IARP vs NCAA

Thankfully NIL renders the need for such $ dealings moot. (I’m sure there will be those who work to get around the strictures of the NIL rules as they evolve).

As to all the articles pointing to the Townsend phone call discussing what Zion Williamson was asking for, there is no evidence adidas paid anything to Williamson. Williamson never came to KU, he went to Duke, who “obviously” didn’t pay him anything (but the FBI wasn’t wiretapping Nike calls, so there’s no evidence, so Duke was not charged). There *is* testimony a Maryland booster paid DeSousa’s guardian to get DeSousa to go to College Park. Yet as with Duke, not a single charge was levied against Maryland.

Based on the evidence Townsend was fined for never reporting that conversation, which in and of itself was a violation per the then NCAA rules. There is no evidence Townsend knew of or was involved in any actual adidas payments to Williamson, so he wasn’t fined for that.

Same for the other two “student-athlete#s” the decision details. Nothing came of those investigations. Only “student-athlete#1” stuck.

In the vast ocean of NCAA violations for payments to players or their families or their guardians, it really does come down to the NCAA picking which programs it wanted to attack… and then personifying the role of overzealous prosecutors who lost their case in court because they went after “murder 1” charges instead of manslaughter.

It does bother me that people say Kansas walked away without any real penalties. First, just having the case looming over the program for 5+ years like a sword of Damocles significantly hurt recruiting. Just look at how the recruiting rankings for Kansas fell during the years since the FBI case and the NCAA allegations filing. It has only been recently where those rankings returned to their pre-case levels as it became likely that Kansas would not be facing a postseason ban (as indicated by the prior IARP decisions regarding other charged programs).

Second, there were the self-imposed penalties (games suspended, scholarships lost, recruiting restrictions) by Kansas that the IARP accepted as adequate for the minor violations Kansas concurred occurred.

Finally, losing those 15 vacated wins and the related titles and records are significant, especially losing them for using a player who was academically eligible, played only as he was declared eligible at the time by the NCAA, and who was benched when the NCAA later said he wasn’t eligible. This isn’t a Derrick Rose case, who was never academically eligible to play. This wasn’t a “years of academic fraud and other violations” case like the 2015 decision that penalized Syracuse with fines, suspensions and 101 vacated wins (yet stopped short of taking its 2003 title — and resulted in almost no subsequent media teeth gnashing).

This was “oh, now there is evidence of a small payment, so we are declaring him ineligible now and oh, also retroactively.” $2500 — which Silvio never received and which his guardian never used for the extra courses Silvio took and passed to be able to play in Spring 2018 — is chump change which should have at best resulted in Silvio sitting for a month, not being declared ineligible for the whole term. And it certainly should not have rendered him ineligible for the following year on top of later being retroactively declared ineligible for Spring 2018. With academics you are either eligible at that time or you aren’t. With $ the NCAA has (way too much, in retrospect) latitude to determine when and how long to declare a player ineligible. DeSousa sitting for a whole year should have been enough. They should have left Spring 2018 alone.

My opinion? The IARP took the Spring 2018 wins away — and Kansas accepted this action — in an effort to end the case while saving some face for the NCAA in this fiasco.

Also in my opinion, it didn’t work. Witness the focus in sports news media and social media on this decision being a major failure for the NCAA, while the KU haters continue with their wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Let me add — yes, I’m sure that our coaches knew and know that payments happen. Not naive. But having knowledge of and/or participating in specific payments — I’m also pretty sure our coaches are smart enough to not get caught in that trap if at all possible.