Boise State Firing Athletic Director Amid NCAA Allegations

Boise State athletic director Gene Bleymaier is scheduled to be fired September 8 as the NCAA investigates infractions in several sports involving lodging for new student-athletes. Here’s some reaction.

BSU football coach Chris Petersen:

Suddenly outgoing Boise State athletics director Gene Bleymaier might be about to get fired, but his legacy was long ago secured. You see, Bleymaier was the guy that dreamed up the Broncos’ blue field more than 25 years ago. And college football was never the same.

Ducks do not actually crash into the field, as has often been rumored. But opponents have gone to extreme lengths to prepare for it, and the Mountain West has essentially barred the Broncos from wearing blue uniforms while playing on it. And sports announcers have spent way too much time reveling in calling it “the Smurf Turf.”

Longtime Boise State athletic director Gene Bleymaier will be let go by university president Bob Kustra in the midst of an ongoing NCAA investigation into secondary and major infractions across football, men’s and women’s tennis and men’s and women’s track and field. Here’s Kustra’s statement following the decision:

No incident in particular is cited as having sparked the firing, though an NCAA inquiry into the dreaded “lack of institutional control” tends to spook universities. The school’s athletic department is accused of allowing impermissable housing, food and transportation among other allegations. Bleymaier’s firing could mean that Boise State expects to be hit hard. Stay tuned.

While the scandals in college football have recently been dominated by Southern California, Ohio State and West Virginia, the NCAA’s proverbial Eye of Sauron‎ leaves no program ignored, and as such turned its stare to Idaho, where even Chris Petersen’s Boise State Broncos cannot escape the Committee on Infractions.

Boise State received and NCAA inquiry for a “lack of institutional control” in early May after 22 violations in three sports over a span of five years. On Friday, the Broncos’ meeting with the NCAA Committee on Infractions came.

If the NCAA scandals surrounding USC, Ohio State, and Auburn were all cautionary tales of a lack of oversight regarding compliance and student-athletes, then we now have the polar opposite of that in the case of Boise State’s tempest-in-a-teapot of a situation concerning their self-reported violations.

Boise initially self-reported incoming student-athletes sleeping on the floors and couches of standing student-athletes in order to attend voluntary summer workouts to the NCAA concerning the 2005-2008 seasons. Boise coaches then worked out lodging ahead of time for athletes who wanted to participate in voluntary summer workouts the following year, and had the athletes pay full value for rent the following summer, believing they were in compliance with NCAA rules.

Turns out there are actually coaches who don’t whistle a happy tune while lying on their NCAA compliance forms. One of them, former Boise State track assistant Amy Christoffersen, is responsible for a 2008 warning-shot email that snowballed into the Broncos’ current infractions predicament. The story serves as a friendly reminder that violations happen in every athletics department, and that it doesn’t always take football players flashing ill-gotten rims to find them.

↵

↵Handy snack-sized packets of pertinent information available at the above link, if you enjoy these sorts of things.

Another fun tidbit from Idaho Statesman, concerning the NCAA investigation into improper benefits at Boise State: Those between-term sleepovers arranged by coaches to facilitate players staying on campus for workouts constitute a major violation! Neato!

↵

The Boise State athletics department has put a fast turnaround on the recent NCAA inquiry that handed down a charge of “lack of institutional control” over minor violations on the part of the football team and track team, and major violations from the tennis program. It’s a common practice for schools to self-impose penalties in advance of the NCAA actually handing down sanctions, in an effort for universities to control their own destinies, in part, and to get out in front of any looming PR battles. Also common: Ladling on the suffering so the Committee on Infractions won’t even be tempted to punish one’s program further, and here, the Broncos are aiming high.

What this means for our beautiful game: For just under $5000 worth of violations in the form of illegal housing (that in the form of football players shacking up with other football players over vacations so they could continue working out with the team), in addition to collecting repayment from players, the football Broncos will forfeit three scholarships and six preseason practices between the next two seasons. Thus is the scourge of couch-hopping banished from Boise. We hope you’ve all learned a very serious lesson here.

There’s really nothing more enjoyable in the offseason than a good hot mess of ridiculously overblown NCAA violations, is there? This May, with camps winding down and spring games dwindling, we turn to Boise State for entertainment, and they do not disappoint: The Broncos have been slapped with the dreaded “lack of institutional control” label for 22 violations in three sports over a span of five years (or, as CBS’ Bryan Fischer quips, less than Ohio State averages in a single season).

The official university athletics website has the full text of the NCAA inquiry and the university’s response, but just to get to the point as it pertains to football: The secondary violations involved summer housing being arranged for athletes so they could continue to participate in on-campus workouts with teammates, with the out-of-towners bunking in extra bedrooms and on couches, for a grand total of just under $80 (that’s eighty dollars) worth of extra benefits for each of 63 players. No, for real, that’s it. Amateur statuses, being endangered all over the place! Additional major violations on the part of the tennis program are what earns the university the institutional control smackdown, but parsing the statement from BSU president Bob Kustra, you get the feeling he’s rolling his eyes a litle: