A Time for Novel Solutions to Overhaul the Embattled NCAA Infractions Process
Athletics Veritas is a weekly series aimed at helping higher education executives, faculty, and other stakeholders stay tuned in on trending national issues impacting college athletics, especially NCAA Division I. Athletics Veritas is created by senior DI athletic administrators around the nation.
The NCAA Makeover: 'Heavy is the Head that Wears the Crown' - Recommendations to Elevate the Accountability, Enfranchisement, and Vetting of Head Coaches
Executive Summary
As part of AV's NCAA Makeover series, AV highlights this month a spectrum of concepts to bolster efficiency, accountability, and enfranchisement in the NCAA infractions process
This week, AV explores several measures tied to head coaches and their roles and responsibilities within the NCAA compliance, governance, and infractions process.
AV considers measures that would enhance head coach accountability by prescribing clearer legislative expectations around their compliance roles and increasing head coaches' participation in the infractions process
AV recommends elevating the roles and expectations for coaches associations including creation of standing committee focused on integrity
AV also proposes a measure to bolster campus-level HR processes during the head coach hiring process.
A Jury of Your Peers
Although coaches are central to college sports, they are on the periphery when it comes to serving as adjudicators in the NCAA infractions process.
The Division I Committee on Infractions includes many well-respected, credentialed and experienced individuals – often tasked with a thankless role that is also steeped in time demands fueled by dense case records, lengthy hearings and procedural red-tape. The current Committee roster includes two or three former coaches; however, these individuals have not coached in decades.
There are no active coaches, from any sport, currently serving on the Committee, meaning that no Committee member is required to actually follow the current version of NCAA rules. Adding such a member to infractions hearing panels could provide unique perspective and context to the often nuanced and complex elements of an infractions case including real-world perspectives on how NCAA rules are being applied by coaches across the country.
Additionally, there are innovative ways to incorporate coaches into the Committee. Rather than assigning two or three coaches to serve multi-year terms on the Committee, each case could be randomly assigned two to three Division I head coaches from a sport relevant to the details of that case. The randomized process could account for direct conflicts of interest and other legitimate reasons for dismissal and rotate the service requirement across all Division I head coaches in that sport.
Although the Committee has a small portion of individuals who work daily in athletics, not having coaches involved in the processing of cases is a disservice to the diversification of perspectives that should drive these adjudications. It would also inject more accountability – among coaches – that they need to be part of the process and solution, not just be a defendant.
Coaches have long lamented that the process does not work or that coaches who did cheat “got off easy.”
The jury room, so to speak, is missing the perspective of individuals who can best understand the reality of what a head coach implicated in a case might be experiencing under current NCAA rules.
Adding coaches to infractions hearing panels would also answer many concerns raised by coaches regarding disenfranchisement. If coaches don't believe the current process holds their peers responsible, they should have the opportunity to serve on a panel that issues the findings and penalties. Give them a seat at the table.
Admittedly, there are arguments against involving coaches in the process; one critique is that active head coaches are too busy to serve on an infractions panel. The reality is that everyone on the Committee is busy. By subjecting all Division I head coaches to "jury selection," the time burden is shared by all and the process can be re-imagined to include efficiencies like (secure) virtual meetings.
There would also be anticipated hesitancy from head coaches that would not want to serve on a hearing panel that exists to hold their peers accountable. Infractions cases are not comfortable exercises. Head coaches, though, should not get a pass from participating in more phases of the process.
The Head Coach Responsibility Principle Needs More Front-End Prescription
NCAA Division I Bylaw 11.1.1.1 states that the “An institution's head coach is presumed to be responsible for the actions of all institutional staff members who report, directly or indirectly, to the head coach. An institution's head coach shall promote an atmosphere of compliance within the program and shall monitor the activities of all institutional staff members involved with the program who report, directly or indirectly, to the coach.”
This provision is a catch-all that ensures, on paper, that a head coach is responsible for whatever happens under their watch regardless of whether they knew what happened under their watch. In other words, a head coach claiming “plausible deniability” in his or her defense will not win the day in the infractions process. One cannot tippy-toe around the presumed responsibility premise.
That notion is a helpful baseline to eliminate workarounds, but it seems to mostly manifest on the back-end of the entire process. The Head Coach Responsibility component shines brightest when a head coach or someone under their watch has committed a violation.
What should happen from an NCAA governance and policy side is to insert specific compliance related activities—whether monitoring, form verification, or logging that the coach must actually handle—and not allow head coaches to delegate this to an assistant coach or a director of ops or push back on to athletics compliance departments. This is particularly important in the high profile sports of men’s and women’s basketball, football and baseball. If the NCAA expects head coaches to promote an atmosphere of compliance, a minimum array of behaviors and actions that help demonstrate “head coach responsibility” should be spelled out. Fulfilling such behaviors shouldn’t mean automatic immunity from NCAA violation findings for the head coach, but it should be given great credence within the infractions process.
There is nothing in the NCAA manual that specifically articulates what a Head Coach (or assistant coaches or other sport staff) must do to achieve this expectation. Although it is not tenable to script out every single monitoring or compliance function to a head coach, it is reasonable to legislate expectations on weekly or even monthly activities that directly compel head coaches to be more intimately involved and transparently demonstrate how they are meeting these expectations. These front-line, behavioral expectations need to be spelled out — at least for major sports head coaches, whose ownership of compliance and monitoring is most susceptible to being hands-off and delegated.
The Committee on Infractions has started to articulate, inch by inch, what a head coach should have done in terms of monitoring when they are found to have failed to promote an atmosphere of compliance and/or have violated the Head Coach Responsibility mandate. However, these clues only emerge at the very end of a case – in the Committee on Infraction’s final infractions report for a school. The front-end prescription of compliance behaviors for a head coach need to be legislated via the rule book.
Coaches Associations Need to Take More Accountability for its Members
Once upon a time, several leaders from within the Division I Men’s Basketball Head Coaches ranks formed an ethics committee within the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) – the primary coaches association for men’s college basketball coaches. The names involved with the ethics committee included Michigan’s John Beilein, Butler’s Brad Stevens and Stanford's Johnny Dawkins, among many others.
"We are not an extension of the enforcement staff," said committee chair John Beilein. "But we're trying to communicate the problems and make strong suggestions."
This group endeavored to try and root out elements of college basketball that could lead to corruption, or at least compromised values. As ESPN reported, “One of the first agenda items was tickets for conference tournaments. The committee wanted to make sure no coaches felt any pressure to distribute the allotment of tickets for coaches to AAU coaches. Tickets that Beilein would receive for the Big Ten tournament should be used for his family and friends, not handed out to summer league coaches as payback for helping Michigan get a player.”
This activity dates back to 2008. Yet today, there's been little presence of any coaches' ethics committee or other proactive and transparent activity among the coaches association to foster ethics and integrity within their coaches’ ranks. Coaches associations from the highest profile sports should establish a standing ethics committee and continue to develop expectations for their members and outline standards tied to ethics, integrity, and shared responsibility.
Each sport has some version of a coaches association and, in many cases, the coaches’ associations work closely with its sport’s governing body on a variety of issues impacting the health and growth of the sport.
The infractions process cannot be cured by NCAA regulatory solutions alone. Coaches associations, like the NABC, the AFCA, the WBCA, and others need to take more ownership of the behavioral expectations of its own members including consideration of publishing code of ethics and potential discipline for violations of those codes.
Infuse More Campus-Level Quality Control Into The Head Coach Hiring Process
NCAA rules generally stay out of institutional HR processes when it comes to hiring, disciplining, and firing coaches and staff. One exception is the “Show Cause Order” which, in short, means that an institution that hires a coach that has had a major infraction within a specified period of time must appear before the Committee on Infractions and explain why their institution shouldn't be penalized for hiring said coach and what they will do to monitor the coach and promote compliance within the coach's program moving forward.
However, show cause orders only create a singular pause at the Committee on Infractions level to review whether a prior major infractions violator should be employed and whether the involved institution should also be penalized for making the hire. The show cause order is a helpful tool at the NCAA level, but it does not compel a strategic pause with necessary people at the campus level.
NCAA rules should compel all member institutions to have the department heads of their University Risk Management Office, the General Counsel’s Office, and senior athletics compliance office to interview any final or preferred Head Coach candidate in any sport, prior to the individual being offered the position.
Further, those high-ranking administrators in the legal, risk management, and compliance areas should be required to confidentially provide their written feedback (including concerns) about the top candidate(s) directly to the University President, the Athletics Director, and the Chair of the University’s Board.
That same process could also apply to the hiring of al assistant coaches in high profile sports such as men’s and women’s basketball, football and baseball.
Although an athletics compliance staff member may often be involved in some step of the interview process for hiring a coaching staff member, this recommendation mandates their involvement and the involvement of other key offices and compelling upward feedback to the President and Board before the hire is made. This would lead to more thoughtful and independent vetting of a head coach finalist before making a hire.
This proposed step embodies “institutional control” and would have far more impact at the campus level of enriching accountability and inserting checks and balances during a critical juncture (the hiring a head coach) than an attestation form signed by a President or Chancellor claiming their allegiance to institutional compliance.
The NCAA Makeover series concludes next week with final thoughts on the infractions process and recommitting to the value of adopting rules that can be enforced.
Athletics Veritas is presented for information purposes only and should not be considered advice or counsel on NCAA compliance matters. For guidance on NCAA rules and processes, always consult your university’s athletics compliance office, conference office, and/or the NCAA.
