NCAA Ruling Affects Future Michigan Football Hearing In August

David Brandon can rest a little bit easier as an interesting bit of news was unveiled today.  The NCAA Infractions Committee handed down a ruling to the Southeast Missouri State men's basketball team in regards to an appeal of multiple violations surrounding its program. 

The team, formerly headed by coach Scott Edgar, was found guilty of a variety of different violations, including but not limited to: impermissible summer conditioning.  

Today's ruling is important for Michigan fans because the case of Southeast Missouri State basketball is similar to that of Rich Rodriguez and Michigan Wolverines Football.  

As in the case with Michigan, Edgar and coaches were apparently present during summer conditioning and voluntary practice.  However, their case was a little more extreme as the athletes were required to report missed voluntary times to head personnel, which is clearly a violation of NCAA regulations. 

However, just because the circumstances are different, that doesn't mean the overall ruling doesn't apply.  In the NCAA's ruling against the coach's appeal, they left a  footnote as an explanation of its stance on violations of regulations regarding CARA: 

"The presence of a coach before or after an otherwise voluntary workout may be inadvertent, or occur with no intent by the coach to confirm the student-athletes' attendance or to otherwise engage the student-athlete in countable athletically related activities.  Thus, while this committee does not set aside this finding, we note that this general statement in the report should not be construed as the mandatory interpretation of the relevant NCAA legislation without reference to coaches' intent and other pertinent facts in a given case."

What does this mean? 

Basically, if a coach is present for a voluntary workout, but can prove that such presence was not intended to give the effect of a a workout being non-voluntary, the NCAA may not bring forth punishment.  

For example, if a coach runs onto the field to notify a player of an emergency, he doesn't become subject to NCAA rules violations.  Of course, the situation doesn't have to be that dire either. 

The NCAA is like the Supreme Court of college athletics.  So although this ruling doesn't particularly have to do with Michigan, this August the committee will likely draw upon its statements from this incident in its review of Michigan's self-imposed sanctions.  

It is highly unlikely Michigan will try to appeal its recently handed down sanctions upon the grounds of the Southeast Missouri State basketball ruling.  However, in August, if the NCAA decides to hand down further punishments to Michigan, it could appeal based on these criteria. 

Furthermore, with this ruling, expectations of additional sanctions for Michigan go from an unlikely occurrence to a downright nearly impossible event. 

There is no doubt when the sanctions committee wrote this note it had Michigan and its future hearing in mind.