NCAA’s top cop defends his staff

Associated Press

INDIANAPOLIS

Jonathan Duncan understands that a perfect NCAA enforcement division won’t catch every cheater in college sports. He still believes his team is getting the job done.

Two days after Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby called the NCAA enforcement system overwhelmed and “broken,” the NCAA’s top cop fired back by defending his staff’s work and acknowledging the impossible mission of policing more than 1,200 schools.

Yes, sometimes, teams or schools might get away with breaking the rules for a while, Duncan said, but eventually most are caught.

“We don’t pretend to be able to catch every violation in any given year,” Duncan told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “So the next question is, do we have a handle on it, and the answer is yes, I think we do. The people who violate the rules will be found out and we will report them back to the committee on infractions.”

Duncan took over the enforcement division on an interim basis in March 2013 when the department was embroiled in its own embarrassing scandal. An internal investigation found the NCAA improperly collected evidence against the University of Miami, which led to the ouster of Julie Roe Lach.

Duncan took over a department that was losing experienced investigators and saw morale wane as it came under intense public criticism — criticism that hasn’t diminished and has lately included leaders like Bowlsby, a former athletic director at Iowa and Stanford.

Bowlsby put NCAA enforcement back in the spotlight Monday when he suggested the lack of high-profile cases over the past year are indicative of the problems within the current system.

“Enforcement is broken,” he said. “The infractions committee hasn’t had a hearing in almost a year, and I think it’s not an understatement to say cheating pays presently.”