What were the actual wrongdoings that did us in?

[ramblinwise1]

Very insightful post, BOR.

I think you hit several nails on their heads.

I can remember enough when Braine was a coach here not to like him. But he has made his own bed as a "manager". I get the impression that the AA is one of those "good ole boys" organizations that protects their own and as a result inbreeds outright incompetence. If that is true, it will take more than one person leaving (Braine) to make the AA a high performing organization. I wonder when we will see Rad make more changes. Surely if he doesn't do it soon he will miss his opportunity to accomplish something.

 

[Bogey]

Good report BOR... *nm

nm

 

[JOJATK]

Re: Listen folks, this is what REALLY happened.

BOR, excellent summary. Like you I do not believe there was a cover. But I can conceive of a mindset by people in the NCAA, for example, who might have thought based on HOW we reported and what we reported, and then additionally that their investigation found MORE issues that we did try to cover up some things. They could be feeling that GT could not possibly be as unable to understand the rules as we seemed to be and therefore must have been trying to pull the wool over someone's eyes.

So here's my amateur psychological analysis of why we got punished as harshly as we did:

1) The NCAA felt, wrongly, that we were indeed trying to cover up the level/amount of the infractions and so we needed to be dealt with sternly

2) The NCAA felt that we are a small enough program (from the standpoint of how much we bring to the NCAA) that we could be punished harshly as an example to others but at the same time we are big enough that the punishment would get noticed by many others. So by punishing us they don't hurt themselves AND they send a message that they are supposedly so concerned about the Student-athletes that they will harshly punish schools convicted of wrongdoings.

I haven't heard any credible arguments to convince me either of my theories are wrong, though they definitely could be and probably are

 

[YodaBee]

the rules were broken, but that\'s not what

But that's not what killed us.

The rules were broken. We did play with academically ineligible players. And despite Dave Braine's pack of lies in the paper designed to placate the Alumni base, it wasn't just paperwork errors. We played kids that did not pass classes, didn't have enough hours and weren't by any stretch eligible.

When you face the reality that we made a mistake and legitimate violations did in fact happen it makes it much easier to appreciate what happened next and why the penalities were so stiff. When you ignore the realities and validity of the NCAA's complaint and look for paperwork excuses or buy into Braine's lies the process makes much less sense.

However, it wasn't the act of playing with 17 ineligible athletes that made the punishment so severe. It was how the process of compliance, cooperation and honesty with the NCAA was managed that caused them to penalize us so harshly.

Consider that our academic eligibility expert (Roper) for student-athletes worked at Georgia Tech for almost 40 years. During his tenure, he attended one NCAA class regarding the evolving rules of maintaining student-athlete eligibility.

In the NCAA report, he listed his excuse as being "too busy" to make the other 39 dates.

BOR's wild conspiracy theories aside, we did uncover the offenses in 2003. And we did not report them to the NCAA. The violation itself wasn't the back breaking problem. The bigger problem was knowing and not reporting. That's major problem #1.

The NCAA called us in Jan 2004 and told us to investigate a problem that they were tipped off to. We did.

In Fall of 2004, we broke the same rule again during Football season. We kept breaking a rule after knowing that the rules had been broken already. That's major problem #2. Now we venture into institutional control issues.

GT defended itself as if all of its problems were minor. That was naive. That was problem #3. If we had been attending the classes on eligibility for the past 40 years, we would have known that playing with ineligible players was a big problem.

It is true that GT didn't know how to defend itself. Had we been more experienced in these matters, we would have better defended ourselves. That's not to say that repeat cheaters are better defenders of themselves. Although, that's partially it. But those schools also know how to better managed the process to avoid the Institutional Control charges. They know when to cooperate and when to put up a fight. We handled both poorly.

It wasn't Dave Braine's fault that we broke the rules, but it was Dave Braine's fault that things spiraled out of control to the Institutional Control charges.

As for the person that said, "It was only 17 kids out of 300". Albert Means was just 1 kid out of 300 on scholarship at Alabama. That argument is ridiculous.