Pepperdine works through compliance issues discovered two years ago
Money laundering, DUI arrests and sex tapes are scandals. In the NCAA, scandals are the result of a deviance from compliance and eligibility rules. Consequences for breaching the rules are handed down — whether it is for a coach’s private pay-by-play program, a football player signing copious amounts of memorabilia or a golfer washing her car on campus. According to the NCAA website, these guidelines are created in the interest of protecting student-athletes.
From July 3, 2012 to July 2, 2015, the NCAA holds Pepperdine under probation for self-imposed Division I infractions concerning athlete eligibility and the delving out of incorrect amounts of financial aid, including that of need-based financial aid. The NCAA Committee officially handed down the ruling two summers ago.
“We discovered all that ourselves,” Athletic Director Steve Potts said. “We reported it ourselves. Nobody intentionally did anything wrong. Our compliance structure wasn’t as good as it needed to be, and we’ve fixed all that.”
This past summer, Pepperdine met with the committee again to hash over the university’s compliance in a final report.
One issue is still being discussed, according to Potts.
He was not able to specify the specifics of the issue. The audit of the university’s athletics program concluded that the university did not devote sufficient manpower to the compliance effort or to educate those involved in applying NCAA rules.”
Pepperdine Professor of Law and author of March 2011 Boston College Law Review article “NCAA Sanctions: Assigning Blame Where It Belongs” Maureen A. Weston, observed and followed the situation as it unraveled. Weston said it appeared to be an honest administrative oversight.
The NCAA bylaws are close to 500 pages of text that are updated yearly.
Efforts have been made by athletics to solve and eliminate its past shortcomings. Pepperdine rolled out a new “Eligibility Certification Committee to help monitor and establish eligibility,” Potts said.
The board holds representatives from the registrar’s office, the financial aid office, office of admissions and student services, and Dr. Don Shores stands for the faculty.
“We want to make sure every athlete that is competing for us is NCAA eligible,” Potts said. “That’s the most important thing. We’re going to do things right.”
Athletics reported itself and cooperated fully, and the self-imposed penalties hit hard. Every win from the 2007-08 through the 2010-11 seasons was stripped. Men’s tennis and men’s volleyball WCC titles were wiped from the record books.
Baseball, men’s tennis, men’s volleyball and men’s water polo took 25 percent scholarship reductions per year. Women’s soccer scholarships were reduced by .88 percent per year.
When asked about the throbbing scandals running through universities across the country, Potts said that the NCAA is undergoing a “transition.”
“There are a lot of complicated issues that the NCAA as an organization is trying to deal with,” Potts said. “Schools are different, athletic programs are different. The rules apply to everybody whether you play football or not. They’re trying to find the appropriate balance.”
On Aug. 1, 2013, the NCAA revealed an effort to work toward that needed balance. As of this 2013-14 athletics season, one of the changes made entails a four-level violation structure that will assist in differentiating major and secondary violations.
In her article republished in the Fall 2011 issue of the Pepperdine Law Magazine, Weston posed the question: “Do NCAA sanctions adequately punish the actual wrongdoers, or do they disproportionately impact current student-athletes?”
With the recent changes the NCAA has made, Weston said she believes the organization is taking “a step in the right direction.”
“The problem with some of the sanctions is that people are gone,” Weston said. “The people who committed the violations are gone. The players are gone, the coaches are gone, and the institution and the new players are left. That seems unfair. The idea is to craft these sanctions fitting the people who made the violations and that’s not always easy.”
Only about a month has passed since the freshly implemented structural changes. Time will reveal if the NCAA will ever be able to protect and respect its athletes simultaneously.
“Hopefully the sanctions are trying to address the misconduct or the violation and not be overly proportionate,” Weston said.
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As published in the Sept. 12 issue of the Pepperdine Graphic.
