Big trouble looming for NCAA’s favorite sons

Even in its vast, well-appointed, 200,000-square-foot headquarters and Hall of Champions in Indianapolis, there might not be enough rugs for the NCAA to sweep this lengthening basketball scandal under.

The latest revelations, amid an on-going FBI probe, from documents that purport to detail payments made to some leading college basketball stars list more than 20 marquee schools, according to a Yahoo.com report Friday.

They include blue bloods of the sport — Duke, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan State, North Carolina and North Carolina State — among others.

FBI officials, beginning last October, laid out allegations that blue chip high school basketball players sold their services for thousands of dollars to shoe companies aligned with certain schools through intermediaries including agents and club team coaches.

Also at issue, apart from whatever criminal charges the FBI investigation produces, is whether the players received financial benefits and other inducements in violation of the NCAA rules that govern colleges.

Heretofore, without the FBI getting involved, scofflaw schools have had just the NCAA to worry about. And if they were prominent enough institutions or revered programs, maybe they didn’t need to sweat even that all that much.

As the late basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian was fond of saying, “The NCAA was so mad at Kentucky they gave Cleveland State two more years of probation.” Alternately, adjusting the names for a West Coast audience, Tarkanian also liked to say, the NCAA was “so upset at UCLA, they’ll put (Cal State) Northridge on two years probation.”

That perception has been reinforced here in recent years by the disparate penalties imposed on the University of Hawaii and North Carolina in separate cases.

UH vacated victories, lost scholarships and paid penalties for violations of impermissible benefits including using a booster’s car, receiving an iPad and allowing an operations director to take on coaching duties.

Meanwhile North Carolina escaped significant sanctions for one of the largest academic scandals in college athletic history. Over the course of almost two decades dozens of athletes, many in the financially lucrative sports of men’s basketball or football, maintained eligibility through classes requiring no attendance and only one paper.

Nor is UH alone among non-Power 5 programs shaking their heads at the disparity in past penalties.

Regarding the current investigation, NCAA President Mark Emmert said in a statement Friday, “These allegations, if true, point to systematic failures that must be fixed and fixed now if we want college sports in America.”

Failures, you could say, either perpetrated right under the noses of NCAA gumshoes or largely left unpunished by the NCAA’s high court, its Committee on Infractions.

Allegations at several schools have been deemed serious enough that a handful of mostly assistant coaches have lost their jobs. At Louisville, however, Hall of Fame head coach Rick Pitino, who first appeared in NCAA infractions findings at UH in the 1970s, lost his job, as did his boss, athletic director Tom Jurich.

Stay tuned for more chilling reminders that the NCAA’s broom can’t save some of their brethren.

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