Welcome to the Friday Feedback, which is this close to self-reporting my work schedule to — what’s that? We’re not unionized? Never mind then …
The rather ridiculous NCAA received a self-report from WVU earlier this month when, after a standard review, the WVU compliance department discovered the football team had mistakenly, as opposed to brazenly or stupidly, violated NCAA bylaw 17.1.6.5.
That little rule covers athletically related activities in the offseason and, specifically, states student-athletes must have two calendar days off per week. WVU gave its players 58 1/2 consecutive hours off twice in February — ending a workout at 6:30 a.m. on a Friday and beginning a workout at 4 p.m. Sunday. Surely you know 58 1/2 hours is greater than the sum of two days, but WVU’s only “calendar” day off was Saturday.
So WVU compliance caught it after it happened, rather than before it happened, and then told the NCAA. WVU punished itself by taking four calendar days off in two subsequent weeks before the start of spring practice, which observes the 2-for-1 rule often applied to secondary violations like this, or spider pads. You remember those.
And WVU doesn’t expect any more trouble from this little incident … no matter the football program is still on probation through July 7, 2013. Maybe it’s just me, but I think that has to be a sigh of relief over there. The probation process is just a pain in the neck in which you have to record and report everything in detail, and one would think part of that would have you looking at every athletically related schedule. And while WVU did have the proper system in place to catch the mistake, it did not, in would seem, have one in place to prevent it.
I thought that would matter.
Listen, this is devil’s advocate stuff. I think it’s an important rule, but also as minor a transgression as you can commit and I can’t believe a school would get in trouble for, essentially, giving players more time off than the rules suggested. I’d say a rule was misinterpreted more than it was broken, or even bent. Understand WVU would have ended at 11:59 p.m. Friday and been back at 12:00 a.m. Monday, allowed for 48 hours, 1 minute of time off and gotten away with it.
Now, I also just happen to be the guy who has twice made a meal out of secondary violations — and one, in particular, is a part of my book. I don’t think this is that … or those … whatever … but what WVU and two former head coaches were convicted of in July in the summary disposition process was a failure to monitor.
To be honest with you, when I saw the headline yesterday, I figured there would be problems attached to the probation because, well, monitoring things adequately would have prevented this, right?
And I was wrong, which is good for WVU. Again, silly violation because it’s a silly rule, and it looks bad only because it happened and who it happened to. The point here seems to be that WVU has a new coach, and you can’t hold what his predecessors did against him, and that this offense is in no way related to the prior ones, which were basically all related to letting too many people do too many things they weren’t allowed to do. Even the failure to monitor is, I guess, unrelated because it’s a failure to monitor totally different things.
Fortunately, we have the tin foil hats and the really enjoyable theories about how this made it to the media. WVU doesn’t go public with secondary violations. They’re too common and too insignificant. Yet this one popped up in the newspaper, quite prominently, and WVU has had to answer to it. Some people sure are having some fun with it.
Also, I made it all week without using this space to push my book. That ends right here, right now. All I ask is you take a look. Pretty pleased with this.
Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, brace yourself.
JP said:
Keeping in line with the theme of Casazza’s book, this paragraph from today’s article jumped out at me:
Asked if Holgorsen would have a “non-compete” clause in his contract that would prevent the former Texas Tech and Oklahoma State assistant from leaving for another Big 12 job, Luck said he didn’t think that was necessary “and I doubt Dana will go for a non-compete … but there will be a buyout in there.”
It is interesting, because the immediate question would be “Why wouldn’t he sign it?” And it is in other coaching contracts. But in all honesty, Dana wasn’t hired by a Big 12 Conference team. I think it would be hard to apply it. If things got testy, Dana could just point at that if he were asked, “Why not sign it?” And we know how much a buyout is worth, but the guy is building a house here.
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