Kentucky Basketball: Does The Cam Newton Decision Give Hope To Kanter?

We’re Indestructable
Determination that is incorruptable
From the other side a terror to behold
Annihilation will be unavoidable

i will be Roy Rogers,HUH!!!!!!!!!!

Did I mention that I’m 6-6, 260? Poor horse.

And from the ’70’s, “Oh… right on, man”.

I’ve been an extremely good girl this year and I plan on leaving incredibly yummy cookies for Santa as well as some carrots for his reindeer, so maybe he’ll grant our wish, eh? I usually get what I want, and I’m hoping this year isn’t an exception. : )

Part of the Sidney ruling was based on his lying the NCAA investigators. They essentially added the extra year to the rulebook suspension solely for that reason.

One year suspension would be an interesting play on the NCAA’s part, but I expect they’ll either uphold the initial ruling or sit him for basically the out of conference schedule.

If, as has been the popular argument lately, the NCAA rulings are solely based on money, it’ll be a 30% of the season suspension as a means of capturing European interest.

Too much loot to lose on the BCS outcome and the turnoff by football fans nation wide and TV ratings taking a huge hit if Auburn was without Cam. Its all about the money on his ruling.

Glory be!! Would never have guessed that Turkish Lira was that valuable. Boy they have come up in the world.

Here. 3+ months is simply wrong. Once the NCAA had the info, they took less than a week to make an initial ruling.

Further, let’s not forget that the majority of the investigative procedures done for both Wall and Kanter were done by UK and the NCAA working together. You cannot simply blame the NCAA for the length of time without blaming the UK staff (and I assume you wouldn’t want to do that?).

That said, Wall’s decision was made before the first game, so there’s not much to complain about – it was certainly faster than the Selby ruling so we can’t accuse the NCAA of favoritism towards Kansas. Kanter’s decision was made before it actually cost him time from the program – the reinstatement committee will give him a 30% suspension as the most lenient decision they make. He’d still be sitting right now either way.

As for the Cam Newton situation, I would frankly be surprised if they hadn’t reinstated him. Auburn understands that it’s season rests on Cam Newton, but they were required by NCAA rule to mark him ineligible. The NCAA made it clear to Auburn that they would be willing to rule him eligible, pending the final results of their investigation (weren’t we all complaining about the NCAA even investigating this kid last week?), but Auburn would have to risk forfeiting the season. It’s a risk Auburn was willing to take, and a logical move on the part of the NCAA. Besides that, I really don’t think one could seriously refer to Auburn’s history in football as being treated special: see 1993 and 2004 as examples.

They have been done looking into it for a month. Kentucky could have accepted their ruling. The time between ruling and appeal is 100% on UK, and the time frame for appeal was pretty much standard.

I think all this complaining about 3 months to look into the matter is just not justified. It took them a year to formally rule on Sidney, and there are other examples. Kanter was a complicated case, and they didn’t get all the information in until around late September, as I have explained several times, all of which you have apparently ignored.

Cam Newton’s case was special. It needed to be expedited for several really good reasons, including how wrong it is to have something like this hanging over a school that will be playing for the BCS championship, and the fact that the kid is a Heisman candidate. It was also easy to expedite, as the facts were easily available compared to Kanter, as I explained before.

but you keep buying into the ncaa is doing the best they can bs for all teams and everyone else CAN SEE that certain teams get favorable treatment

No, “certain teams” don’t get favorable treament. This is the sort of conspiracy thinking that makes people scoff at UK fans so often, which is why I wish it would stop.

We need to lose the paranoia about the NCAA, it is counterproductive. The NCAA may be a bureaucratic nightmare, but they absolutely do the best they can with how they are currently constituted. We can talk all day about their lack of efficiency and consistency of their rulings, which is certainly fair and justified, but suggesting that they favor some schools over the other is just plain incorrect.

Once again we agree about the NCAA. They also favor certain PEOPLE.

What gets me about this is Enes was a minor when all this took place, while Cam was an adult and had played at Florida for two years. On top of that Cam and his family were American citizens and hopefully knew a ‘tiny bit’ more when it came to the rules of the NCAA. Enes and his family tried to do the ‘right thing’ with Enes not even being an adult. Cam and his family (without Cam’s knowledge of course) tried to make a substantial profit off his abilities. Makes me want to gag trying to compare the honesty of the two different cases. This should be a no-brainer and should be ruled in Enes’s favor immediately. A foreign minor and his family vs a more savy adult American family.

Though I agree that the NCAA could use a good dose of public relations to explain their decisions more clearly, I also think that fans do their “jobs” a bit too well when it comes to NCAA rulings. The ability to rationalize why the NCAA would rule something against your team or in favor of another team goes out the window with a fanatic. As we all know, UK has the best fan(atics) in the world.

(I am not saying, however, that the NCAA is infallible.)

1. They can’t “follow the law.” They can only follow the rules. Stare decisis and similar legal doctrines cannot apply because the NCAA is not a legal organization. Stare decisis, for example, justifies standing by a wrong decision just because that matter has reached a certain maturity. Would you have the NCAA do that in the name of consistency? I hope not.

2. I think the NCAA would argue that their decisions do make sense. I grant you that many of them have an alternative argument that may seem stronger than than the one that eventually rules, but unfortunately, that doesn’t imply impropriety or unethical behavior.

3. What you and I think “should” matter to the NCAA is really not all that important, is it? After all, we don’t live and breathe the stuff, or have access to all the facts. Keep in mind that what the public eventually gets is just a sanitized version of the events, and the resultant reasoning. I have not seen any case recently for which I could not defend the NCAA’s position. The problem is, many people desperately want the NCAA to be evil and wrong because of the nature of the organization. I just reject that notion utterly.

4. In the Newton case, the NCAA has taken the position, apparently, that the sins of the father cannot be visited upon an otherwise innocent son. Believe it or not, that concept is enshrined in the United States Constitution. I have a hard time faulting them for that.

5. Frankly, I see a lot of “home cooking” in most people’s complaints about the NCAA, mostly things like: a) the process is too slow; b) the rulings seem arbitrary (this is 99% demonstrably false); c) the NCAA doesn’t care about the althlete (can’t say that after the Newton ruling), etc.

6. Your claim that they don’t apply the rules evenly is just not really defensible. They often seem to apply them inconsistently on the surface, but if you look in depth at their reasoning, you will usually find that they are much more consistent than you claim. The thing is, they look at each situation individually, and often, details that seem insignificant to us wind up being the ones upon which the ultimate outcome turns. That is probably a good thing, but even if we consider it bad, it is not indefensible as so many seem to claim. I don’t really believe that their inconsistency is due to indifference, and I’d be surprised if you really believe that.

In sum, most of the complaints we see from fans about the NCAA are complaints based on either personal bias or reflexive rejection of authority. As an organization, there are many that are less forthcoming and transparent, in the final analysis, than the NCAA. That doesn’t mean they are perfect, and you will never hear me say that — their concept of amateurism is positively antebellum, they are understaffed, and their regulations are ridiculously Byzantine in their complexity. I could go on and on.

But this reactionary tendency to assail everything the NCAA does is just that — reactionary.

But all opinions are not created equal.

For instance, having the opinion that the United States is actually run by space aliens is an opinion, is it not? But if someone puts that forth without factual support, it is quite likely both you and I would hold the person putting it forth in low esteem.

That’s what I’m trying to say here. Having an opinion that the NCAA is “criminal” is fine, but it shouldn’t be made in a vacuum, because it is the kind of charge that requires support to be believable.

So if you’d rather me just not take you seriously, fine. I respect your right to hold that opinion, and I reserve my right to question its rational basis of it until you give me one to examine.

I wouldn’t want to be on the other side in a court room with you.

You and your Daughter have fun at the game tomorrow in Chapel Hill and don’t let those Tar Heel fans intimidate you – wear your ‘Free Enes’ Tee shirt and a BB jacket.

WOW! That short but effective discourse did not come from any TV show; that’s for sure. Your name, as I’m sure you know, is derived from the Latin “Patrician” which means “noble”. Thanks Patricia.

… the NCAA does have a process for submitting new information on appeal. So can we now agree that it is a de novo review in fact if not in form?

Moving on to your commentary comparing Kanter and Newton. I have already taken the very same position in an earlier post, and trust me, that is a position I would feel comfortable defending.

But since you have decided to take that position for the sake of this comment, let me take the NCAA’s side.

Intent was not the basis of the Newton ruling, in the first place. The NCAA’s position is that Cam Newton was unaware of his father’s schemes, his decision was not based on them, and therefore he committed no rules violation that compromised his eligibility, even if his father did commit a rules violation.

What this amounts to is not forcing the son to pay for the foolishness of his father, especially since the son had no knowledge of Cecil Newton’s scheme. This seems fair and equitable to me, assuming that there is either evidence for, or the NCAA are convinced, that Cam Newton in fact did not know.

While it’s easy, and I have argued, that you could apply a similar dynamic to Kanter, let’s look at the other side of the equation. While the NCAA rules describe both the Kanter and Selby or even Sidney situations as a case of improper benefits, the Kanter matter is different in context. Kanter was paid by a professional team, and his family, and arguably he, accepted that money in violation of the NCAA rules. Those are facts.

Intent was not an issue with Newton, it was not an issue with Selby, and it was not an issue with Sidney. If intent had mattered, Sidney would have been permanently ineligible, because he tried to cover up the money by lying to the NCAA. That is a clear intent to professionalize, in my opinion.

So the NCAA has ruled that Kanter violated the rules and is a professional. That isn’t what the rules explicitly say, but that’s how the NCAA interpreted that specific set of rules which deals with playing for a professional team and are being interpreted for the first time in the Kanter matter. In my opinion, that would be a perfectly logical reading of that set of rules, even considering the Cam Newton decision. The only way the two cases would be directly similar is if young Kanter did not know he was being paid, and nobody has suggested that.

If the Newton case says anything, it is that the student-athlete’s personal knowledge and actions regarding the rules matter the most. It was Enes Kanter’s responsibility, not that of his parents, to make sure he was eligible and committed no violations.

Finally, stare decisis is not a desirable doctrine for the NCAA to apply. As I explained earlier, the doctrine of stare decisis is designed to provide legal stability, and at law is only applied after the decisions have remained unchanged for significant lengths of time. The courts do not apply stare decisis to every single decision, and rightly so. The principle itself does not speak to the fairness or rightness of a particular decision. Rather, it tries to produce stability by allowing decided matters not to be constantly re-litigated with diverse outcomes. By stare decisis, bad decisions can and have become the law of the land simply by dint of their longevity, not their actual basis in law or regulation.

I think the de novo standard is the right standard for the NCAA to apply to appeals. I think, as a general principle, the NCAA has come up with some standard practices that are not in the rulebook, like the suspension length based on the amount of impermissible benefits taken. The NCAA would be perfectly within it’s rights to permanently make ineligible any athlete who had taken any amount of money for sports participation. They chose, fairly in my view, to set up a tiered system that allows these kinds of errors to be corrected and amateur status restored.

The bottom line: The Kanter case has no precedent to follow, and by no means is Newton that precedent. As such, it is a landmark ruling that will inform, but not constrain, future similar cases.

I want you to know that this is not the position I would prefer to take, but since you took the opposite, I think it’s necessary for me to demonstrate that there is another side to this debate, and that side has a case.

… that their judgment is always poor? I don’t.

If you can explain to me in what way the NCAA aren’t logical, I’d be happy to debate that.

Doing what is right.

I know I will be vilified for this, but I will say it anyway. The NCAA is an institution of regulatory status in this country. It is made up of it’s member schools which gives it a “private” status. Meaning you have to be a member to belong.

All of the NCAA power it holds is as a direct result of making up it’s own rules as it went along in an effort to regulate fair play both on and off the field of athletics. But it was STARTED as a Regulatory body by then President Theodore Roosevelt. It’s intent was to protect the student athlete. They were supposed to do what is necessary for them. Then money got involved. The NCAA has not been the same since. And whenever and wherever money is involved there is corruption. Another one of those nasty facts we keep mentioning.

And corruption by nature makes anything that organization does suspect. Period. Call it conspiracy theory if you like, I care not for anyone elses criticism. It is a fact. Which is supported by decades and centuries of evidence. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The NCAA has far too much money and too much power to not be corrupt.