Death Penalty

http://msn.foxsports.com/collegefootball/story/have-we-seen-the-end-of-ncaa-death-penalty-072911

 

In the article Could death penalty give NCAA new life by A.J. Perez on foxsports.com we as a reader are introduced to the debate of whether the death penalty will be used by the NCAA again and if it will help to stop the increased cheating taking place among NCAA teams.

 

The NCAA death penalty is a lot like the real death penalty, the guilty party has committed crimes/ gone against the rules set by the NCAA at an extreme level which means that death should be placed upon them in order to stop them and scare others into correcting their mistakes and stop their cheating in fear of the harm that death among them for a certain amount of years could cause.

 

The NCAA has only ever used the death penalty once and its most famous time was when they used it against the Southern Methodist University football team over two decades ago. To this day, SMU is still suffering from the death penalty.

 

According to SMU coach June Jones the NCAA’s means for scaring schools in the right direction may be something of the past. The NCAA will probably never use the death penalty again. Illinois State associate professor Chad McEvoy stated, “The chances of seeing the death penalty again are small, but I would hate to think that coaches and administrators are sitting in their offices and doing a cost-benefit analysis. If you are a big-time college football or basketball coach who is bending the rules, you’d want to know the negative outcomes if your violations are discovered. The data suggests that repercussions are relatively minor compared to the advantage you might gain from cheating.” McEvoy is basically saying that the penalties received by the NCAA for penalties are not ideal because obviously they harm a program in some way, but they are nothing like the death penalty and honestly the gain that the program gets from cheating is greater than the loss they get from being penalized, therefore cheating is a better option for the programs these days. The biggest penalization a coach can receive for cheating is loosing their job, as observed recently through the job loss of Ohio State University coach Jim Tressel.

 

It is believed by the public that the NCAA only targets the smaller schools to find violations in, but over the past few years there have been numerous examples of how this is not true. Big schools who are winning national championships such as Miami, Auburn, and Alabama, had all had major infractions yet, none have seen the death penalty nor seem to be afraid of it since their cheating and “off the field, booster money and ticket sales tend to rebound, as well” have yet to stop.

 

Teams and programs cheating are becoming expected among the general public. Will the NCAA let this behavior slide or take a more serious action such as the death penalty because nothing else seems to be working?

 

While the death penalty was a major problem for SMU, according to coach Jones it was not the sole death to their program. The School and its supporters did not want the football program to start up again- most likely they did not want another major scandal on their hands. According to Josephine Potuto, a law professor at the University of Nebraska and former member of the NCAA division 1 Committee on infractions, said the reason no other programs have been given the death penalty because they have not had as major infractions as SMU had.

 

Since the NCAA is an independent organization and not a government authority schools may refuse to share information, which is exactly what Kentucky, had originally done. They essentially stonewalled the NCAA. The NCAA felt that Kentucky was guilty and eventually was surprised when their new leader came in and decided to admit to the infractions the NCAA found them guilty of and even provided a list of more infractions they were guilty of and they were even worse than the ones the NCAA had found.

 

Virginia Tech football coach Frank Beamer stated, “if you break the rules-no matter the level- you should serve the consequences.” The NCAA takes a lot of time to complete investigations so although they have the right intentions of making programs pay for their dishonesty it often is too late and penalizes the people who were not a part of it. A prime example is Reggie Bush an NFL player who played at USC. When at USC, Bush went against NCAA rules but by the time the NCAA had finished their investigation Bush was already in the NFL and the new USC players had to pay for his dishonesty.

 

The NCAA is not going after more schools now a days than they had back in the day, it just appears that way because social media allows for the information to circulate further, sooner, and at a higher rate.

 

The NCAA using the death penalty again could perhaps give the NCAA a new life by scaring programs to stop cheating and to follow the rules but most schools are not afraid of the death penalty, because it has yet to be used since the SMU scandal over two decades ago.