The NCAA’s Committee on Infractions found Rutgers guilty of several compliance violations under the administration of former head coach Kyle Flood, the NCAA announced Friday. Full details on the case are here. The COI’s gist is that Rutgers “failed to monitor” a bunch of compliance allegations going on within its program.
Finally, the NCAA has stepped in to stop the incredible Rutgers football juggernaut
The NCAA finds Rutgers guilty of cheating, and I find Rutgers guilty of not being very good at it.
Ed Mulholland-USA TODAY Sports
The penalties include two years of probation for Rutgers. They also include a one-year “show-cause” order for Flood that could prevent him from getting another NCAA job in the next year. That’s silly and irrelevant, because Flood is now an Atlanta Falcons offensive line coach, and the NFL doesn’t care about these things. Also fun is a three-game suspension for Flood, which doesn’t matter because he already served it.
There’s also a one-year show cause for a former Rutgers assistant. The school previously self-imposed a few recruiting restrictions, such as cutting off-campus recruiting days and limiting the number of official prospect visits they’ll pay for.
The charges against Rutgers weren’t the worst, but they sure were silly.
The NCAA’s charges against Rutgers were almost all Level II allegations, the second-most serious classification. (Level I is the worst, and there were none of those.) All of the charges were against the school’s previous coaching staff, led by Kyle Flood. Current coach Chris Ash wasn’t named or involved in any of the NCAA’s charges.
The charges varied. Several centered around former defensive back Nadir Barnwell, for whom the NCAA says Flood tried to get special academic treatment. There were a couple of impermissible recruiting charges, plus one that the school didn’t properly report and discipline positive drug tests.
When Kyle Flood first reached out to this unnamed professor, he did so from his personal email account. It was entirely possible that he did so on accident, perhaps sending the email from his phone without realizing which account it was coming from. Of course, it was also possible he did so to purposefully avoid New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act.
Great news! Now we don’t have to wonder which one it was. This is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen committed to a permanent electronic record. It’s like leaving a knife in your carry-on bag at the airport with a note that says “LOL I KNOW THIS ISN’T COOL BUT WHATEVER.”
The NCAA said Flood had told investigators he’d never contacted a professor about a player’s grades before, which is fascinating, because this whole episode unfolded years after Flood became Rutgers’ head coach before 2012, and because he’d been coaching college football since 1993. Anyway, he claimed it was the first time.
NCAA scandals come in all shapes and sizes.
Ideally, if you’re going to get slapped with a bunch of compliance allegations, you’ll at least have won a few games. Ole Miss is in an NCAA mess right now and just had its own Committee on Infractions Hearing earlier this month. But at least the Rebels beat Alabama a few times and gave their fans some thrilling football seasons before everything crashed down spectacularly.
Flood’s Rutgers teams didn’t do that. In two of his four seasons, the Scarlet Knights were at least decent. They won nine games in 2012 and eight in 2014, and they made three bowl games before a 4-8 2015 that led to Flood’s dismissal. It’s easy to bag on Rutgers as a laughingstock, but Flood’s teams were OK. It’s just that now Rutgers is bad, and it was never even that good while it was breaking the rules.
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