Stanford’s Shaw: Football’s vulnerable
While college basketball waits for the next shoe to drop in the ongoing FBI investigation into bribery and cheating allegations, college football might be next, according to Stanford head coach David Shaw.
“It’s already happening in football,” he said on a Pac-12 coaches’ teleconference. “I don’t think its on the scale of basketball; the money’s not as big. There’s cheating in everything. The biggest thing with the basketball scandal is because the FBI was involved.”
He proposed that the NCAA be given the power to levy substantial fines against schools caught cheating.
“The solution, and nobody wants to hear it, is giving the NCAA more power, not less power,” he said. “There should be severe punishment.”
Fines against universities, rather than limiting scholarships, would be stronger and more judicious than “punishing the kids who ... aren’t even there yet.”
If given such a fine, Shaw said, a school’s officials likely would tell offending coaches that no more cheating would be tolerated, and watchdogs would be instituted to make sure it doesn’t happen.
Such a response would be far more effective than the loss of scholarships, he said. Otherwise, coaches are “going to keep finding a way to skirt the line.”
Paying players has been suggested as a way to keep them from accepting payoffs from coaches. According to Shaw, the idea is “not feasible at all.”
If universities were forced to pay players beyond the cost of scholarships and the limited stipends now provided, he said, the schools couldn’t afford nearly as many varsity sports as they do now.
“You’re going to cause 50 more problems by trying to solve one,” he said.
If a school starts paying football players — there are more than 100 on an FBS roster — “then what’s going to happen is you’re going to lose field hockey, you’re going to lose men’s volleyball, you’re going to lose sand volleyball, all these great sports that young people get a chance to play. That’s not an option.”
College basketball has been severely shaken in recent weeks following the arrests of 10 men, among them four assistant coaches at power-conference schools. They were charged with using hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to influence athletes’ choices of schools, shoe sponsors and agents.
The scandal already has resulted in the firings of Louisville head coach Rick Pitino and athletic director Tom Jurich. The NCAA set up a task force headed by former Secretary of State and Stanford political-science professor Condoleezza Rice to study the inner workings of the sport and try to find solutions.
The group, which includes former Stanford and Cal head coach Mike Montgomery, met for the first time last week. “There are probably coaches and others running a little scared out there,” Montgomery said recently. “And rightly so. Because the FBI’s involved, it’s probably got people rethinking their position on this stuff.”
In court documents, an unidentified coach — referred to only as “Coach-3” — was said to have talked with an Adidas executive about paying a recruit $150,000 for his commitment. On Monday, Miami head coach Jim Larrañaga said he believes he is “Coach-3” although he insisted he has done nothing wrong.
He said he has turned over what he described as thousands of text messages, emails and other materials to the FBI.