The NCAA is left with egg on its face

Sporting News, The, August 30, 1993 by Ivan Maisel

University of Washington coach Don James, shocked by the severity of the penalty given his program last Sunday by the Pacific-10 Conference, rendered his disgust by retiring.

In the last act of his coaching career, James showed he knows how to win. Rather than let the Pac-10 besmirch his program, he trumped the league by painting it as the villain. James didn't throw that up as a smokescreen. The Pac-10 implicated no one on his staff or within the athletic department.

Which was precisely the coach's point.

"I have decided I can no longer coach in a conference that treats its members, its coaches and its players so unfairly," James said in a two-page statement read at a news conference by Athletic Director Barbara Hedges.

The retirement capped an already stunning day at the campus. Earlier, the conference presidents and chancellors voted unanimously to ban the Huskies from postseason play and to cut 10 scholarships from each of the next two academic years.

The conference also will severely limit Washington's on-campus visits by recruits over the next two seasons. In addition, senior tailback Beno Bryant, senior wide receiver Joe Krahk and senior defensive lineman D'Marco Farr all lost their eligibility. Hedges says she will ask the NCAA, which can levy more severe penalties against Washington but cannot lessen those already issued, to reinstate these players.

And while Washington may play on television this season, the university will not receive the participant's share (27.5 percent) of the rights fees.

Assistant Pac-10 commissioner Jim Muldoon estimates that will cost the Huskies $1 million. To prove the other schools won't benefit from their vote, the money will be put into a fund for an as-yet-undetermined purpose.

The Pac-10 announced it had found 15 violations in six areas, five of which involved boosters. Most prominent was former quarterback Billy Joe Hobert and a $50,000 loan.

"We behave that the penalties leveled are too harsh and unwarranted, based upon this case," Hedges says.

No one behaves that more strongly than James, 60, who rescued the Huskies from mediocrity when he arrived in 1975. In 18 seasons, James led Washington to six conference championships and a share of the 1991 national title. He ranked eighth among active NCAA Division I-A coaches in victories and 10th in winning percentage (.691, 176-78-3).

There were rumors of his retirement in coaching circles the past couple of years. However, no one believed it would come in this fashion. Grant Teaff, the incoming executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, expressed disbelief at the news.

"He's always been a person that wanted to run his program in a proper way," says Teaff, athletic director and former coach at Baylor. "I hate to lose a man of his ability and strength from college football."

Hedges says she tried to "change Don's mind not only (Saturday) night, but this morning and later on this afternoon. But he said to me, |Barbara, I am at peace with myself. I don't have the energy to fight this. And my decision stands.

The Pac-10 has prided itself on being tougher with its members than the NCAA. In 1980, fury half of the league had been banned from the Rose Bowl. The league also has been, along with the Big Ten Conference, the most gung-ho of the Division I-A conferences within the NCAA reform movement.

The message sent by this penalty is unmistakable. But James obscured the message with his retirement. As hard as it can be to find principled people in college athletics, they ran into each other head-on last Sunday.

The NCAA Committee on Infractions -- which, ironically, includes a member of the Washington faculty -- came out looking bad. Earlier in the week, in a case involving payments by coaches and boosters to a student-athlete, the NCAA gave Auburn University a much lighter penalty.

Auburn will be on probation for two years, out of bowls for two seasons and off television for one. In addition, the NCAA took away one initial scholarship in each of the next three years and mandated that Auburn must remain two below the total number of football grants-in-aid available.

The Tigers got of easy. Look at the language of reprimand in the report of the NCAA Committee on Infractions on the Eric Ramsey affair.

The violations, the report says, occurred when, in the minds of members of the university's athletic department staff and representatives of its athletic interests, the athletic program becomes more important than the university."

In addition, according to the report, athletic director/coach Pat Dye and members of his staff had adopted a Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy long before the Pentagon.

"Even though information was provided to a coach concerning a possible violation of NCAA rules," the report says, "unless there was absolute and concrete evidence of a violation, there was no need to report such a violation."

All of this led up to the NCAA deciding Auburn had been guilty of "a lack of institutional control." That is the NCAA's biggest stick, reserved for the hardest heads it needs to crack.