Nocera Strikes — NCAA — Again

should give this story a read.

Thanks for posting, WW.

Will Nocera write about this? Doesn’t exactly fit his narrative.

NCAA schools are understandably leery of people coming from overseas as it pertains to their eligibility. The sad truth is, they have managed to get it completely wrong.

This definitely needs attention, but to be fair, even the Crimson article which Nocera links in his article explains this:

"The NCAA is trying to get a handle on players coming from Europe," Delaney-Smith says. "As you can imagine, a lot of those players do abuse the system and stay back to gain an athletic advantage." [My emphasis]

So despite the anger being directed at the NCAA here, even Harvard’s coach seems to be aware that the rule is there for a good reason. The problem is, it is poorly conceived.

Also, Nocera isn’t interested in the truth, only pushing his agenda. The truth is that the NCAA isn’t buying the argument that her additional year was purely for academic reasons. Just as we saw in the Boatright case, where despite Nocera’s reporting that the only issue was a plane ticket, it turns out that he either didn’t have access to all the facts, or didn’t care about them:

When the investigators saw a series of cash deposits in her bank account, they demanded to know the source of the money. She told them: Friends had given her money so that she and her children could have a joyful Christmas. The investigators said they didn’t believe her; they felt sure that she must have gotten the money from an unscrupulous sports agent or some other party outlawed by the N.C.A.A.

It turns out that she took over $8,000 in cash and impermissible benefits from “two individuals linked to nonscholastic basketball and professional sports.”

Thankfully, they granted Ryan immunity, after his mother and he agreed to be completely forthcoming about the entire affair. By doing the right thing, the NCAA saw their way to lenient. This entire affair was very similar to what happened to Renardo Sidney, with the exception that the Boatright’s mother decided to do the right thing for her son and be honest where the Sidneys dissembled.

I think it’s fine that Nocera is criticizing the NCAA, there is plenty there to criticize. What bothers me about one-man crusades like this is that he doesn’t seem to be interested in finding out all the facts before launching his critical columns. Of course, he isn’t alone – I’m as guilty of that as the next guy, especially when I’ve made up my mind – I’m interested in burying Caesar, not praising him.

But I’m also not willing to accept uncritically charges of bad faith against an easy target. Why did the NCAA make the ruling in Temi Fagbenle case? We don’t know, but here is something that gives us a clue:

“I started around three years ago,” Fagbenle said of her tenure in basketball. “This would be near the end of the third year, and I started playing tennis actually. And basically it wasn’t really working out like me and my family wanted and we had a talk and we figured out that basketball would be the way to get into college and get a good education in the states.”

Based on this quote, I think you can see why the NCAA might question whether that extra year was academic or athletic. She has only been playing basketball for three years, and they clearly saw it as a vehicle to get Fagbenle into college.

To be fair, there is also evidence that it was in fact an academic decison – after all, getting into Harvard is rather more demanding than going to, say, Kentucky, from an academic standpoint, and that same article emphasizes her focus on academics.

But with all this said, we really don’t know the basis for the NCAA’s decision – why did they decide Fagbenle made a basketball decision rather than an academic one? We simply don’t know, but as in the Boatright case, not knowing all the facts considered lead us to incorrect conclusions, and no matter how well-meaning people are, the claims they make about these type of decisions are often demonstrably untrue.

100% disclosure of all dealings with all parties by the entity known as the NCAA. Make all of the information public in the interests of appeasing not only the fans, but member institutions who might be in the process of dealing with similar situations.