In Mizzou case, NCAA’s message is better to deny responsibility than to cooperate

Say this for the NCAA: Absurdly and inexplicably late and dismissive of fundamental fairness as its technical gobbledygook denying the University of Missouri’s appeal might be, at least it offered some clarity.

Better to obfuscate than cooperate with NCAA investigations. Best to contest any and every aspect of an investigation, including facts in plain sight, than to engage in their system. Better to try to win at any cost than have integrity.

“The NCAA enforcement system is broken. This decision hurts student-athletes who had nothing to do with the actions uncovered and who put 110% into everything they do — their schoolwork, their practice time, their dedication to this great institution,” Jon Sundvold, the chair of the University of Missouri Board of Curators, said in a release. “They have put their belief into a system that should reward good behavior and discipline poor actions. Instead, we’re seeing the reverse happen, and it sets a dangerous precedent.

“Mizzou did the right thing. This ruling tells every other school that it’s better to hide the truth than to admit mistakes.”

To be clear, that’s a point that should send a shudder through collegiate sports. But it’s not a recommendation — either from Sundvold or MU administrators or us.

“Sometimes it may not work out,” MU chancellor Alexander Cartwright said in a news conference Tuesday at Sprint Center, where the MU basketball team was playing later in the day. “You continue to do what’s right.”

Because ultimately all you have is your name, after all. And using this mess as an excuse to cheat still would reflect poorly on any institution and stigmatize it in a different way. Like it has North Carolina.

That school eluded NCAA punishment despite far-flung and epic academic fraud in athletics. Why? Because it had the shameless gall to argue that it wasn’t an NCAA issue because the scamming opportunities were not exclusive to athletes.

Meanwhile, rooted in the actions of one rogue tutor, Missouri football, baseball and softball received a postseason ban that will have steep financial ramifications for a school already battling to hoist itself up out of the low-budget tier of the Southeastern Conference industrial complex.

MU figures it will lose $8 million to $9 million in bowl revenues because SEC rules say schools barred from the postseason forfeit their share of bowl revenue. It also will be damaged by scholarship reductions, recruiting restrictions, vacated wins and assorted fees.

But it’s the human cost that really hurts, as symbolized by a remarkable moment at Sprint Center 19 weeks after the appeal was made and 10-plus weeks since an answer was expected (a delay that the NCAA didn’t deign to explain).

As athletic director Jim Sterk spoke about athletes in all three sports being punished for events that they had no involvement in, his voice cracked and he held back tears. This, after Sterk had spoken earlier about going from shock at the result to being “just angry” over what he called the “consistently inconsistent” NCAA.

He wondered aloud if MU had been a ripple in the wake of the North Carolina case, a sort of makeup example to be made that the NCAA really does care about academic integrity.

“But that’s all speculation,” he said, nonetheless making his point.

More specifically, MU provided comparative handouts as it pointed to the dispensation of a remarkably similar case against Mississippi State. The academic issues revolved around one tutor and 11 student-athletes (MU was one and 12), resulted in no postseason competitive bans and no lost bowl revenue, among other disparities.

The radical difference stems from the fact that Mississippi State literally was judged by a different process: a rule that passed in August 2018 when Missouri already was engaged in the NCAA process. The rule allowed Mississippi State to reach a “negotiated resolution” with the NCAA. Resembling a plea bargain, it allowed both sides to move through the process without a formal hearing or summary disposition.

But MU was entangled in a summary disposition process, in which it presented vacated wins and probation as acceptable penalties that the Committee of Infractions rejected.

So if you want to get down in the weeds, that’s part of how this happened.

Yet that’s also ridiculous in its own way. As if there were no mechanism to treat this with more logic and thoughtfulness or by a comparable standard with Mississippi State simply because this clock started before August 2018. and MU already was knee-deep. in what the NCAA considered exemplary cooperation.

“Where it fell apart,” Sterk said, “was with the NCAA staff and the organization.”

The NCAA can try to rationalize this by pointing to procedural technicalities about the differences in various cases, etc., but it has to know that the hypocrisy of this nonsense is eroding the faith of its broader membership at a time when the organization is deservedly under scrutiny in numerous ways.

Who knows what the future holds for its stranglehold on the way college sports have been run?

“Today’s decision raises serious questions about whether the current NCAA enforcement system encourages or discourages cultures of compliance and integrity,” Cartwright and Sterk said in a joint statement released earlier in the day. “While we have exhausted our NCAA appeal avenues, we will continue to advocate for meaningful reform within the NCAA enforcement process.”

But don’t doubt that this ruling, which will reverberate as absurd, is another dent in the NCAA operation and another prod for influential people to open their minds up to finding another way to govern and administer justice.

As for the more immediate future, hey, at least there is this: Amid a 5-6 football season that had been expected to be much more, Tuesday’s decision came in before a more damaging scenario unfolded.

Imagine if MU were to win as expected at 2-9 Arkansas on Friday to become bowl-eligible and be invited to a postseason game, only for the appeal to be denied in the weeks after. That would have meant a postseason ban next year as well, effectively a doubling-down against Mizzou.

For that matter, even an MU loss Friday with a denied appeal afterward could have had that impact … albeit with Mizzou essentially self-imposing its own bowl ban this season.

It’s also true that because of this exasperating Tigers football season, the NCAA’s denial of Missouri’s appeal may not get the immediate broader attention it deserves.

They say “it just means more” in the SEC, but this also just means less to others when it’s a team not so much as in the hunt for a divisional title.

But in the haze this week that also includes speculation about football coach Barry Odom’s job status as the team lugs five straight losses into Arkansas, maybe there is one other useful point of clarity to be taken from the NCAA at the end of a season Sterk believes was affected by the increasingly negative effect of the NCAA appeal being “always, always there” hanging over the team’s head.

Mizzou’s last football game of the season is Friday, and best not let the NCAA defeat you another time. The present is the right time to move forward as best you can and control the controllable.

As for the irrational NCAA, best to stash that in a compartment until a reckoning that seems inevitable ahead.

“Our athletic directors, our presidents and chancellors and commissioners need to collectively decide where we want to go. ...,” Sterk said. “Because the current system is broken.”