A Textbook Case Of Boooorrrrriiiiinnnnggg!
By Brian Miller
So the Alabama Crimson Tide are now on a 3 year probation. They have had a repeat violation of NCAA rules violations in the last 5 years which opens up the prior infractions. So this latest violation spans 16 different sports and now, 21 games won by the Tide since 2005. 2 seasons under Mike Shula and 2007 under Nick Saban. This is so boring that had it not been for the fact that the name Nick Saban is mentioned, no one in Miami would really care.
So what was this latest big time infraction that has everyone from baseball to swimming getting popped? Textbooks. Yes, I said textbooks. When an athlete receives a scholarship the textbook portion is covered under that umbrella. To a degree. While the players can order extra books, they can’t go wild with it and they can’t hand them out to other “non-scholarshipped” students.
That is what is going on here. 201 athletes obtained extra books from the bookstore and apparently shared their cache’ with other students. It is not believed that any of those 201 athletes sold those books to other students…which would at least make the story a tad bit more interesting sans the Saban angle.
So the team goes on a 3 year probation…something Saban should be used to and the 15 other programs will be on probation as well until the year 2012. For Saban he will lose and unspecified number of games while former HC Mike Shula, will lose the remainder. The NCAA will look to see what games the players participated in and won and those games will be taken away. What does it affect? Nothing. No reversal of a National Championship. Because they didn’t win one and nothing more than a large fine for the school.
All of the players currently enrolled and recruited will not lose anything in the way of their scholarships because Alabama isn’t going to lose any. This is a simple case of enforcing an NCAA regulation that was broken. The players committing the infractions have been told to pay restitution for the textbooks.
Speaking of Saban, another former NFL idiot, Ryan Leaf is back in the news after being indicted on seven counts of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud and one count of delivery of a simulated controlled substance.
He is also charged with burglary of a habitation. Leaf the outspoken former number 1 pick by the San Diego Chargers did not last long in the NFL and his volatile temper earned him no respect from the SD fans. Leaf was hired as the QB coach for West Texas A&M in Canyon, Texas proving once again that while people go to college to get smarter, colleges are not the smartest institutions in the world.