You have it all. One minute you’re a star high school athlete and highly touted college prospect. You finish your senior season and with such raw talent you get to choose from only the best of universities. Being a competitor with dreams of winning a national title, you pick a school with a winning tradition and legitimate potential to win it all in the near future. With hard work and dedication, you can see things falling into place until suddenly your team is banned from appearing in a bowl game. For two years.
Scenarios such as this happen all too often, but why should they affect the athletes and put all of their hard work to waste? It is a shame that athletes have to go through this and some day the rules should change that will instead penalize the athletic directors and the specific athletes actually breaking the rules. This will surely bring more justice to the situation than punishing the remaining hardworking, honest student-athletes.
It is the athletic director’s job to run the various sports programs at his school and make sure that the programs are adhering to the rules set forth by the NCAA. The infractions made that end up getting schools in trouble with the NCAA directly reflect on the athletic director. How could an athletic director let these kinds of things happen? All operations in the athletic department must be overseen by him and he must take responsibility for any mistakes made. Even if a rule was broken by an athlete without the athletic director’s knowledge, it is still his fault for not educating the athlete enough about doing things that will put the team in jeopardy.
In June 2010 after a 4-year investigation it was announced that the NCAA would be imposing sanctions on the USC football team for "lack of institutional control" which would result in the forfeiting of all wins which included Reggie Bush as an ineligible player, losing their 2005 national championship, losing 30 scholarships over three years, and a 2-year ban on postseason play.
The forfeiture of wins makes sense. Bush was receiving gifts and thus was no longer eligible making him an unfair advantage for the Trojans against other teams. The erasing of the national championship also makes sense. Even the loss of scholarships somewhat makes sense (though 30 is a very harsh number). The program abused their powers and broke key rules that should be followed by every school. But the 2-year ban on postseason play? How does that make sense?
How is it that Bush, a pro football player who broke the rules that erased everything his teammates worked so hard for and Mike Garrett, the athletic director who oversaw the program at that time, are untouched by the NCAA while the young players at USC are forced to sit out of the postseason for two years after the majority of them did nothing wrong.
Although Garrett was later fired and Bush’s image was removed from USC’s campus, what does it matter? Garrett was fired by the school, not punished by the NCAA and Bush is still making millions in the NFL. Something tells me that these two are not exactly hurting for money. The people who are hurting, however, are the young athletes who were lured into a school that can no longer enjoy playing in a bowl game. A college football career can go by fast and with many players leaving early for the NFL these days, 2 years can be a heartbreaker. There are many problems with the NCAA and BCS these days, let’s start looking out for our honest student athletes and fix this one for them.
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