Athletic department's responses too reactionary

Hath-Time By Nathan Hathaway

The Fresno State athletic department absorbed another hit Wednesday. A well-deserved one.

The NCAA handed down a number of penalties for an exhaustive list of NCAA violations Fresno State committed over the last eight years.

An athletic program with the honesty and forthrightness of a used car salesman deserves to be punished.

But wait, Fresno State self-reported many of its infractions. That’s being forthright. That’s honest, right? Well, on the surface it looks that way. But looks can be deceiving.

It’s really easy to admit you’ve been a bad boy once you’ve been caught red-handed.

Case in point, from the NCAA’s public infractions report released Wednesday: March 21, 2000— “The institution learned that a local newspaper (The Fresno Bee) would be publishing an article detailing the provision of free meals at a local restaurant in Fresno to men’s basketball student-athletes. On that day, the institution issued a press release announcing it would be investigating possible violations of NCAA legislation regarding student-athletes receiving free meals at local restaurants.”

Curious how they would begin an investigation after they found out the story would be running in the paper.

The Fresno State athletic department seems to think it’s OK to violate NCAA rules—until it’s about to be exposed. Then it’s a travesty. It came as a shock to everyone, they’d say. It was all a big surprise.

The incidents with athletes receiving free meals—which went on for seven years, according to the NCAA’s report—are just the tip of the iceberg.

Next came allegations of an athlete accepting money and travel expenses from an agent. Then the allegations of academic fraud.

And it’s hard to believe that no one knew about the violations when the NCAA’s report stated that former coach Jerry Tarkanian knew of, and failed to report, “possible amateurism violations involving receipt of benefits from an agent’s representative by a student-athlete.”

How is it that a coach can know of one violation and not know about the myriad others that his team is engaging in? Easy. Hire Jerry Tarkanian. It’s no coincidence that all these violations happened during the tenure of perhaps one of the most problematic coaches in NCAA history. Problems have followed Tarkanian like a lost puppy follows a kid with a Milk Bone.

Or maybe it’s like the NCAA said—Fresno State “demonstrated a lack of appropriate institutional control.”

In finding a lack of institutional control, the infractions committee cited the university’s “failure to correctly apply financial aid legislation, failure to detect the receipt of excessive complimentary admissions by family and friends of men’s basketball student-athletes and failure to report perceived violations of NCAA rules on numerous occasions.”

It’s sort of a slap in the face that, on top of being told you’re on probation and you have to forfeit wins from three seasons, the infractions committee says you can’t even control your own team.

While it is unfair that coach Ray Lopes, who had nothing to do with the violations named in the NCAA’s report, has to deal with the repercussions of his predecessors’ actions, the Fresno State athletic department has gotten off easy. All the lying and cheating should have netted the department a much stiffer penalty.

— This columnist can be reached at ndhathaway@cvip.net