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Message: [QUOTE="sutomcat, post: 3665917, member: 27"] You are entitled to your opinion but based on this post, I question if you understand what competitive advantage means here. I know of no study ever conducted that concluded smoking pot gives athletes a competitive advantage. I believe most college students and most college athletes who play basketball smoke pot. That our coaching staff and athletic department created a policy that made no sense and that they decided not to enforce did not give Syracuse a competitive advantage. It just needlessly exposed the basketball program to possible issues in the event of an NCAA investigation. I don’t know how anyone with a functioning brain can think that violating this idiotic policy gave the basketball program a competitve advantage. The players didn’t cheat. This didn’t make them better. The policy was an ill conceived one from day one. I assume that is on JB and his staff. Even worse was the failure of the SUAD to do due diligence oversight on the basketball program. This was a minor administrative screwup that should result in penalties but IMHO, it should NEVER under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES lead to the forfeiture of a basketball game. I don’t have the numbers but I think the drug policy thing was directly responsible for something like 95-98 of the 101 games forfeited. The NCAA has had 2 historically moronic sets of penalties that led to forfeiting tons of games for things that did not give teams competitive advantages in games. One was when the NCAA decided to strip Joe Paterno of many of his wins because he turned a blind eye to one of his direct reports raping children in his locker for years. The other was the decision to strip JB of 101 wins because some kids smoked pot and the staff sometimes didn’t call their moms. I am no Penn State fan but again, you have to make the punishment fit the crime. It is great that the NCAA apparently felt P e d o p h I l I ais really bad but they shouldn’t have taken away a lot of Paterno’s wins for this either. Forfeiting games is a severe penalty that should be reserved for when teams received major competitive advantages breaking NCAA rules that resulting in a dramatically uneven playing field for athletic contests. The same applies to the bizarre NCAA decision to take JB’s wins away. Fine him, suspend him, limit his ability to recruit. Whatever. When a team fails to follow a minor procedural process to the letter, part of the responsibility is on the staff, but part also falls on the athletic director, the NCAA enforcement officer on staff and whoever else is involved in internal auditing. The basketball program has already shown it needs to be watched closely. The fact that this didn’t happen is unacceptable and one of the reasons I feel Dr Gross ended up being a truly horrendous athletic director. Anyway, JoePa eventually got his wins back, because the NCAA clearly overstepped their bounds and what they did could not be justified. The same will eventually happen with JB and his wins. They will be given back because the punishment the NCAA chose clearly does not fit the crime. When the NCAA finally collapses, cases like these will be a big reason why. [/QUOTE]

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