Without which they could never have won the big hacky-sack showdown with MIT, no doubt. 

Some of the violations resulted from Caltech’s system in which students attend classes for several weeks before deciding which ones they want to take, and then formally registering for them.  This technically meant athletes were not enrolled as full-time students at the start of each semester.  In other cases, students participated in athletics when they were not in good academic standing.  The problems were exacerbated by the usual “lack of institutional control” that prevails at jock schools like Caltech.

The penalties Caltech incurred were far from trivial:

• Public reprimand and censure.

• Three years of probation from July 12, 2012, through July 11, 2015.

• A 2012-13 postseason ban for the sports of men’s and women’s track and field; men’s and women’s cross country; women’s swimming; baseball; men’s and women’s fencing; men’s soccer; men’s water polo; men’s basketball; and men’s and women’s tennis. . . . (Self-imposed by the university)

• Vacation of all wins and individual records earned when ineligible student-athletes participated. (Self-imposed by the university)

• A financial penalty of $5,000. (Self-imposed by the university)

• Elimination of off-campus recruiting activities for the 2012-13 academic year. (Self-imposed by the university)

And while some of these have a Brer Rabbit quality (e.g. the men’s basketball team recently won its first conference game in 26 years, so the postseason ban will not bite very hard), it just goes to show that the NCAA’s rules are sometimes so complicated that even the geniuses at Caltech can’t figure them out.

So writes Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post, the last person to interview Paterno before his death:

Joe Paterno, at the end, showed more interest in his legacy than Jerry Sandusky’s victims

Joe Paterno was a liar, there’s no doubt about that now. He was also a cover-up artist. If the Freeh report is correct in its summary of the Penn State child molestation scandal, the public Paterno of the last few years was a work of fiction. In his place is a hubristic, indictable hypocrite.

In the last interview before his death, Paterno insisted as strenuously as a dying man could that he had absolutely no knowledge of a 1998 police inquiry into child molestation accusations against his assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky. This has always been the critical point in assessing whether Paterno and other Penn State leaders enabled Sandusky’s crimes.

If Paterno knew about ’98, then he wasn’t some aging granddad who was deceived, but a canny and unfeeling power broker who put protecting his reputation ahead of protecting children.

If he knew about ’98, then he understood the import of graduate assistant Mike McQueary’s distraught account in 2001 that he witnessed Sandusky assaulting a boy in the Penn State showers.

If he knew about ’98, then he also perjured himself before a grand jury.

Guilty.

Paterno didn’t always give lucid answers in his final interview conducted with The Washington Post eight days before his death, but on this point he was categorical and clear as a bell. He pled total, lying ignorance of the ’98 investigation into a local mother’s claim Sandusky had groped her son in the shower at the football building. How could Paterno have no knowledge of this, I asked him?

“Nobody knew,” he said.

Everybody knew.

Never heard a rumor?

“I never heard a thing,” he said.

He heard everything.

“If Jerry’s guilty, nobody found out till after several incidents.”

Not a whisper? How is that possible?

Paterno’s account of himself is flatly contradicted in damning detail by ex FBI-director Louis Freeh’s report. In a news conference Thursday, Freeh charged that Paterno, along with athletic director Timothy Curley, university president Graham Spanier and vice president Gary Schultz, engaged in a cover-up, “an active agreement of concealment.”

The rest here.

So writes Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Sun-Times:

No football for a school that knowingly allowed the child abuse to continue for years.

The destruction of the campus statue honoring a coach who was more worried about his program’s reputation than protecting victims from a serial sexual predator.

Those are the raw, visceral thoughts of someone who has just seen the Freeh Report, as damning a document as you’ll ever find. And I don’t think those raw, visceral thoughts are going to change much over the next hours, days, months or years.

Prison for former university president Graham Spanier, former vice president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley.

An indelible black mark that should bleed all over everything Joe Paterno accomplished as a football coach at Penn State. A statue that should be reduced to bits of bronze.

An empty stadium on Saturdays in State College, Pa., for two years as punishment for a school that protected the powerful and itself at the expense of young boys who were being confronted with evil incarnate.

Jerry Sandusky will spend the rest of his life rotting in a prison cell and pondering the afterlife. But the people who could have and should have stopped him deserve cots in a federal penitentiary, too.

There has been a lot of noise from the Penn State faithful that Paterno didn’t know the extent of Sandusky’s actions. The Freeh Report, which was released Thursday morning, was clear that Paterno did know that Sandusky had been accused of molesting boys, and besides going to his athletic director, did nothing to ensure that his former defensive coordinator would be locked up.

The rest here.

New York Times:

The most senior officials at Penn State University failed for more than a decade to take any steps to protect the children victimized by Jerry Sandusky, the longtime lieutenant to head football coach Joe Paterno, according to an independent investigation of the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the university last fall.

“Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims,” said Louis J. Freeh, the former federal judge and director of the F.B.I. who oversaw the investigation. “The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized.”

Freeh’s investigation — which took seven months and involved more than 400 interviews and the review of more than 3.5 million documents — accuses Paterno, the university’s former president and others of deliberately hiding facts about Sandusky’s sexually predatory behavior over the years.

“The facts are the facts,” Freeh said of Paterno. “He was an integral part of the act to conceal.”

One new and central finding of the Freeh investigation is that Paterno, who died in January, knew as far back as 1998 that there were concerns Sandusky might be behaving inappropriately with children. It was then that the campus police investigated a claim by a mother that her son had been molested by Sandusky in a shower at Penn State.

Paterno, through his family, insisted after Sandusky’s arrest that he never knew anything about the 1998 case. But Freeh’s report asserts that Paterno not only knew of the investigation, but followed it closely. Local prosecutors ultimately decided not to charge Sandusky, and Paterno did nothing.

Paterno failed to take any action, the investigation found, “even though Sandusky had been a key member of his coaching staff for almost 30 years and had an office just steps away from Mr. Paterno’s.”

The investigation also presented evidence that in the wake of the 1998 case, top university officials contemplated the possibility that Sandusky could be a serial pedophile. A second boy, according to notes taken by a university vice president, Gary Schultz, described actions similar to what had happened to the first boy, including Sandusky hugging him from behind in the shower. Schultz wrote in his notes: “Is this opening of Pandora’s box? Other children?”

“In order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity,” the most powerful leaders of Penn State University, Freeh’s group said, “repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities, the board of trustees, the Penn State community and the public at large.”

The investigation’s findings doubtless will have significant ramifications — for Paterno’s legacy, for the university’s legal liability as it seeks to compensate Sandusky’s victims, and perhaps for the wider world of major college athletics.

The rest here.

From the Washington Post live-blog of the report:

Freeh report: ‘Total and consistent disregard’ for safety and welfare of Sandusky victims 

Next step: What will the NCAA do in terms of sanctions?

via The Daily Beast:

Paterno is lucky to have died last January at the age of 85.

Otherwise, based on new information from a CNN story by Susan Candiotti, he would be facing possible indictment for perjury. Along with former Penn State University president Graham Spanier. Along with two high-ranking former Penn State officials who have already been indicted by the Pennsylvania attorney general on charges of lying to a state grand jury in the case of predatory animal Jerry Sandusky.

When told originally in February of 2001 that Sandusky had been seen with a child in a shower stall in the Penn State football locker room, Paterno, the ultimate Iron Man of Penn State, suddenly became weak in the knees, a scared and mousy bureaucrat. He subsequently told the grand jury that he passed the information up the line to his supposed superior, athletic director Tim Curley, and let the investigation take its course.

It never made sense.

more:

It is totally unfair to say that Penn State officials did nothing. They did tell Sandusky he could no longer bring “guests” on campus. There was no way of enforcing it of course, and the humaneness with Sandusky was so effective that he continued to sexually abuse children for another six years.

You can thank Curley for that. You can thank Schultz for that. You can thank Spanier for that. But most of all you can thank Paterno. He was the God of Happy Valley. People scurried and scrambled when he spoke, so you can bet it was he who was the primary driver behind the decision not to report Sandusky to authorities. It was he who on the basis of his own words in his grand jury testimony, gave the false impression that he had placed the matter in the hands of athletic director Curley and then walked away.

It is an ugly thing to trample on the dead. Just as ugly as using the cloak of his death to perpetuate the image of a man who we now know beyond all doubt never existed. He wasn’t the moral center. He wasn’t the avuncular JoePa. He wasn’t the man who simply didn’t do enough when confronted with a sickening allegation.

Add the word “liar” to his legacy.

 

 

Los Angeles Times:

Central Florida senior guard Marcus Jordan, a 21-year-old son of NBA legend Michael Jordan, was arrested outside a hotel in Omaha early Sunday morning.

Jordan was charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and obstructing officers, according to a news release. Police responding to a call at the Embassy Suites found hotel security trying to subdue Marcus Jordan, who was having an argument with two women in the hotel driveway at 2:11 a.m.

The release stated Jordan was “very animated, intoxicated and uncooperative,” and it took multiple officers to control and handcuff him.

Jordan was booked at the Douglas County Department of Corrections. He had been released by Sunday night.

The Central Florida athletics department released a statement about Jordan that read, “After gathering all of the facts, we will deal with this situation in an appropriate manner.”

Jordan, a senior, averaged 13.7 points a game last season.

His status with the team has been in flux. Jordan opted not to enroll in Central Florida summer classes and did not attend option workouts with his teammates. He was debating whether to return for his senior season or pursue business opportunities and the possibility of playing overseas.

Once incoming freshman point guard Daiquan Walker enrolled in classes this summer, Jordan was expected to move from scholarship to walk-on status to make room for the newcomer. Walker’s signing prompted more questions about Jordan’s future with Central Florida, but the school insisted he remains a member of the basketball program.

The rest here.

AP:

College football will finally have a playoff. Come 2014, the BCS is dead.

A committee of university presidents on Tuesday approved the BCS commissioners’ plan for a four-team playoff to start in the 2014 season.

The move completes a six-month process in which the commissioners have been working on a new way to determine a college football champion. Instead of simply matching the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the country in a championship game after the regular season, the way the Bowl Championship Series has done since 1998, the new format will create a pair of national semifinals. No. 1 will play No. 4, No. 2 will play No. 3.

The winners will advance the national championship game.

The teams will be selected by a committee, similar to the way the NCAA basketball tournament field is set.

There are still some details to work out, but all the decision-makers are on board.

A Division I playoff, that is, since the rest of college football already has one:

The BCS commissioners are backing a playoff plan with the sites for the national semifinals rotating among the major bowl games and a selection committee picking the teams.

The plan will be presented to university presidents next week for approval.

Once the presidents sign off — and that seems likely — major college football’s champion will be decided by a playoff for the first time starting in 2014.

’’We are excited to be on the threshold of creating a new postseason structure for college football that builds on the great popularity of our sport,’’ Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said Wednesday.

All 11 commissioners stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind Swarbrick, who read the BCS statement from a podium set up in a hotel conference room.

The commissioners have been working on reshaping college football’s postseason since January. The meeting Wednesday was the sixth formal get-together of the year. They met for four hours and emerged with a commitment to stand behind a plan.

I’m fully behind this, as it would still allow for the traditional bowl structure to remain.

Last January, following Auburn University’s national championship win, “Al from Dadeville,” called into Paul Finebaum’s syndicated sports radio show: “The weekend after the Iron Bowl, I went to Auburn because I live 30 miles away, and I poisoned the Toomer’s Trees… [they] definitely will die.” The caller, incensed that War Eagle fans put a Cam Newton jersey on coach Paul “Bear” Bryant’s iron-statue in Tuscaloosa, wanted to strike back at the heart of Auburn.

The Toomer’s Trees are two gigantic southern live oak trees that are right nearby Auburn’s stadium. A tradition, dubbed “rolling of the oaks,” has developed where the trees are draped with toilet paper whenever something good happens with Auburn sports (particularly football).

One day after the radio call, Auburn University discovered the trees to be surrounded with “lethal amounts” of herbicide. Currently, the trees are struggling, as Auburn horticulturalist Gary Keever recently announced: “We’re going to continue to monitor the trees, but the situation is not looking good.”

Eventually, police discovered that “Al from Dadeville” was actually Harvey Almorn Updyke Jr., a 62 year-old devotee of the Crimson Tide. Updyke was charged with a number of offenses, including criminal mischief and desecration of a venerable object, to all of which he has plead not guilty.

Today, jury selection started and already, according to some reports, the Iron Bowl rivalry is creeping into the courtroom. One of the questions submitted by one of Updyke’s attorneys asked whether a juror would, “make a decision based upon the defendant being a University of Alabama sports fan.” While none of the jurors said they would, forty-one acknowledged that they had visited or seen the trees since their poisoning, and thirty-nine testified to participating in the “rolling of the oaks” at least once.

Despite considerations regarding his image to the prospective jury or the larger defense strategy, Updyke has been unyielding about his Crimson pride, even at trial: the defendant has chosen to wear a crimson tie at most court appearances.

So, Roll tide, Mr. Updyke… perhaps, even, to jail.

The confluence of sports & the environment:

When it comes to recruiting, Virginia Tech’s athletics department is taking an “if we build it, they will come” approach, with plans to construct a new $20 million indoor practice facility for its football and other sports teams near Lane Stadium on the university campus.

The Hokies have the third-longest college bowl game streak in the country, and have sold out every game since 1998. However, they have yet to win a national championship. The athletics department hopes a state-of-the-art facility nearer to the football stadium could help change that.

There’s only one problem: A densely wooded area chock full of old-growth trees, some older than the United States itself, is in the way.

As a VT alum, and football season ticket holder, I’m rooting for the trees.

Excellent article on ESPN about the actual causes of inequality in men’s sports. It’s not Title IX but football.

AP:

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) — Notre Dame quarterback Tommy Rees has been arrested and jailed on a preliminary felony charge following a confrontation with officers early Thursday, police said.

Rees, 19, was arrested on charges of resisting law enforcement, battery to law enforcement, minor consumption and public intoxication, St. Joseph County police Sgt. Bill Redman said.

Redman said South Bend police officers arrested Rees and Notre Dame linebacker Carlo Calabrese and that he didn’t know details of the incident or which charge against Rees was a felony.

Calabrese was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct and released after posting $150 bond.

Rees of Lake Forest, Ill., was being held without bond until the county prosecutor’s office decided on formal charges, Redman said.

Rees started 12 of 13 games as the Irish went 8-5 last season after starting four games as a freshman in the 2010 season. He was among four players competing during Notre Dame’s spring practices for the starting quarterback spot this coming season.

The rest here.

Dan McGrath of the Chicago Sun-Times writes:

I did a double-take to make sure I was in the right place last week as the Notre Dame Club of Chicago’s annual Knute Rockne dinner got under way inside a Sheraton-Chicago ballroom.

The usual cast of ardently believing Domers was on hand, only not as many of them. Not nearly as many. In past years, the hotel would set up extra tables to accommodate the throngs eager to be enthralled by Ara Parseghian or charmed by Lou Holtz. Even Charlie Weis might draw a full house as he blustered on about the Decided Schematic Advantage he’d brought to South Bend.

The dinner’s proceeds support a good cause: scholarship assistance for Chicago-area students attending ND, a high-end-and-climbing university. (In fact, if you plan to enroll your toddler, start saving now.) It may be a sign of the times that the room was maybe two-thirds full for Brian Kelly; the Irish are coming off back-to-back 8-5 seasons and have won 10 games only twice in the last 10 years.

It was an oddly subdued crowd, too — not especially interested in enhancing its modest size with fervor.

With the Rev. John Smyth laid up after hip surgery, the Rev. Raymond Klees served as a pinch-hit greeter for the reformed Irish hoops enforcer, whose post-basketball career has been a selfless crusade for the betterment of young lives. And the Rev. Gene Smith’s invocation was an inspiring reminder that a life-threatening stroke doesn’t have to be life-altering.

Kelly, though, was the undisputed headliner. And while he proclaimed himself ‘‘excited’’ by a laundry list of recent developments, he didn’t shake down much thunder.

Too much sugar at times.

The rest here.

Rule No. 2: See Rule No. 1. Pro Football Weekly:

It looks like Commissioner Roger Goodell needs to send out yet another memo.

Two weeks after the leak of LSU cornerback Morris Claiborne’s Wonderlic score prompted Goodell to remind all 32 teams that “certain information obtained during preparations for the Draft, including personal and family details, results of drug tests, scores on the Wonderlic test, and the like, are strictly confidential for club use only and are not to be disseminated publicly under any circumstances,” the TV network/website owned by the NFL has aided and abetted a violation of the terms of that very memo.

Jason La Canfora of NFL Network reports that Ohio State offensive lineman Mike Adams tested positive for marijuana at the Scouting Combine.

Adams, as La Canfora explains it, didn’t know about the positive result when meeting with teams at the Scouting Combine.  Obviously, Adams wouldn’t have known; the results aren’t made available until well after the players have left Indy.

But Adams surely knew that he’d smoked marijuana, and if anything he said to teams about marijuana use during Combine interviews was later contradicted by the positive test result, that could be viewed as a far more significant problem than the positive test result.

The rest here.

The Coaches’ Trophy, a gaudy Waterford crystal football valued at $30,000, is awarded to the NCAA Division I football champion. This year’s trophy went to the Alabama Crimson Tide, but Bama’s crystal football is no more, thanks to the clumsiness of an unidentified player’s dad.

The player’s father’s foot got caught on a rug that sits beneath the trophy display. One false move sent the Waterford crystal trophy, which was on display in the Mal Moore Athletic Facility halls, tumbling toward the floor. No word on whose father did the expensive damage.

The shattered trophy had been on display at the facility, where coach Nick Saban and other athletic personnel have their offices.

More here.

Greg — It looks like this strange saga is about to get stranger . . . or at least more costly for the university:

Morality aside, one of the questions uppermost in the minds of football fans and business people alike is the legal one — can a consensual sexual relationship between a manager and a subordinate constitute sexual harassment for which not only Petrino but the University of Arkansas could be liable?

They really had no choice in my opinion after the revelation that he paid his mistress $20,000 and lied about it. NYT:

Once every generation or so, everything falls into place and allows a team outside one of college football’s traditional powers to compete for a national title. For the Arkansas Razorbacks, the 2012 football season appeared to be shaping up that way. Quarterback Tyler Wilson, a Heisman candidate, returns for his senior year, eight defensive starters are back and two Southeastern Conference West giants, Alabama and L.S.U., will each play in Fayetteville next season.

But this golden opportunity could be doomed before it even begins. On Tuesday night, the university fired Coach Bobby Petrino in the wake of an embarrassing scandal that began with Petrino’s getting into a motorcycle accident last week.

In a statement, Petrino said: “I’m sorry. These two words seem very inadequate. But that is my heart. All I have been able to think about is the number of people I’ve let down by making selfish decisions. I’ve taken a lot of criticism in the past. Some deserved, some not deserved. This time, I have no one to blame but myself.”

Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long, in an emotional news conference in which he twice choked back tears, said that Petrino’s “pattern of misleading and manipulative behavior” had led to his firing.

Long was referring to Petrino’s initial claim that he was riding alone on his motorcycle at the time of the accident. Just before the police report became public, Petrino admitted that he had a passenger. It turned out to be Jessica Dorrell, a 25-year-old woman who is a former Arkansas volleyball player and with whom Petrino admitted having an inappropriate relationship. Petrino, who is married with four children, had also recently hired Dorrell for a football department staff position for which 159 candidates had applied.

Long also said that his investigation into the incident found that Petrino had given Dorrell $20,000 in cash. Ultimately, Long said that it was not the inappropriate relationship with Dorrell that led to Petrino’s firing, but his duplicity surrounding the details of the accident and his failure to disclose his relationship with Dorrell before she was hired.

The rest here.

Driving while under the influence of a woman not your wife is never a good idea:

Bobby Petrino’s image of perfection has come to a sudden and surprising end at Arkansas.

The Razorbacks coach was put on paid administrative leave on Thursday night less than seven hours after his boss, athletic director Jeff Long, learned Petrino had failed to disclose he had been riding with a female employee half his age when his motorcycle skidded off the road over the weekend.

Petrino said he had been concerned about protecting his family and keeping an “inappropriate relationship from becoming public.”

It was a stunning revelation for a highly successful coach who prides himself on complete control and intense privacy in his personal life. Petrino will now wait out his fate while Long conducts a review.

“I will fully cooperate with the university throughout this process and my hope is to repair my relationships with my family, my athletic director, the Razorback Nation and remain the head coach of the Razorbacks,” he said in a statement issued by the university.

Long announced the decision to put Petrino on leave at a late-night news conference, one that was reminiscent of when the former Atlanta Falcons coach was hired by the Razorbacks on Dec. 11, 2007. Long said he had no timeline in determining Petrino’s future with the Razorbacks.

“I’m at the beginning of the review. I don’t know what I’m going to find,” Long said. “I am disappointed that coach Petrino did not share with me, when he had the opportunity to, the full extent of the accident and who was involved.”

The rest here.

Driving while under the influence of a woman not your wife is never a good idea:

Bobby Petrino’s image of perfection has come to a sudden and surprising end at Arkansas.

The Razorbacks coach was put on paid administrative leave on Thursday night less than seven hours after his boss, athletic director Jeff Long, learned Petrino had failed to disclose he had been riding with a female employee half his age when his motorcycle skidded off the road over the weekend.

Petrino said he had been concerned about protecting his family and keeping an “inappropriate relationship from becoming public.”

It was a stunning revelation for a highly successful coach who prides himself on complete control and intense privacy in his personal life. Petrino will now wait out his fate while Long conducts a review.

“I will fully cooperate with the university throughout this process and my hope is to repair my relationships with my family, my athletic director, the Razorback Nation and remain the head coach of the Razorbacks,” he said in a statement issued by the university.

Long announced the decision to put Petrino on leave at a late-night news conference, one that was reminiscent of when the former Atlanta Falcons coach was hired by the Razorbacks on Dec. 11, 2007. Long said he had no timeline in determining Petrino’s future with the Razorbacks.

“I’m at the beginning of the review. I don’t know what I’m going to find,” Long said. “I am disappointed that coach Petrino did not share with me, when he had the opportunity to, the full extent of the accident and who was involved.”

The rest here.