3 Reasons NCAA Should Go After Coaches Instead of Schools

Former coaches continue to haunt the University of Tennessee athletic department.

Willie Mack Garza, an assistant for former coach Lane Kiffin at both Tennessee and USC, reportedly wired $1,500 to talent scout Willie Lyles while at Tennessee in 2009. The money was used to buy plane tickets for prospect Lache Seastrunk and his mother. Nobody within the Tennessee athletic department has been proven to have had any involvement in this incident.

With Kiffin leaving multiple secondary violations behind in Knoxville and the dismissal of basketball coach Bruce Pearl for NCAA violations, news of this potential violation is obviously not what Tennessee needs. It is also not what the program deserves.

Here are three reasons why violations committed by coaches should stay with the coaches and not their schools.

No Reason to Punish Innocent Players

It makes no sense to impose sanctions that punish the players when a coach has done wrong. The players should only be punished if they are directly involved with the wrongful actions of a coach.

For example, take the recent problems the Ohio State football team has had. The NCAA has yet to prove the university’s administration or athletic department had any involvement in Jim Tressel’s decision to withhold information about his players trading memorabilia for tattoos.

The school already fired Tressel, and the players involved were suspended for multiple games. In that case, everybody who did wrong was punished. Imposing a bowl ban or a heavy loss of scholarships would only punish innocent players.

The same goes for Tennessee in this most recent situation. There is no point in punishing the current Volunteer players for what an assistant coach, who was acting on his own, did in 2009.

Athletic Departments Must Be Able to Trust the NCAA

Just because a coach committed a violation does not mean the athletic department is automatically at fault. And it makes no sense to punish a school’s administration or athletic department unless they can be proven guilty.

The reason the NCAA cannot punish schools based solely on what a coach may have done is because those schools need to be able to trust the NCAA. If a school’s compliance department reports one of their coaches to the NCAA and ends up getting hit with major sanctions, then in the future those departments will instead choose to hide violations from the NCAA.

Punishing the School Will Not Stop Coaches from Cheating

The best way to send a message to coaches who cheat is to hit them directly, and that means show-cause penalties that virtually blackball them from getting other college coaching jobs.

The NCAA did this to Bruce Pearl, and will likely do it to Jim Tressel. Pearl won’t be anywhere near a college basketball court until at least 2014 and Tressel is probably done coaching football.

The NCAA will never be able to scare all coaches from cheating. But coaches will be less likely to commit violations if the NCAA makes it clear that they, and not the institutions they represent, will be severely punished.