NCAA Board to Weigh Stiffer Penalties for Programs That Break Rules

The worst offenders of NCAA rules could face harsher penalties than ever under a sweeping set of proposals to be presented on Thursday to the association’s Division I Board of Directors.

The plans, detailed in a 72-page NCAA document obtained by The Chronicle, would give the association’s Division I Committee on Infractions more leeway in using the “death penalty” and other severe sanctions against athletics programs that commit the most egregious violations.

Teams that flout the rule book or fail to uphold the NCAA’s standards could see postseason bans of up to four years, a loss of half of their scholarships, and financial penalties that stretch into the millions. They would also face severe limits on recruiting.

The NCAA board is not expected to vote on the proposals until October, and any changes would not go into effect until at least August 2013. The ideas, which have been vetted by a cross section of Division I athletics officials, are part of a broad overhaul of the enforcement process that has been in the works for months.

Head coaches would face among the steepest penalties, including possible season-long suspensions for big violations that happen on their watch—even if the coaches are not directly responsible for them.

Under the current system, the NCAA has limited ability to penalize head coaches when their assistants break the rules. The new plan would allow the infractions committee to punish head coaches when their assistants step outside the lines under the presumption that they have responsibility for anything that goes on in their programs.

“We think head coaches pretty much call the shots, and we’re just making that explicit,” said Ed Ray, president of Oregon State University and chair of the NCAA’s enforcement working group, which is proposing the changes. “If an assistant coach is behaving badly, we’re holding the head coach responsible, unless he can show substantial evidence that he tried to keep his assistants under control.”

Head coaches aren’t the only ones who would face greater accountability when things went wrong. The document proposes giving the infractions committee the authority to name in its public reports presidents, athletic directors, and others with oversight of athletics, even when those people are not directly involved in the underlying violations.

“We’re trying to be consistent,” Mr. Ray said in an interview on Monday. “Whoever is involved in bad circumstances, there ought to be a record of that.”

New Categories

Mark Emmert, the NCAA’s president, established the enforcement working group last August as part of a plan to refocus the association’s investigations on the most egregious violations and to find ways to deter coaches and others from crossing the line.

In the document, the group proposes a new four-level violation structure, moving away from the “major” and “secondary” violations categories that have long characterized the punitive process. Problems that fall into the proposed new worst categories— “severe breach of conduct” and “significant breach of conduct"—will get most of the NCAA’s attention.

According to the document, a severe breach of conduct would include such violations as a lack of institutional control, academic fraud, individual unethical or dishonest conduct, and “intentional violations or reckless indifference” to NCAA bylaws.

A significant breach of conduct would include a failure to monitor the athletic department and multiple recruiting, financial-aid, or eligibility violations that do not amount to a lack of institutional control.

One of the working group’s goals was to deter violations by making rule breakers pay a higher price.

Over the past few months, Mr. Ray said, the group spent a lot of time talking about historical expectations for punishment and whether repeat offenders were the only ones that deserved the harshest penalties.

The group decided that an institution’s punishment should be based on the severity of the violations, not the number of times a program had been in trouble.

“It really is the seriousness of the offense that ought to determine if the death penalty is part of the package,” Mr. Ray said. “That shouldn’t be limited to institutions with a record of repeat offenses.”

The committee also proposes significantly increasing the size of the NCAA’s Division I Committee on Infractions, to help speed up the adjudication of cases, some of which take years to complete. The document suggests that the committee have as many as 24 members, made up of a greater diversity of people than currently serve, including former college presidents and members of the public with legal backgrounds.

“A larger [Committee on Infractions] will decrease individual workload, thereby encouraging service on the committee and expedite the timeline for resolution of cases,” the document says.

The most egregious cases would be heard by panels of five to seven committee members. The NCAA’s enforcement staff or conference offices would process lesser violations.

Based on feedback that athletics officials gave to an earlier draft of its proposals, the enforcement working group reduced the proposed penalties for certain violations.

“When there are mitigating circumstances—people being more than expectedly forthcoming and helpful, for example—we ought to be willing to cut them some slack,” Mr. Ray said. “So in some cases the penalties are more modest than in the last version.”

The Penn State Effect

The enforcement group started discussing their concerns over ethical lapses in athletics before the violations at Pennsylvania State University came to light. Those events may have created an urgency, as the situation there was “front of mind for everyone,” Mr. Ray said.

One outgrowth of that: The group has suggested that the NCAA form a separate committee to get a better grasp of institutional integrity and what it entails.

“You can’t get at every behavior by having an enforcement structure—it’s just the system to deal with failures and breakdowns,” Mr. Ray said. “The bigger discussion is how to get the culture right in intercollegiate athletics.”

The group recommends that such a committee consider having athletics-compliance staffs report outside of the athletic department. It also proposes expanding the role of institutional audits to include, or at least recognize, institutional control of athletics.

“We should do audits of athletics in the same way that we audit an office of research or the financial accounts of the university,” Mr. Ray said. “We do audits all the time, and athletics ought to be brought into the broader university setting to have its behavior audited.”

The group also suggests requiring the members of the infractions and appeals committees, as well as the NCAA’s enforcement staff, to assess their own performance every three years, reporting back to the Division I board on how effective they believe they have been.

“We’re looking for ways to make sure people are accountable throughout the system,” Mr. Ray said. “And if the system isn’t working, we want to know what should change for people to do better.”