The NCAA isn’t punishing Michigan State, but *actual* authorities should

The NCAA isn’t going to do anything to Michigan State over the case of Larry Nassar, the convicted sexual predator who gained access to many of his victims through his job as an MSU sports doctor from 1997 until 2016. The university said Thursday that the NCAA had cleared it of rules violations after an investigation that’d been announced in April.

That’s despite former Spartans in multiple sports saying Nassar abused them during his time on staff, and one former Michigan State gymnast saying in a victim-impact statement at a February sentencing that she’d informed a coach of Nassar’s abuse in 1997. So one of college sports’ worst scandals was allowed to unfold at MSU over two decades.

If college sports had a better governing body whose guiding light wasn’t enforcing amateurism rules, that organization might have punished the Spartans. But while the NCAA has some rules that are supposed to promote athlete safety — like limits on practice time, equipment regulations, and a drug policy — it doesn’t have any rules with teeth that would punish schools for fostering a culture where a staffer assaults athletes.

Where the NCAA punishes schools seriously, it’s usually because they let athletes get paid for playing sports. The NCAA isn’t built to punish actions that cause real suffering.

The NCAA’s attempt to sound concerned with athlete welfare includes writing out several “principles of conduct”. One says “it is the responsibility of each member institution to protect the health of, and provide a safe environment for, each of its participating student-athletes.” Michigan State failed miserably to live up to that ideal, but that’s just what it is — an ideal. It’s not a rule that the NCAA has policies to enforce.

On other topics, the NCAA has rules that schools and people face consequences for breaking. If a player gets caught taking money or not making a grade, they’re ineligible to play. If a coach or administrator gets caught breaking the rules, the NCAA might assess a show-cause penalty, making it almost impossible for that person to get a job in college sports. But when it comes to “principles,” the NCAA has no real enforcement mechanism.

The Jerry Sandusky scandal that came to light at Penn State in 2011 and ‘12 didn’t fit any obvious NCAA rules violations, either, and the NCAA decided to ditch its usual infractions process and heavily sanction the school anyway. The punishments for Penn State got the NCAA sued by a Pennsylvania state senator, and a former U.S. senator hired to monitor the school’s post-sanctions progress later recommended that the NCAA cut the sanctions short. The NCAA did.

This also isn’t strictly an athletic scandal. The Detroit News reported allegations of Nassar’s abuse reached at least 14 university staff members before it ended. One was university president Lou Anna Simon, who resigned under pressure in January. Even in the fictional event that nobody at MSU beyond the athletic department knew of allegations against Nassar, that would pose a university-wide problem of its own.

The NCAA going outside its usual disciplinary process and stretching its rulebook to punish acts of evil was messy, exposed the NCAA to legal liability, and partly amounted to banning Penn State players from bowl games, even though they had nothing to do with Sandusky’s crimes or covering them up. Any NCAA punishments of Michigan State, especially something like scholarship reductions, could create a similar dynamic: current college athletes who had nothing to do with the Nassar case bearing NCAA consequences for it.

The NCAA has not before or since done anything like what it did at Penn State. It didn’t punish Baylor after its football program’s rape scandal came to public light in 2016.

Mark Emmert’s organization doesn’t deserve a pass for setting up a world where punishments get doled out for amateurism violations but not facilitating sexual abuse. It deserves unending scorn and pressure to pass policies that meaningfully protect players. But in this moment, the NCAA is not an effective investigator, judge, or jury.

This year, the Big Ten’s become the first conference ever to distribute more than $50 million to member schools in a year. Michigan State’s biggest source of revenue comes from its conference TV deal, just like every other school in a Power 5 league.

The Big Ten has a mega-deal with ESPN and Fox, plus its own channel. In the 2017-18 fiscal year, Michigan State had $128 million in athletic revenue, according to public documents. About one-third was a $41 million total it attributed to “broadcasting,” mostly meaning the media money the Big Ten sent to the school.

Could the Big Ten withhold revenue from Michigan State to punish it for harboring Nassar throughout decades of sexual abuse? The conference’s and school’s lawyers might disagree on the answer. But the Big Ten has taken similar steps before. It withheld football bowl revenue (which also comes through the conference office) from Penn State after Sandusky, a way to discipline the school without directly punishing any future athletes. And conference commissioner Jim Delany indicated that the Big Ten would’ve further punished Penn State if the NCAA hadn’t issued the sanctions it did.

The NCAA itself — the organization with the central office in Indianapolis — is a big business. In 2017, its revenues cleared $1 billion for the first time. Its biggest money source is the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which Turner paid about $800 million to broadcast. The NCAA gives most of that money to conferences, split up depending on many teams they put in the field and how far they advance.

But even that money (a little more than $250,000 per tournament win, basically) has to pass through a conference to get to a school.

A university-wide punishment would track with a university-wide story.

The government of Michigan provides about 21 percent of MSU’s revenue ($281 million in 2017-18, according to the school). Lawmakers could force MSU to reach certain compliance benchmarks and, if they’re not met, withhold money from the school.

The federal government regulates MSU like it regulates every other school. The Department of Education fined Penn State a record of nearly $2.4 million for violating the Clery Act, a university crime disclosure law, after Sandusky. Any number of other levers could be used to pressure Michigan State, which, like pretty much all big schools, relies on federal grants.

That isn’t to let the NCAA off the hook for structurally prioritizing keeping athletes from getting paid over keeping them safe. The NCAA needs an overhaul, and this is one of several reasons why.

But because of the NCAA’s terrible and long-established priorities, it’s on other organizations to step up.