Zemek: The Big Miami Delay

Matt Zemek's thoughts and take on the college football world.

This has been just another upside-down week in the upside-down world of college sports - and that's not including anything that's happening in or around the Penn State program, either.

In a column from last Sunday, Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald stated that the NCAA might not hand out its punishment to the Miami football program until National Signing Day is over (February 6, 2013). One readily understands and accepts the need for due diligence to be performed in this or any other serious investigation. Findings – and the punishments attached to them – cannot be arrived at in a hasty fashion. The work of fact-checking requires an appreciable amount of time; the process of arriving at just punishments necessitates patience. These realities are understood by everyone. However, it is just as obvious that the timing of penalties also matters to a great many individuals, chiefly the young men whom Al Golden will recruit to play football for the Hurricanes next year and beyond.

If NCAA penalties were not able to be announced by this spring, the adjusted calculus seemed quite simple: Announce the penalties at or near the end of the regular season. The ideal scenario would have been to hand down the penalties during the spring, so that the team and coaching staff would have enough time to emotionally and strategically digest the ramifications of the decision before the start of the 2012 season. In the absence of that scenario, though, the next-best plan would have been to announce penalties at the end of the 2012 season. The reasoning behind such a contention is not hard to identify.

It would not make sense to announce penalties just before (ask North Carolina players about their 2011 journey), at the beginning of, or in the middle of a season. The weight borne by players would be too much, the distraction too immense for coaches to handle. By announcing penalties in week 11 or 12, the NCAA could have enabled the Hurricanes to make it through their regular season without the stomach punch of sanctions. In this kind of case, it could perhaps be argued that an announcement would need to be made one or two weeks before the season's end so that coaches could accordingly adjust their recruiting plans; fair enough. In the bigger picture, however, anything earlier than a week 10 or 11 announcement would rob the current Canes of their ability to pursue their goals free from disillusionment and despair. An announcement immediately following the twelfth and final game of the regular season would honor the space (and the on-field accomplishments) of Miami players yet give the coaching staff an immediate awareness of how it would need to re-calibrate its recruiting efforts.

If it is indeed true that the NCAA is waiting until AFTER National Signing Day in 2013 to hand down penalties against the Hurricanes' football program, one can say that a modest (or less-than-feared) one-year postseason ban would carry a little more bite than a one-year ban announced right now, in June of 2012. The one-year delay of a one-year ban would, in a real sense, extend Miami's suffering and make life more difficult for everyone in and around the program. Critics might therefore feel that such a sanction would be sufficiently punitive. That political angle shouldn't be ignored, and it's understandable that the NCAA might want to spin a one-year ban in that fashion lest its critics think that the organization is letting off Miami too lightly.

There's just one very big problem with the above approach: New Miami football recruits would be the ones left holding the bag.

If the Miami Herald story holds up and the NCAA does indeed wait until after National Signing Day to penalize The U, how can the NCAA, in good conscience, allow Al Golden and his assistants to recruit for two whole months, only to then tell their new players that they'll be ineligible for the postseason? Shouldn't would-be Miami recruits know about the status of the Hurricane program in late November or early December of 2012, so that they can make an informed decision that will affect their futures?

One hopes the NCAA is not foolish enough to wait until after National Signing Day in 2013 to levy its punishments against the University of Miami's football program. One's hopes, however, are rarely if ever met when the NCAA is involved.