Bad Apples or More?

The National Collegiate Athletic Association punished nearly half of all big-time college sports programs for major violations of its rules in the last decade, an Inside Higher Ed analysis shows.

The review finds that 53 of the 120 universities in the NCAA’s top competitive level, the Football Bowl Subdivision, were found by the NCAA's Division I Committee on Infractions to have committed major rules violations from 2001 to 2010. That number appears to have held largely constant from the previous two decades, but the 2000s show that the number of colleges that committed serious violations of the association’s academic rules nearly doubled, to 15 from 8 in the 1990s.

Exactly what these results say about the state of NCAA rule-breaking and enforcement is to some extent in the eye of the beholder. To many critics of big-time college sports, the fact that so many major programs committed what the association deems major violations of its rules is likely to undermine the argument -- historically heard from some sports officials -- that rule-breaking is relegated to “a few bad apples” (an argument likely to resonate with those paying attention to the debate in Washington over for-profit colleges).

To others, though, the large number of colleges ensnared in the NCAA’s infractions process is evidence that the association has an impossibly complex (and, some would argue, arcane) set of rules that virtually no program can follow to a tee. Some argue that college and university sports officials -- with bigger compliance staffs and more cooperation with NCAA investigators -- are doing a much better job ferreting out (and self-reporting) wrongdoing in their own programs.

Still others point out that, especially compared to some of the high-profile pay-for-play and other scandals of the 1980s and 1990s, many of the cases in the last decade involve relatively minor violations, such as excessive phone calls to recruits.

Yet even some experts who take a more upbeat view of the infractions statistics admit to concern about the increase in academically related violations, which they attribute, at least in part, to changes in NCAA eligibility rules that lowered the minimum academic requirements for freshmen and imposed penalties on teams and colleges whose athletes do not make consistent progress toward a degree. (See related Views article here.)

“We’re admitting more people who really don't belong there, and spending millions on academic support to keep them there,” said Gene A. Marsh, a retired University of Alabama law professor who headed the Division I Committee on Infractions from 2004 to 2006. And while most sports officials remain “focused on educational progress for students for their own sake,” the potential penalties for colleges whose athletes don’t succeed academically “means you’re going to get more people getting cute, more professors who lose their will and their ethics.”

Better Than the 1980s?

By most accounts, the 1980s represented the height of NCAA rule-breaking. That was the decade in which the television money connected to big-time college sports began to explode (thanks in no small measure to a Supreme Court decision that ended the NCAA’s stranglehold on football TV contracts). It also included the NCAA’s first-ever (and to this date only) imposition of its famed “death penalty,” on the Southern Methodist University football program, after a scandal in which Texas’ governor was implicated in paying players to enroll there. A 1990 survey by this reporter found that 57 of the 106 institutions in what was known then as Division I-A had been punished by the association for rule-breaking during the 1980s.

How much has changed since then? Have tougher enforcement and the NCAA's efforts to encourage colleges to identify and report their own violations diminished the extent of rule-breaking? Are major violations common, or are such breaches exceptional, as college sports officials often assert?

A review of the NCAA's own database of major violations finds that over the previous 10 years, 53 of the 120 institutions that now compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision broke major NCAA rules. That is one fewer than the 54 that committed major violations in the 1990s, according to the NCAA database, although the total number of cases in the 2000s -- 65 -- was actually one higher than in the 1990s.

That's because 11 institutions had two major infractions cases during the decade: Ball State University, California State University at Fresno, Florida International University, Texas Christian University, and the Universities of Alabama, Arkansas at Fayetteville, Colorado at Boulder, Michigan, Oklahoma, Southern California, and Washington.

While critics often complain that the NCAA picks on less-prominent sports programs and goes easy on the highest-profile institutions, the results from the 2000s don't necessarily back that up. More universities in the Big Ten Conference (eight) were punished for major violations than in any other league, followed by seven in the Big 12 and Southeastern Conferences and six in the Pacific-10 Conferences, all of which are among the six leagues in the Bowl Championship Series that are typically seen as college sports' biggest players.

The other two major conferences -- the Atlantic Coast and Big East Conferences -- had four and two members punished, respectively.

Among other trends, the NCAA found a "lack of institutional control" at 14 universities from 2001-2010, down sharply from 31 from 1991-2000. "Lack of institutional control" is among the more serious NCAA rules violations, because it suggests that the college in question did not have adequate policies and practices in place to prevent violations and did not sufficiently oversee rules compliance.

The 2000s, however, saw a near-quadrupling -- to 23, from six in the 1990s -- of the number of colleges found guilty of "failure to monitor," suggesting that more institutions had proper policies and procedures in place but used them insufficiently.

The infractions committee used what have historically been its most serious penalties -- bans on appearing on television and on appearing in the postseason -- much less frequently in the last decade than in the 1990s. Just six Football Bowl Subdivision programs had teams barred from the playoffs in their sports during the 2000s, down from 31 in the 1990s. And no FBS teams were barred from appearing on television from 2001-2010, while three were from 1991-2000.

Michael L. Buckner is one of a small but growing number of lawyers whose practices revolve largely around helping colleges investigate and minimize the damage from NCAA rule-breaking. He says that the significant uptick in both institutional and NCAA officials involved in preventing and ferreting out potential violations has helped to sustain the number of violations uncovered -- and perhaps decreased the severity of the penalties imposed by the NCAA, which tends to reward colleges when they uncover wrongdoing themselves.

"When you have a large compliance staff, when they're doing what they're supposed to be doing in terms of NCAA guidelines, you're going to have more possible rules violations," he says. "And that's especially true when you consider how many more rules you have to comply with," as the NCAA tends to expand its rulebook every year.

Josephine R. Potuto, the Richard H. Larson Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and, like Marsh, a former infractions committee chair, says that "while you would certainly like the number [of major violations] to be much lower," she perceives a qualitative difference in the types of violations that are being uncovered, especially compared to the pay-for-play scandals of the 1980s.

"A number of cases, when I served [on the infractions panel], involving playing and practice seasons or excessive telephone calls," she says. "Certainly I wouldn't be here to defend those sorts of violations by any means -- schools are obliged to follow all the rules, and a major violation is a major violation. But I think they are different in kind from academic fraud, from amateurism violations, from real recruiting violations" of the sort that were more common two decades ago, Potuto says.

Marsh agrees that it "may be that there are more people out walking sentry duty," and that "you could have fewer violations and more people out there catching fish." He also concurs with Potuto that much of the rule-breaking in the last decade has involved "some pretty humdrum stuff" that has been deemed major because of the number of violations, more than because of their seriousness, like excessive text messages or phone calls sent to athletes.

But he says he is struck by -- and concerned about -- the significant number of cases of academic fraud. Fifteen of the 64 major cases involving Football Bowl Subdivision universities from 2001-10 pertained to academic fraud or other academic violations involving enrolled athletes, up from 8 in 1991-2010.

Marsh thinks that increase can be attributed, in part, to the NCAA's decision early in the decade to eliminate the minimum cutoff score athletes needed to be eligible to play as freshmen. When combined with the Academic Progress Rate system the association instituted in 2003 -- which imposes potentially serious penalties on teams whose athletes don't stay on track toward graduation -- those changes have been perceived as pushing more athletes into less academically demanding majors and could lead officials to "focus on eligibility... What can we do to keep this kid eligible for one more fall semester?"

Buckner, the lawyer, agrees that the NCAA's academic rules may be leading to more rule-breaking, but attributes the problem to individuals rather than to institutional malfeasance. Potuto agrees, to a point: "If you're talking about the kind of rule-breaking where somebody on the staff of a university would be complicit in helping a student-athlete plagiarize to stay eligible, or have somebody take a test to stay eligible, that's an individual situation, not a systemic problem," she says.

"But if you're talking about getting sucked in to doing more for student-athletes than sound academic principles would provide, then we might be seeing something systemic there," she says. "There are incentives in athletics to cheat that really change the nature of what's going on. If you have those sorts of incentives, people who are going to do anything to succeed are going to do things that you don't like."

Football Bowl Subdivision Universities Punished for Major Violations, 2001-2010