NCAA Makes Big Noise Against a Small Sport

Bigfoot NCAA stomped on Westwood on Tuesday.

What was left was, at first look, potential devastation for UCLA, one of the country’s most respected and storied athletic programs.

But in the aftermath of big, bold headlines and explosive words such as probation and lack of institutional control and death penalty, a further look at the debris is in order.

The Bruins have been told, because of some blatant shuffling of scholarship numbers in women’s softball and women’s soccer, that, among other things, they are one more big misstep from becoming Southern Methodist. That’s the school that committed a repeat major blunder and was left without a football program in 1987-88.

But if you question further, even a second major blunder isn’t an automatic death penalty. That would be subject to review and discussion and meetings and interminable politics, all specialties of the NCAA.

And don’t expect it to happen, barring Bob Toledo’s front line all showing up with new Porsches. To make that kind of big hit against major sports at UCLA, one of the NCAA’s biggest breadwinners, is what the NCAA does worst, or not at all.

That’s what feels so hypocritical about Tuesday’s sanctions. On this one, the NCAA looks as though it lit a bonfire with a blow torch.

One of the NCAA’s most ardent critics, Jerry Tarkanian, who obviously has an ax to grind against the NCAA and who obviously won’t be first in line when they count the basketball coaching saints in heaven, nevertheless summed up best what the NCAA does when it comes to taking on the big guys and their big programs--Kentucky, USC, Notre Dame, Michigan, Ohio State, etc.

“If the NCAA ever caught UCLA cheating in basketball,” Tarkanian said, “they’d probably be so angry they’d put Northridge on probation.”

Tuesday’s action appeared to be lots of NCAA sound and fury, meant to signal lots of sound and fury.

To be clear, this is not a hometown newspaper wailing over the local school being wronged. UCLA, and its former senior associate director of athletics, Judy Holland, did wrong and were caught. This paper ran many of the first stories on these potential infractions.

The rules were bent, and bent by people in the highest authority, leaving the playing fields unleveled. And that’s what the NCAA is there for: to return the field to level.

But how much more serious was this than the sister of the top basketball point guard in the country, a recently hired UCLA employee, buying with money orders a car registered to UCLA’s head basketball coach and driven by his son?

The Bruins were cleared on the car situation and put on the brink of the death penalty for softball malfeasance. Go figure.

And would the same school that so recently demonstrated tight-fisted institutional control by ousting Jim Harrick for repeated lies about his expense account now need to be put under deep scrutiny for institutional control?

And why was there such a variance of opinion on this?

The Pacific 10, when it submitted its findings on the case to the NCAA, did so without citing any “ethical violations” on Holland’s part. One committee of the NCAA that reviewed the case did not find it to be a major violation. Yet another, the Infractions Committee, said it was major and took it a step further in citing Holland for “ethical violations.”

Said one Pac-10 official: “We felt this case with Judy Holland was an aberration. We knew her, and her record of going by the book on everything. Apparently, the NCAA did not.”

Buried under all this debris is Holland, who lost her athletic department job two years ago shortly after this investigation began and now works at UCLA in student affairs. Some say that her actions in allowing scholarships to be shuffled around were so unheard of in collegiate sports that it was only her long and meritorious record as a pioneer and champion of women’s sports that allowed her to retain some employment at all at UCLA.

Others feel that she has done so much for women’s athletics in this country, including her leadership of the annual Honda Awards that honor the nation’s best collegiate female athletes, that it is in the best interest of everybody to forgive, forget and keep her active.

Yes, UCLA got stomped pretty good Tuesday. But maybe the long-term result will be mostly bruises, which would seem a slightly better fit to the crime than currently deemed.