Bowlsby pokes the NCAA, and Hawaii will pay for it

Bob Bowlsby
Commissioner
Big 12 Conference
400 East John Carpenter
Freeway
Irving, TX 75062

DEAR BOB,

Loved your insightful-as-usual annual state-of-the-Big 12 address at Monday’s media day in Dallas — right up until the point where you reached into your golf bag, took out the Big Bertha driver and started whacking the NCAA enforcement gumshoes about the head with it.

Couldn’t you have at least used a lob wedge? Or gone for the ankles?

Sure, we all have our issues with the NCAA — and don’t get Dave Shoji started on seeding, etc. — but with such a wide array of possible targets, why wake up and rile the sonorous enforcement branch? Especially now.

I mean, folks in Hawaii are already sweating the expected letter of allegations from an NCAA investigation of the men’s basketball program. After more than three months of investigation, a couple of trips out here from Indianapolis and enough documents to stock the Obama Library, you pick this moment to tee off on the NCAA by saying "enforcement is broken."

Instead of just leaving it at that, you added, "The infractions committee hasn’t had a hearing in almost a year and, I think, it is not an understatement to say cheating pays presently. If you seek to conspire to certainly bend the rules, you can do it successfully and probably not get caught in most occasions."

THEN THERE WAS this shot to the gut: "They (NCAA enforcement) are in a battle with a BB gun in their hand and they’re fighting howitzers."

But the one that really had to sting back at NCAA headquarters was the suggestion that the federal government should step in and run enforcement. Ouch.

So, basically, you’ve said they are lazy slow-pokes who are so in over their head and inept that even the feds could do a better job. Might as well have called them "Barney Fife."

Tell us, Bob, when you were a kid growing up in Waterloo, Iowa, did you like to stir up colonies of red ants and throw rocks at the hornets’ nests?

We know that the NCAA Board of Directors meets Aug. 7 to approve an autonomy plan being force-fed them by the Big 12 and your brethren, the Power Five.

In less than a year you folks will be well on the way to having everything you want, including your own division within the NCAA or own association outside it, and the lion’s (and tiger’s and elephant’s) share of all that new football playoff moolah. You’ll have your own rules on how to spend it and pretty much your own rules on everything else, including enforcement policies. And you’ll have it all before the Oklahoma State case comes up.

A little compassion for Hawaii’s plight right now would have been nice. Especially if you recall Jerry Tarkanian’s classic line.

"The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky," Tarkanian once said, "it’s going to give Cleveland State two more years’ probation."

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Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.