This post is about what’s been happening with University of Mississippi’s (Ole Miss) Athletic Department. Apparently, many of the school’s coaches violated the rules and regulations of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). One Football coach falsified ACT scores back in 2010 so that three prospective student athletes could be admitted to the school. The school accepted full responsibility for the violations and fired many of the coaches and boosters, who were wrongfully paying the athletics. They banned their women’s basketball team for a season, reduced football scholarships, cut off campus visits for both football and track and field and on top of that, paid around $160,000 in fines.
Personally, I’m not really interested in football nor am I on any athletics teams but I felt that the school or rather the NCAA, overreacted a little. For one thing, I was intrigued how they never caught the violation of the ACT scores till now, 4 years later, and why the University did not monitor its Athletics Department closely. As we discussed in class, many universities prize their Athletics teams (which suddenly reminds me of how President Gould was adamant on making the Bulldogs mascot her thing.) I also feel that it was an overreaction when the University imposed a postseason ban on their women’s basketball team, when it was actually the football coach who falsified the ACT scores. Perhaps it was because the women athletes were paid for their participation, but then again, is that really a terrible thing? This reminds me of a post I did about paying athletes. What do you guys think of this article?
Link: http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/ole-miss-admits-former-assistant-football-coach-helped-falsify-act-scores/111698
I think it’s really horrible what the football coaches did, and as we discussed in class, these aren’t incidents that happen occasionally, they are unfortunately rampant across American universities participating in the NCAA Division I. I agree with the fact that measures should be taken to punish those responsible for this, but I don’t think the word “overreacted” should be used, because that implies that the crime committed wasn’t all that bad and that we should be more lenient, which in my opinion, is not the case at all. Rather, I think that the choice of punishment could have been a little different; for example, why punish students on the team that have done absolutely nothing wrong, by banning them from playing in the post-season. But on the other hand, after playing all of these dirty, disgusting tricks to put athletic players on the school team, would it really be fair for the team to continue on playing as if nothing wrong has been done? Obviously the firing of the coaches responsible for this mess is a rightful punishment, but to the question as to is punishing the team as a whole the right thing to do, I don’t really know the answer to it, but I don’t think it was an “overreaction” because what was done was extremely low and disgusting and must face harsh measures, but what was decided possibly could have been the wrong choice of punishment.