Ah, yes, the Groundhog Day of collegiate athletics … NCAA penalties.
In all, eight players were involved with this trainer, two for the academic misconduct and six for the extra benefits. The trainer was given a two year show cause penalty, meaning he can’t be hired in the same capacity for quite some time.
So the NCAA sat down and did what it too often does in these cases, and throws out their overused and uniquely NCAA cosmopolitan punishment of retroactive win-taking.
Which does absolutely nothing to address the actual issue. Now, you can argue the show cause for the trainer does get to the heart of the issue, but other than some cosmetically ugly optics from a “records” standpoint, taking wins is just an entirely useless punishment.
Additionally, the Irish were placed on one-year probation.
The practice of retroactively scrubbing wins from the record books affects little more than media concerned with records, which obviously has jack squat to do with actually making sure this doesn’t happen again.
It also insults our intelligence.
I can’t imagine a scenario where, in 10-15 years, a few former Notre Dame players from the 2012 and 2013 teams where a select amount of wins will be vacated are sitting around a bar talking about, “remember that game against Michigan State!?” and saying, “wait, that never happened. We can’t talk about it.”
I’ll go ahead and let you be the one to bump into a former ND lineman during those years and remind him that those games didn’t go on.
Nor does scrubbing wins really have any effect on how the world will view Brian Kelly, whom, up until this year for the most part, was viewed as a pretty brilliant coach with some off-field issues (obviously, we didn’t know about this one).
But this isn’t really about Notre Dame, or Michigan basketball, or any other institution that is charged with “forgetting” success happened. What’s really the point?
Rewriting history for one, is just utterly dangerous. Imagine if we did this with actual history.
“Well, they cheated in the Revolutionary War, so we’re going to need to wipe a few of those battles out of the books.”
The world doesn’t work like that, and in 70 years when those of us who actually witnessed ND’s magical 2012 run are deep into the back nine of our lives, if alive at all, there will be people that genuinely don’t know that actual season happened.
That’s horrific. Are they going to make all the folks who bought ND merch from those years that have any identification of success specific to those years throw it in a bonfire, too? Maybe toss The Catcher in the Rye on top so it burns quicker?
What the NCAA should stop this idiotic form of cosmetic punishment and start fining individual coaches and programs big bucks when these things happen. What do you think ND cares about, someone taking a fake eraser to the history books or having to shell out a few mil for allowing this to go on, and a coach a few mil for not having his house in order and knowing it was going on?
ND will end up appealing the vacated wins, mostly because everything gets appealed these days just for the heck of it. Gotta keep those courts churning.
But until the NCAA really starts addressing punishments in a real, and much less fantasy-island and dangerous way, this stuff is just going to keep happening.
Things don’t change (at ND or anywhere) until they’re forced to change, and a surefire way to make sure you get your point across is attacking someone’s pocketbook.
This is true in all walks of life. If you want someone to change their attitude, start dipping into their wallet and changing what goes in and out of it and you’ll see some movement quick, fast, and in a hurry.
Until then, cosmopolitan penalties about rewriting history cause more damage than they do good, because 2012 and 2013 happened, and one of them was pretty magical. As a college football fan today, I’m lucky enough to have witnessed it in real time.
And no one can tell me it didn’t happen. But one day, that won’t be the case, and that’s disingenuous at best, and intellectually dangerous at worst.
