cops, for the same reason it wants anything
The NCAA wants rule-breakers to be punished like law-breakers. The goal, as ever, is to stop players from getting paid.
As part of the fallout from the FBI’s ongoing investigation into college basketball corruption, the NCAA unveiled a handful of rule changes on August 8. Some of them — particularly around basketball recruiting and the NBA Draft — are good, even if they’re too limited. They largely track with what a Condoleeza Rice-led commission suggested in April 2018.
As is usually true when the NCAA does something good for athletes, those changes come with strings attached.
The NCAA is also changing its enforcement model to make punishments more severe for anyone who helps a college athlete get paid for being good at sports.
A door had already been cracked open for people who break NCAA rules to face serious legal consequences. With its new rules, the NCAA has kicked that door down.
For years, there have been two key truths about NCAA rules.
- They’re meant to prevent players from getting paid.
- They’re not laws. Breaking an NCAA rule could always bring punishments, like a postseason ban, coach suspension, or player becoming ineligible. But it wouldn’t get anyone prosecuted, and it wouldn’t usually get rule-breakers sued by their schools.
The FBI probe has already chipped away at that second truth. New NCAA policies are only going to link the law and the rulebook more closely.
The new rules include building a “responsibility to cooperate” with NCAA investigations into the contracts for school presidents and all athletic department staff:
As a term of employment, school presidents and athletics staff must commit contractually to full cooperation in the investigations and infractions process.
Full cooperation means reporting violations in a timely manner; sharing all knowledge and documents requested in a timely manner; providing access to all electronic devices, social media and other technology; and maintaining confidentiality.
The chair of the Division I Committee on Infractions or the Independent College Sports Adjudication Panel can impose immediate penalties when schools or individuals do not cooperate (including loss of revenue or postseason opportunities).
These bodies can consider lack of cooperation as admission of a violation.
Many athletic department contracts already have language that requires coaches and staffers to follow the NCAA’s rules.
The Justice Department has seized on that expectation, charging three coaches (and four others) with “honest services fraud,” by which the coaches allegedly wronged their universities with the help of businessmen. The feds have also charged those coaches as “agents of federally funded organizations,” elevating alleged bribery that might just break NCAA rules into a federal crime.
By making it a condition of employment that athletic department staff agree to “share all knowledge and documents” the NCAA asks for, the organization is trying to establish its own version of subpoena power, the lack of which has made for botched investigations and embarrassing situations before.
The NCAA now explicitly allows the use of “outside facts” to settle infractions cases. It’s easy to see how that rule could be abused.
The NCAA says:
People charged with investigating and resolving NCAA cases can accept information established by another administrative body, including a court of law, government agency, accrediting body or a commission authorized by a school. This will save time and resources previously used to confirm information already adjudicated by another group.
NCAA investigators, who do not exactly have the resources to personally investigate lots of entire universities all across the country at the same time, have done this before. The NCAA drew on publicly commissioned information from former FBI director Louis Freeh when it punished Penn State after the Jerry Sandusky scandal, for example.
To recap:
- The NCAA now mandates an already-common practice: that every athletic department contract includes a “responsibility to cooperate” with NCAA investigation.
- Also, the NCAA can now accept findings by “a commission authorized by a school” when deciding whether someone is guilty of an NCAA violation.
The NCAA is schools, and a system like this could create all sorts of messes. It could add a new layer to an investigations process that’s already a total mess: schools and the NCAA arguing for ages over which outside sources are credible, and different institutions with their own interests trying to inject their own “findings” into the infractions process. It might raise questions over which school-authorized commissions are acceptable and which aren’t. But maybe the NCAA would use great, levelheaded judgment and avoid pitfalls.
The NCAA’s hope seems to be that it streamlines the process. It also now says schools and NCAA investigators can work together when they agree on the facts of a case, to “minimize drawn-out adversarial situations.”
So, one reality of NCAA rules is changing. Another isn’t.
The federal government already made clear that it thinks breaking NCAA rules can mean breaking the law, and it’s chosen to prosecute people it thinks broke both.
With these changes, the NCAA is leaning into that new reality. It wants people who violate the rulebook to have as much legal exposure as possible, whether in civil or criminal court.
But one thing hasn’t changed and might never: The NCAA’s north star, the only thing it really cares about, is that money stays in schools’ hands and out of athletes’.