Friday, October 31, 1997
Playing it $afe
FEATURE: Athletic department ensures compliance with benefits
rules through education and control
By Vytas Mazeika
Daily Bruin Staff
No college athletic program wants to find itself under
probation.
Therefore, most colleges have two systems designed to keep the
athletes and the school from being investigated by the NCAA.
The first program aims at teaching all student-athletes about
the NCAA rules – especially those regarding extra benefits. Extra
benefits violations fall into categories that range from free
merchandise to free meals from restaurant owners to money from
boosters. With college athletes technically considered amateurs,
all of these "gifts" are considered a violation of their
status.
The second program is basically a system of checks and balances
run by the college with the purpose of discovering NCAA violations
that come from within. There is a director of compliance whose job
is to oversee financial aid, eligibility and rules interpretation
for the institution.
Since the rules from the NCAA exist in a vast 500-page book, it
is not easy to keep track of all the rules. Therefore the education
process is of utmost importance if a college is to make sure a
student-athlete abides by the NCAA rules.
Rich Herzog, UCLA’s director of compliance, has rule meetings
with all of the teams at the beginning of each year. If an athlete
red-shirts his freshman year, then he will most likely be able to
recite "The Terrible Ten" by the time he leaves UCLA. "The Terrible
Ten" is an outline designed to showcase several NCAA rules to
UCLA’s athletes – extra benefits, gambling, agents, cheating,
parking-permit abuse, unauthorized telephone use, unauthorized use
of athletic-department equipment, ethical conduct, and
employment.
UCLA has even expanded its education process to include coaches.
Like athletes, the coaches receive memos about common ways in which
NCAA rules can be broken and then they are given a quiz to
ascertain their understanding of the extra-benefits rule. Common
anecdotes address the recent exchange of athletic equipment for
credit by USC football players and the time in which Arnold Palmer
took out a Stanford golfer by the name of Tiger Woods to
dinner.
It has become very hard for athletes to identify the fine line
between what is right and what is wrong according to the NCAA.
"Unfortunately, athletes sometimes jump to the wrong
conclusion," Herzog said. "In the case, for example, of the
sandwiches that student athletes had in Westwood. They had a
relationship with the manager of that restaurant and thought that
they could (take the food) because of their relationship with that
manager – they had played pick-up basketball with him. So they
thought of (the food) as something that wasn’t an extra benefit.
The difficult thing about NCAA rules is that in most cases, the
student athletes are probably held to a stricter standard than a
regular student when it comes to extra benefits."
The NCAA is strict in order to allow an almost even playing
field for all schools. With the even playing field also comes
programs that are alike.
The director of compliance of another prominent West Coast
school – he preferred to have neither his name nor his school named
in this story — runs an educational program much like the one at
UCLA. Their athletes fill out paperwork, just like the Bruin
athletes, and extra attention is paid to the basketball and
football programs.
Earlier this week a Long Beach newspaper quoted former UCLA
basketball coach Jim Harrick saying that coaches should not be held
accountable for the mistakes athletes make. But the compliance
director points out that not only are the athletes responsible for
learning the rules, but the coaches are accountable for their
athletes.
"In many instances, the coaches themselves take the
responsibility of educating their student-athletes," the official
said. "Especially once a coach and a program have been burned by
something – like we’ve had a few agent problems in the past — and
you go through that as a coach, you kind of take it upon yourself
in the future to deal with that sort of thing."
Even with all of these precautions by the institution, NCAA
violations occur. So the college is forced to keep a system of
checks and balances in charge of making sure that no serious
violations taint the school’s reputation.
This system is usually run by the director of compliance and the
athletic department. In the other prominent West Coast school, all
of the athletic-department employees (which amount to around 240 in
total) are told to keep an eye open. If a coach of another sport
notices that something is wrong, he is encouraged to come forward.
In fact, there is even a clause in their contract requiring them to
report any instances where they find an NCAA violation.
Chuck Smrt, the director of enforcement in the NCAA, said that
there are two types of violations, secondary and major. Smrt also
mentioned that about 95 percent of the secondary violations are
self-reported by the schools, and in the other 5 percent, the
schools usually acknowledge the problem when the NCAA asks the
school for information.
"In self-reported secondary violations, the institution takes
their own corrective and punitive action," Smrt said. "And in those
cases, if an institution has taken (action), then there is no
further action by the committee on infractions."
The existence of incentive for the institution to come forward
with the violation is a big reason as to why schools report any
problems. The NCAA has a four-year statute of limitations in which
most penalties are enforced on future activities.
Therefore institutional responsibility, the length to which a
school goes to prevent or catch as soon as possible NCAA
violations, is of utmost importance. Herzog said that UCLA reports
secondary violations more often than people understand. If one runs
a system that has checks and balances, violations will be
discovered.
There is not an exact definition for secondary or major
violations – this is determined on a case-by-case basis. But
Herzog, the unnamed official and Smrt point out that with
institutional control most situations hazardous to the school’s
probation status are neatly resolved.
"If one secondary infraction goes unchecked, that isn’t
necessarily a problem, given that you have so many minor things
that could happen, you couldn’t be expected to have enough time in
the day to be able to track them all," Herzog said. "More likely it
would be that several secondary violations become a major
(violation) because of lack of institutional control."
To solve secondary violations, all the school sometimes needs to
do is either make the athlete pay restitution and suspend the
athlete for a limited amount of time. Sometimes, if it’s reasonable
to assume that the athlete did not know he was breaking a rule,
restitution may suffice.
In more complex cases, the school may ask the association to
come in and help – like in the Harrick situation. If the situation
is ignored and there seems to be a lack of institutional control,
the NCAA usually steps in to double-check that everything is being
thoroughly investigated.
In the end, though, most everything comes back to the education
process and institutional control.
"(The student-athletes) have been informed clearly about the
(extra-benefits) rule," the unnamed official said. "They have
something in writing about it and that should be sufficient. You’re
dealing with kids in college, so there is going to be violations
regardless of what you do. But there certainly are pro-active
things you can do and we try to cover our bases that way."
Considering the way in which the NCAA can strip athletic
programs of almost everything, most institutions try to cover their
bases that way too.