Listen folks, this is what REALLY happened.
What happened is you have a guy (Roper) who was in charge of overseeing eligiblity with all athletes. This guy had held the position for 30 some odd years. In the mid 90's the NCAA made some rule changes regarding eligible athletes. Roper, who thought he didn't need to go to these conferences, because you basically "cannot teach an old dog, new tricks".
Well that burned us, because he kept doing things the same old way. What happened was you had certain athletes that were taking courses that were not going towards their major. At ANY OTHER university, this is not a problem, because athletes do not have to declare until they are a junior. At Tech, however, you MUST declare your intentions your freshman year. So it was ultimately a rule that screwed GT a little more than other schools. Also, at Tech, a D cannot count as credit towards a major in some classes, whereas at other schools it can. So in our situation, we were a very unique case.
Anyway, so sometime around 2003 the GTAA hire this schmuck of a shithead, Shane Olivett, who had been run out of dodge by every school he's worked for (including South Carolina) because he's one of these guys who constantly wants to prove himself as great and will do so above following protocal. He's one of these unmanagable types, who wants to be recognized than do the right job. He uncovers the blunder that Tech had been doing for years in evaluating their own elgiblity of players.
Now this is where I have heard two versions of the story and from a few different sources.
a.) I have heard this guy brought the allegations to Braine and that Braine stymied him and told him to keep it quiet and was never planning to do anything about it. He was basically told to shut the hell up or else. So Olivett finked on GT and the sameday Braine in a fluster announces that GT is "self-reporting" the infractions. This is the version I don't believe.
b.) He brought the case to Dave Braine, Dave talked to Clough about it. At the time, both were unsure that a violation had occurred. They immediately went back to Roper who held the responsiblity of this stuff over Olivett. Roper was completely befuddled. He did his fact checking because ultimately he did not want to be responsible for the mess. Yet, unfortunately, a man who had served GT so long, turned out to serve GT very badly during this time as he was at fault, and negligent to boot. Apparently Roper felt just unbelievablably awful about the whole thing, and he stepped down from his position which basically admitted to Braine and Co. that they were indeed guilty. At this point I think Braine and Clough, and maybe a couple of other of people knew about it outside of Olivett. Roper "retires", and so the Brain trust starts looking into the situation, probably trying to figure out how they were going to announce, what they were going to announce, and figure out what they needed to be immediately ready for when dealing with the NCAA.
It was about this time that Olivett thought that he had been removed from the situation, and that he was not happy about his un-involvement. So he dials up the old NCAA (who he previously worked for I think) and starts blabbing the details and accusing GT of a coverup. This is when Braine looking to do damage control "self reports" the incident.
Now I am no fan of Braine. He continuously mismanaged the GTAA, was irresponsible, made poor hires, and even poorer decisions. But I had heard that we may be reporting violations prior to the violations coming out, and based on everyone that I have ever talked to, and what I have pieced together just by using sheer logic, there was never a situation of a cover-up.
Now this shithead Olivett is suing the GTAA for wrongful termination, because after the dust had settled, here you had a guy who in MOST peoples opinions in the GTAA didn't follow protocal. Frankly, I think this guy is bogus. But then again, I also think Braine handled the situation like a complete jackass. I could write a character study on Dave Braine for my MBA about how not to manage an organization and would have enough material to put it in a hard bound book.
Call it a comedy of errors and a page study out of poor communication, but cover-up? If myself and several others had heard about this prior to it coming to light, then does that reek of cover-up? Give me a break. Use common sense. Of course, there are a couple of fonts who will argue with me til the day is long, because apparently they knew Olivett or some cohort of his and are hell bent on believing that Dave Braine was an evil man.
Dave Braine is a lot of things, yes. Evil is not one of them. Undermining is not one of them. (personally I don't think he's that smart to be undermining). Incompetent... YES. Negligent... YES. Not Strategic... YES. Terrible Manager... YES!
Bottom line, the punishment rendered by the NCAA for "lack of institutional control" was more of a punishment for our complete idiocy in reporting the violations and not so much the negligence in not evaluating eligiblity the right way. Roper Screwed us... Dave Braine buried the hatchet in our backs when he completely bungled the entire reporting procedures, and Olivett was the ignitor of the events.
If we had handled this properly the first time, we probably would be looking at a deduction of 2 scholly's instead of 6. But thanks to Braine, he made up for the harsh verdict(and I'll will tell anyone who will listen "I TOLD YOU SO", because I've been calling out his terrible management for years, prior to when it was the "in thing" to do).
Anyway, that's the deal. Hope that sheds the light on your questions. Our punishment wasn't a matter of what we did wrong. It was what we did wrong after the fact that justified the severity of the punishment. If anyone thinks that Dave Braine was a good AD for Tech... you must have no other experience than working with morons.
