Colleges coming clean on athletic infractions

More athletic programs are policing themselves, rather than wait for the NCAA.
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- After a federal investigation revealed that some Michigan basketball players had received thousands of dollars from a booster in the 1990s, the university knew what it had to do.
Aware that the NCAA would eventually sanction the university for major infractions, Michigan officials doled out their own punishment.
Michigan banned its basketball team from the postseason, placed it on two years' probation and forfeited more than 100 games.
In a few months, the NCAA will have its say.
There's been a change in the last decade in the way NCAA rules infractions cases are handled. Instead of waiting for the NCAA to snoop around for misdeeds, college athletic programs are now more apt to police themselves.
"Why wait for somebody to impose it on you? This is a voluntary organization," said Judy Van Horn, associated athletic director for compliance at Michigan.
Full-time compliance officers, such as Van Horn, were virtually nonexistent in college athletics before 1990.
Increased care
These days it is rare to find a Division I school that doesn't have at least one staff member whose main job is making sure everybody else in the program understands and obeys NCAA rules and regulations.
The result is cases such as the one involving Michigan, where a university will take it upon itself to investigate allegations, report its finding to the NCAA, and even impose sanctions.
In recent years, high-profile infractions cases involving men and women's basketball at Minnesota and football programs at Alabama and Kentucky have taken a similar course.
In 1987, Southern Methodist University's football program received the "death penalty" for rampant cheating. Never before -- or since -- has the NCAA come down that hard.
"Suddenly you've got extremely severe penalties that can be imposed and it sort of was necessary for a school to make sure it didn't get in that particular situation," said David Swank, a former member of the NCAA Infractions Committee who is now a law professor at Oklahoma.
Not only did SMU break the rules, but university officials were defiant and evasive when the NCAA came calling. Others took notice that SMU's lack of cooperation did not serve them well, Swank said.
"If a school would take the idea of, 'Well, we'll stonewall it,' that really didn't help them very much when they got in an infractions case," he said.
Cooperation
Earlier this year, Alabama's football program was sanctioned by the NCAA for major violations involving boosters paying for prized recruits.
The NCAA has said the death penalty was considered for Alabama, which fell into the repeat-offender category for football and basketball infractions during the 1990s.
But members of the infractions committee said Alabama's cooperation during the latest investigation kept the university from being cited for lack of institutional control, which could have led to the death penalty.
The phrase "lack of institutional control" became part of the lexicon of college athletics in the late 1980s after the NCAA formed the President's Commission, which was created to get presidents more involved with -- and take more responsibility for -- their athletic programs.
"In the '80s, there was not nearly as much cooperation in the investigations process," said attorney Mike Glazier, who has represented numerous universities in NCAA infractions cases, including Michigan.
Commission
In 1990, the Knight Commission on college athletics was formed to address runaway athletic programs overseen by powerful coaches and athletic directors. The independent panel made recommendations that further emphasized the president's role in running a clean athletic program.
SMU's demise, the creation of the President's Commission and the findings of the Knight Commission gave birth to the position of compliance officer at universities all over the country.
The effects go beyond major infractions cases.
Athletic programs now report minor infractions regularly, often with a coach bringing the violation to the attention of the compliance officer.
"That's really the way it should be. [The coaches] should feel comfortable knowing that if they commit a violation, they're human beings, they make mistakes," Alabama compliance officer Chris King said.
The number of minor or secondary violations self-reported by NCAA members has increased dramatically since 1987, when secondary violations were separated from major ones, said Chris Strobel, NCAA director of enforcement for secondary infractions.
There were about 100 self-reported secondary violations in 1987, Strobel said. The total has increased every year since. Strobel estimates the final total for 2001 will surpass 2,100 for the first time.
"More and more institutions are becoming aware of the requirement to self-report," Strobel said. "More and more are improving their monitoring procedure so they are detecting secondary violations and self-reporting those to the NCAA."
Infractions
A study by The Associated Press of records from Southeastern Conference schools on self-reported NCAA violations by the football programs from 1999 to 2002 shows dozens of violations, most involving recruiting. These included inappropriate contact with prospective student-athletes.
"The enforcement staff and the committee on infractions are more concerned about institutions that don't report any violations, more so than those who self-report several," Strobel said.
Self-reporting indicates an institution has procedures in place to monitor its programs, he said.
What draws a red flag from the NCAA is the same violation being repeated at a university.
"Multiple secondary violations could be taken together and considered a major violation. But generally, there's going to be some connection to those secondary violations," he said.