The NCAA Violations Committee gave Auburn, Bruce Pearl ease in the case developed from the FBI investigation

When the Justice Department released the results of its investigation into the talent game of basketball more than four years ago, the item that always seemed most alarming was the allegation that Chuck Person, one of the greatest players in basketball history, Auburn returned to the show as an associate. head coach, accepted nearly $100,000 to direct players to a specific financial advisor.

This is not about someone trying to win basketball games by breaking recruiting rules. This allegation, to which he eventually pleaded guilty, has real victims: athletes who are being pressured by someone they trust to take actions that may not be in their favour.

So who do you think is the NCAA’s transgression committee that most severely punishes all of this?

Well, of course, the student-athletes!

THAN: Sports News ‘2021-22 Preseason All-American

Players in the 2020-21 Tigers squad are subject to a post-season ban, a penalty Auburn self-imposed after all players had registered and were no longer able to move in. fight and go to school elsewhere. It’s a shady trick that works to protect the show at the expense of those already in it.

The breach committee also accepted Auburn’s self-imposed scholarship reduction for the previous season and insisted Auburn “reduce the number of scholarships by two” during the four-year probationary period.

Coach Bruce Pearl, who was found by the committee to have “violated the head coach’s responsibility rule” by not adequately supervising Person and “failing to promote an atmosphere of compliance”, was suspended for two games. . That’s all, although Pearl did serve a three-year sentence for the violation during his time as head coach at Tennessee.

Speaking to the breach committee, Vince Nicastro of the Big East Conference said Friday that Pearl’s track record has been reviewed. “It was considered an aggravating factor,” Nicastro said, “and was counted toward Coach Pearl’s penalty.”

One might assume if Pearl’s past records were pristine, the offending committee might have chosen to punish him with a trip to Hawaii.

This person has been given a 10-year sentence for the crime, which basically makes no sense because the odds are extreme for any sports director to hire someone with a felony conviction and only three college coaching season on his resume.

Nothing released from the infringement commission’s notice appears to have any connection to the apparent seriousness of the incident nor its previous harsh punishment for the State of Oklahoma.

In June 2020, the Cowboys were banned for a year after the season because one of their assistants, on the payroll for more than a year and hired by a coach no longer on the show, pleaded guilty to $22,000 bribe. The committee apparently viewed an issue from 2015 in the OK State football program as an exacerbating factor.

So the infringement committee dealt with the Cowboys more than the Auburn for something that happened in another sport, but hit the Auburn basketball with ease despite its case, because of the money involved. , can be considered one of the most serious cases of what has evolved from the operation of the FBI.

The NCAA has used scholarship penalties in an attempt to appear proactive for decades. When recruited to the extreme, like when Southern California football hit 30 scholarships in three years, they can seriously undermine a team’s competitiveness.

THAN: 2022 NBA Mock Draft

Auburn’s punishment was merely aesthetic, and those punished were athletes who did not benefit from a free education. For more than a decade, members of the NCAA and the offending committee have refused to even consider this fact: A scholarship sanction inevitably means someone will be denied the opportunity to get a free education. fees, because the NCAA’s scholarship limit means that the number of such awards is finite. A player denied the opportunity to play for Auburn may find a home at UAB, but then recruiters who may have been playing with the Blazers must look elsewhere. Eventually, that food chain runs out of links.

So the NCAA’s offense committee used this form of sanction out of… well, habit.

Nicastro told Sporting News: “Obviously, it’s a punishment that’s been used in a very standard way in cases like this and other similar cases for a long time. “It was a punishment that was given to the committee by the member because one of the penalties that could be significant in terms of having appropriate consequences for schools is those who break the rules.”

In fact, the heaviest consequences fell on some young men who had absolutely nothing to do with any of these.

And to the five Auburn players in last year’s draw, who are no longer on the show.

Pearl will be back on Auburn’s bench in a week’s time.

Auburn will be back in this year’s NCAA Tournament.