NCAA’s Punishment Doesn’t Fit Fullerton’s Crime

Finally. It’s over.

Nearly six years after alleged violations involving the Cal State Fullerton men’s basketball program occurred, the NCAA announced the punishment.

You know how punishment, to be effective, should be immediate? How when you’re training that new puppy, the slap across the snout with the newspaper is supposed to happen as soon as the puppy goofs?

Immediate in NCAA time apparently is six years.

The punishment?

Four years of probation. No recruiting of community college athletes for three years. Reduced numbers of recruiting visits for the present coaches. Coach Bob Hawking can’t do any off-campus recruiting until Nov. 30. Loss of two scholarships for the next two years.

At least the university didn’t get banned from NCAA tournament play, a ban that would also have kept the Titans out of the Big West tournament.

But this is severe. The inability to recruit community college players at a state university in California, where the community college system is an integral part of the educational process, will be harmful to Cal State Fullerton’s basketball program, a program that is rarely able to seriously recruit the cream of the state’s high school crop.

In the last month or so two other schools have faced NCAA sanctions. St. Joseph’s, a Division II school in Indiana, was penalized with the loss of five full scholarships because a previous basketball coach made payments of about $1,600 to a player. The coach is gone. So is the athletic director. Who’s being punished? A bunch of players and coaches who had nothing to do with the problem.

And the Indiana football program could lose a top recruit because the coaches attended the funeral of the player’s father who had died of a heart attack four days after the IU coaches had visited in January.

The player, who later signed with Indiana, lost his eligibility there. So in the course of a week, this player lost his father and then his chance to attend the college he wanted because his potential college coaches went to the funeral, which meant they broke a rule about the number of visits to a recruit in a week. Is it any wonder the NCAA loses every time it is taken to court? Its rules and punishments seem so capricious.

A small Division II school loses five of its 13 scholarships. A high school kid is hit with an emotional hammer.

Yet look at what happened at Louisville. The father of a player, Nate Johnson, who is from New Jersey, allegedly stayed at a Louisville hotel for several months during basketball season. It was discovered that the hotel bill was paid for with the credit card of an assistant basketball coach. This seems to be a severe violation. But when the Cardinals appealed their ban from the NCAA tournament this year, the appeal was successful.

Fullerton will never have that kind of influence. Lawyers hired by Louisville to plead its case to the NCAA had once worked for the NCAA.

The violations that Fullerton was found to have committed under Coach Brad Holland, now at San Diego, and Athletic Director Bill Shumard, now at Long Beach State, were characterized as “major” by David Swank, chairman of the NCAA investigation committee and a professor of law at Oklahoma.

What were some of these major violations?

That Hawking, then an assistant under Holland, paid a charge of $11.50 to use overnight mail to get a recruit’s community college transcript sent to a second community college so the athlete could receive his associate’s degree.

That two assistant coaches used a truck to drive two recruits from an apartment they were staying at to classes at their community college. Imagine. Now at some big, famous schools you will see every manner of luxury cars or four-wheel drives all belonging to basketball and football players. At Fullerton, a truck ride to class is big trouble.

That an assistant coach used his car to take recruits to places “including, but not limited to, fast-food restaurants, night clubs, barbershops, grocery stores and Laguna Beach.” Yep, pretty major, going to the drive-thru at Carl’s, picking up cereal at the grocery, riding down to the beach.

That “two student-athletes asked a manager if he could transport them to a community college so that they could attend class.” Now, at some schools, it’s hard to get athletes to attend class at all. These two recruits wanted to go to class and asked for a ride.

And that a recruit went to some study hall sessions conducted by Fullerton for their basketball players. An illegal trip to study hall. There’s a threat to the integrity of college athletics.

Certainly the Fullerton athletic administration in 1993 broke some rules. Once the NCAA comes calling, it’s awfully hard for any college large or small to find no rules broken. There are just so many of them.

Since Cal State Fullerton hasn’t been to the NCAA tournament since the 1977-78 season, whatever rules that got broken haven’t made much of a difference.

Now the punishment has been issued. Shumard, who was reprimanded in the NCAA report for his lack of control over the program, is safely at Long Beach, a school that Fullerton must compete against. Holland is safely at San Diego, unpunished, untouched.

“Penalties are never fair,” Easterbrook said. “The process should not take this long.”

Last October the school was told by the NCAA that the end would come in six to eight weeks. Instead it took almost eight more months. That was his fault, Swank said. His “plate was just too full,” he said.

Yet when Louisville appealed, the penalty was reversed pretty rapidly, in plenty of time to get the Cardinals into the NCAA tournament. Maybe that’s why there was no time to get that Fullerton report finished.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: [email protected]