If case you forgot, Bryant spent some time hanging out with Deion Sanders last spring. That alone is not an NCAA violation—but probably should have been (more on that in a second)—but the NCAA started asking a lot of questions, so naturally Bryant assumed that he was in trouble. He panicked and told the investigators that he hadn't met with Sanders. When asked, Sanders told the truth and said he had. Now Bryant, a junior, is suspended until September of next year, which effectively ends his college career.

That seems a little harsh, doesn't it? Yes, I know lying is bad and examples must be made, but it's not like he was lying to cover up a murder. Or any crime for that matter. He was confused about a set of rules that no one on the planet fully understands and he screwed up. A missed game or two might have sent a better message about the sanctity of amateur athletics, since the end result of this suspension is that Bryant will almost certainly go pro—and probably never finish his degree. Yet, the NCAA acts like they did him a favor by not banning him permanently.

But there is another issue here: Why did he assume that he had violated an NCAA rule? Maybe because meeting with a former NFL player, who is not an alum of your school, to talk about how he can help you prepare for life as a pro athlete doesn't exactly feel like it's on the up and up. Sanders, who is an NFL Network commentator during the season, has built a nice little side business "mentoring" current and future pros on how to survive life in the NFL. That also includes a pre-combine prep school, called "Prime U," that is meant to help players improve their draft standing, but also learn tips on "managing off-the-field lifestyle." Except it's not clear that Deion's advice is really helping anyone.

As a future Hall of Fame cornerback, Sanders probably has some unique insights about the position, but at least four cornerbacks who participated in the camp last spring went undrafted, while only two got picked. One of the actual stars of the camp was Michael Crabtree, who got some spectacularly bad advice from his agent Eugene Parker, who just happened to be the agent of ... Deion Sanders. (Sanders claims that Parker was never present while meeting with Bryant, and that may be true, but that was the main reason for the NCAA's concern about their relationship. Parker has reeled in other clients associated with Prime U—like Ohio's Mark Parson.)

Now Dez Bryant is ruined because he assumed that even talking to Sanders was a bit shady and Sanders failed to properly assure him it wasn't. Deion's intentions may very well be good—and not just a ploy to get his buddy Parker new clients—but that doesn't mean he's doing these players any favors. Nor does it excuse the short-sightedness of the NCAA. But perhaps he should keep his hands off college footballers until they actually are ineligible, instead of just making them that way.

Dez Bryant decision a head-scratcher [USA Today]
Deion Sanders: No rules broken in relationship with Oklahoma State receiver Dez Bryant [ESPN]
Receiving Deion Sanders' help may have hurt Crabtree, Bryant [Tim Cowlishaw]

But here are the teams that I predict will win, today:

VT, Michigan State, Clemson, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Syracuse, Marshall, Tulane, Ball State (buck up, Dave!), Purdue, Iowa, Kentucky, Miami (OH!), Temple, Kansas State, LSU, Illinois, Stanford, Washington, Florida State, Wake Forest, Central Michigan, UCF, Navy, Western Michigan, Bowling Green, UNLV, Indiana, Vanderbilt, Oregon State, Baylor, South Carolina, Mississippi State, Arkansas, Rice, Tennessee, Harvard, University of Phoenix, Reed College, London School of Economics, Police Academy, USC, Huxley College, and National American University.

All of them will win by 6 points. Now hurry up and gamble!

Brand died yesterday of pancreatic cancer. He was 67, having spent most of the last decade of his life in a well-meaning but ultimately pointless effort to reform the NCAA. We're already hearing talk that he "transformed the NCAA." What he really did, despite his good intentions, was widen the gap between how the association talked about itself and how it actually behaved. He didn't transform the NCAA so much as double down on its fundamental hypocrisy.

"College sports is not a business," Brand once claimed, and somehow he didn't get laughed out of the room. He was a slumming academic, and he could get away with a certain amount of willful naivete. But even so, it was a staggering claim to make — especially for the president of an organization to which CBS had paid $6 billion for the rights to its men's basketball tournament and which slaps a corporate sticker on every surface in the room. Even the ladder that players climb to snip down the nets is sponsored. And all the while, the athletes, on whose backs all this fabulous money is made, are told time and again, by people like Brand, of the simple grace in playing for nothing but dear old Alma Mater. That's the NCAA's sustaining self-mythology, and Brand believed in it to the hilt.

He was smart enough to see some of the problems here but just clueless enough to propose all the wrong remedies. He didn't like the NBA's minimum-age rule, which created all sorts of bad incentives for one-and-done players to work the game's back channels and recoup some of the money they should've been making in the pros. That's all to the good. (Brand himself pointed out that the rule would likely be illegal if it hadn't been collectively bargained.) His solution was all wrong, though: He lobbied the NBA to increase the minimum age. Leave aside the obnoxious paternalism of telling young, highly employable men that what's actually good for them is an unpaid internship under the likes of John Calipari. What Brand was begging for, in effect, was an additional year of rule-fudging and outright cheating. He was asking for a bigger black market.

Brand made for a poor reformer because he believed deeply in the NCAA's purpose and purity of motive. A good one, like Sonny Vaccaro, would simply advocate blowing the place up. Only an academic could earnestly believe that the values of higher education could somehow be reconciled with those of big-time sports. "What you saw was a moral man," Wally Renfro, a former NCAA spokesman, told Andy Katz. "He changed the way we talk about intercollegiate athletics." This is a nice way of saying Brand was a very good piano player in a very big whorehouse that was unworthy of the man.

Brand changed the way we look at the NCAA [ESPN]
Myles Leaves Indelible Brand on NCAA [FanHouse]

The Freep's Michael Rosenberg and Mark Snyder did a great bit of reporting here, getting several players and even some parents to air their concerns (anonymously, of course) about the workouts overseen by strength coach Mike Barwis, the Hans to Rodriguez's Franz. The newspaper found that Rodriguez and Barwis have routinely flouted NCAA rules governing how much time coaches can require players to spend on football:

In the past two off-seasons, players said, the Wolverines were expected to spend two to three times more than the eight hours allowed for required workouts each week. Players are free to exceed the limit, but it must be truly voluntary.

The players said the off-season work was clearly required. Several of them said players who failed to do all the strength and conditioning were forced to come back to finish or were punished with additional work.

"It was mandatory," one player said. "They'd tell you it wasn't, but it really was. If you didn't show up, there was punishment. I just felt for the guys that did miss a workout and had to go through the personal hell they would go through."

The newspaper adds that, should the NCAA choose to investigate, Michigan football could be found guilty of "major violations" for the first time in the program's history (which would mean, of course, that we'd be made to endure yet more retrospective fattening of Michigan's most sacred cow, His Surly Grace Bo Schembechler). For now, at least, let's all pretend to be shocked that student-athletes are worked so hard by the well-compensated bullies who coach them. My god, it's almost like playing college football is a job.

A look inside Rodriguez's rigorous program [Detroit Free Press]

Delaware was hoping to take advantage of a grandfather clause in a 1992 federal law that banned sports gambling in the United State. Four states—Nevada, Montana, Oregon, and Delaware—were exempted because they had previously (or currently) allowed gambling. Delaware ran a football-only, multi-game parlay system in 1976, but wanted to institute single-game betting on every sport this year. The NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and NCAA all argued that if Delaware wanted to get back into the business, they could only use the old parlay system and couldn't expand to other sports.

The appeals judges agreed with them, even though one helpfully pointed out that it's hard to argue that the integrity of sport is in jeopardy when anchors on the NFL's own radio network routinely give gambling advice to listeners. But that's just for fun, I guess. Because if the state were allowed to organize public gambling, then the outcome of games could be manipulated by unscrupulous gangsters! Therefore, only unscrupulous gangsters should organize gambling.

This may eventually go to the Supreme Court, but it looks like there's no way you're betting on football games in Dover this year.

Appeals court blocks Delaware betting [USA Today]
Ohio Lottery signs up two NFL teams for branded games [Lottery News]

Radford University point guard Amir Johnson was convicted of petit larceny yesterday, after breaking into the off-campus apartment of two former teammates and stealing their "PlayStation," some games for it, and an iPod. (I'm going to assume it was at least a PS2, but that the Roanoke Times doesn't know the difference.)

Meanwhile at Ohio University, cornerback Travis Carrie and defensive lineman Corey Moncrief each plead guilty to charges of receiving stolen property after they were found in possession of computers stolen from two residence halls.

So who got off better? Johnson merely had to pay a fine and reimburse his teammates for their electronics. But Carrie and Moncrief each have to serve two days in jail, and write a letter of apology to the computers' owners. If I know college athletes, they can do the jail time standing on one leg, but that whole writing a letter thing's gonna be a bitch.

Radford University's Amir Johnson Enters Alford Plea to Misdemeanor Charge [Roanoke Times]
Second OU player Sentenced in Computer Theft [Columbus Dispatch]

Oh, it gets much more evil. Another basketball player received money to cover his unpaid "institutional fees." How much money? $239 dollars. Coaches also committed the crime of "observation of out-of-season pick-up games" and offseason weightlifting. That's three years probation for you. Oh, and coach Scott Edgar—who has already been fired—was given a "show-cause" penalty that pretty much means he can't work for the next three years, because he is obviously a menace.

The women's basketball team got it too, because a booster paid the tuition of a former player. A player who had used up all her eligibility, but was one semester away from finishing her degree and couldn't get financial aid. Student-athletes: Good. Students?: Fuck them.

Thank goodness Southeast Missouri State is being put its place. I feel safer already.

NCAA infractions committee announces Southeast Missouri State University athletic violations [Southeast Missourian]
Buzz: NCAA Sticks It to SEMO [Rush The Court]

Delaware Governor Jack Markell estimates that sports betting will bring in $55 million this year, or roughly 55 million times the revenue of a single I-AA football playoff game. So as he points out, the NCAA's punitive decision to ban all championship events from the state only hurts college athletes—the people the NCAA is allegedly protecting. I guess they'll just go on using their bookies like they do now.

There's still a chance that the sports leagues could win the lawsuit against the state (this week's ruling only denied an emergency injunction), but that seems unlikely. Looking at the ruling, Judge Gregory M. Sleet, chief of U.S. District Court in Delaware, seems perfectly aware of the rank hypocrisy at work here. Gambling is good for sports. (Financially, anyway.) Everyone knows it. Betting lines sit next to box scores in newspapers. Teams take advertising dollars from casinos. Heck, some team owners even have their own casinos. No one, anywhere in America has trouble finding someone to take a bet on a game if they want to. Wagering on the outcome is practically the only reason that most sports exist.

The world will survive Delaware's gambling jones and more and more states will try to follow suit, because it's the only way anyone can make money in this terrible economy. Look for New Jersey, home of Atlantic City and shore trash, to be the next state to try and overturn the federal sports gambling law. I would bet you anything.

NCAA championship ban affects states with betting [Houston Chronicle]
Delaware sports betting moves ahead [Philadelphia Inquirer]
Judge sets date for Delaware betting trial [ESPN]

The money's not just for admission to their showcase tournaments, either. College coaches are often forced to shell out extra for packets of information that sometimes don't even include the recruits' jersey numbers, writes The New York Times' Pete Thamel. It's a surcharge of, oh, $300. Just an average day at the local gymnasium.

Some coaches — Vanderbilt's Kevin Stallings and Yale's James Jones, notably — went on the record to decry the shady entrepreneurs. The ones with clout — Mike Krzyzewski, Ben Howland, Thad Matta and Tom Izzo, among them — declined to comment. Which is a shame, because while they lobby behind closed doors, they could also take a more public stand. It's not like the NCAA will. After all, this is a bureaucracy that requires four years to potentially paint a 24-inch arc on a basketball court.

"That's exactly what's wrong with our business," Stallings said. "There's a mentality where coaches want to cover themselves and not get out there and say what's right and call out the people that are wrong.

"That's precisely why things are the way they are. That's why we have culture issues in our game. It's a darn shame. The people who could have influence and do have a voice, they choose not to use it because it doesn't help them. They don't want anything unsettling their smooth little boat ride."

Good thing they're surrounded by water. There's plenty of slime to wash off.

Who's That On The Court? [New York Times]
Yet another way AAU types scam coaches [The Dagger]
Another Prerequisite For Referees [Deadspin]

Yahoo's Dan Wetzel has the news:

Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco, O'Bannon became the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit on behalf of all current and former Division I-A football and men's basketball athletes against the NCAA. He's represented by two of the nation's most high-powered law firms – including one that secured reparations for Holocaust survivors from Swiss banks.

The complaint, obtained by Yahoo! Sports, alleges that the NCAA "has illegally deprived former student-athletes" from "myriad revenue streams" including DVDs, video games, memorabilia, photographs, television rebroadcasts and use in advertising.

What's nominally at stake is control of the $4 billion market for collegiate licensed merchandise, but the lawsuit, orchestrated by crusading former sneaker impresario Sonny Vaccaro, is nothing short of an attack on the NCAA's antiquated and evermore untenable notion of amateurism, in which the NCAA profits wildly off the rampant commercialism it pretends to decry. You can read all about the implications here. It's a worthy fight, of which Ed O'Bannon, one of the more spectacular basketball flameouts in recent memory, is now the public face, a "sort of Curt Flood of college sports," in Wetzel's phrase. There's something sort of sweet about that. The guy couldn't crack the mid-'90s Nets lineups, and now he might very well wind up taking down the NCAA.

Making NCAA pay? [Yahoo]
Ed O'Bannon: Why I'm Fighting the NCAA [Lost Letterman]
NCAA faces unspecified damages, changes in latest anti-trust case [SI.com]

Five players were suspended from the team in 2007 after it was learned that they used their scholarship benefits to gain free textbooks for other students. However, since the violations allegedly started in 2005, any victory from those three seasons that those players participated in would have to be vacated. The school will also be on probation for three years and have to pay a fine. Oh well.

As we (and others) have harped on before, vacated wins mean nothing. They don't take back the booster money or season ticket packages that those wins generated. There's only one way to truly hurt an athletic department—take their scholarships—and the NCAA will not be doing that, even though Alabama is a multiple repeat offender. This particular offense is very minor and so is the punishment—even if the NCAA probably wants you to think otherwise.

NCAA to force Alabama to vacate wins, won't require future scholarship losses for football, a source said. (Updated!) [Birmingham News]
Headlinin': Welcome back to ineffectual probation, Alabama [Dr. Saturday]
Report: Alabama Crimson Tide to vacate football wins [ESPN]
Tide won't lose scholarships as part of sanctions [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]

Along with the allegations about the basketball team, the NCAA sent the University of Memphis president a litany of supposed violations by former golf coach Jenny Bruun. She's accused of providing "multiple extra benefits valued at approximately $3,115.70 to women's golf student-athletes," as well as "impermissible recruiting inducements valued at approximately $70," which I confess to finding adorably quaint.

Some highlights:

• "In December [redacted], Bruun provided [redacted] a Christmas gift that included a sweater, Starbucks coffee mugs and a Starbucks gift card. The sweater had an approximate value of $75, the mugs had an approximate value of $30 and the gift card had a value of $25."

• "In December [redacted], Bruun provided a Christmas gift to [redacted] that included a season series of the television show 'The West Wing' on DVD and a wooden tea box and tea bag set. The gifts had an approximate value of $75."

• "In December [redacted], Bruun provided [redacted] a Christmas gift that included a belt, a book entitled 'Best Friends,' a book entitled 'A Wedding in December' and a wall hanging. The gifts had an approximate value of $56.96."

• "Between April and August [redacted] and before [redacted] initially enrolled at the institution, Bruun provided [redacted] a good luck gift, flowers, the movie 'Miracle' on DVD and a picture of a bible verse. The gifts had an approximate value of $70."

The NCAA is anal enough to track down the value of a sweater, and yet they don't bother to tell us which Bible verse. Leave aside the question of whether a state employee should really go around spreading the Good Word to her charges. What sort of verse are we talking here. Psalms? The Gospels? Revelation? "And the rest were killed with the sword which came from the mouth of Him who sat on the horse, and all the birds were filled with their flesh"? It makes a difference.

Also:

In November [redacted], Bruun permitted [redacted] stay at her residence at no cost for approximately two nights after [redacted] apartment was burglarized. The lodging had an approximate value of $160.

The NCAA is just straight-up mean.

Memphis golf faces NCAA allegations [Golfweek]
NCAA notice of allegations (PDF) [Commercial Appeal]

So that's what he was hiding behind The Door. The allegations include "knowing fraudulence" (that's really a word! I looked it up.) or "misconduct" on an SAT exam by a player on the 2007-2008 team, and that they also provided over $2,000 in free travel to an "associate" of that same player. The player's name is redacted in the letter sent by the NCAA to Memphis and obtained by the Memphis Commercial Appeal, but he only participated in that one season—which included 38 wins and a national championship appearance—so that pretty much narrows it down to one-and-done Tiger hero Derrick Rose.

There are many people out there who are of the opinion that Calipari is a slimy no-good swindler and this just makes his convenient shuffle on down to Kentucky (more on them later) that more more slippery. Those people will be happy to know that Calipari was not named in the letter and will face no repercussions. Neither will current coach Josh Pastner or anyone one else on present or future Tiger teams. Rose is long gone, so they can't touch him. So what, you might be asking, is the point? Well, if the Tigers are found guilty it's possible that they will be forced to "vacate" their record 38 wins from that year, taking away the four-year win record that belonged to this year's senior class, give up a Conference USA championship, I suppose, and also take down any Final Four banners that they may or may not have. In other words, nothing.

As I've noted before, vacated wins and records are a common NCAA punishment that actually punishes no one. Remember, this is a "major" violation, but both Calipari and the Memphis athletic department were adamant that no one currently in college basketball will be scarred by this. So if the allegation is true, it means that Memphis helped a player who had no intention of ever graduating cheat so he could enroll in school for one year, then he helped the school to its greatest season ever and skipped town with no repercussions to anyone except the stat guy who has to buy more erasers. The Memphis golf team (which is also part of the investigation) will probably suffer more.

Seriously, great job all around.

Report: NCAA accuses Memphis Tigers of violations [Memphis Commercial Appeal]
Geoff Calkins: Allegations like this come with the Calipari territory [Memphis Commercial Appeal]
Report: NCAA accuses Memphis men's basketball of major violations [ESPN]

... the man has a point. (Or had, briefly, until his frantic row-back a couple days later.) Yahoo has built a brand out of catching young athletes with their hand out, something that always makes for compelling reading but now seems more than a little misguided. If you find yourself writing story after story about NCAA rule after NCAA rule being broken, shouldn't there come a point where you question the wisdom and validity of those rules in the first place?

Yahoo came close a couple months ago, with an excellent story about Kevin Love and AAU coach Pat Barrett. But it wound up being more a standard indictment of greasebag agents and less an exploration of how screwy incentives — created by impossibly high-minded amateurism rules, not to mention the NBA's minimum-age rule (to which Yahoo at least alludes, to its credit) — have created a black market in which greasebag agents can thrive.

Yahoo's Dan Wetzel wrote to Whitlock after his initial column, which stupidly likened the "gotcha" recruiting stories to "1800s newspapers running pictures of and stories about runaway slaves." Wetzel took issue: "We do it to show that the problem is everywhere. That no one is immune. That the NCAA is doing nothing, and that the media are lazy by characterizing it any other way." I suppose Yahoo's reformer spirit is commendable, but this really does get the issue exactly wrong. The "problem" isn't everywhere. It's in one place. The NCAA charter. Where's that series?

So talk freely. Talk about life, heartache, the sticky film that just won't go away. Talk about this headline as a means of confirming your agnosticism. Or, just talk about your usual random shit and get into fights with each other.

It's Ok...

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