You know what, maybe that’s so. Maybe Jim could have been more involved with the academics of his players. But how or why does delegating that then make him responsible for the, presumably, unauthorized actions of his employee?
These are the facts as I understand them:
- The NCAA hit SU with APR sanctions because our players weren’t performing well enough academically; sending the message that programs are responsible for making sure their players attend and pass classes.
- Jim Boeheim hires a person to ensure players attend and pass classes. Seems pretty compliant.
- That employee and others on the staff, including Jim Boeheim, meet with Compliance every so often and go over the ground rules, which the NCAA doesn’t dispute. One of those ground rules was probably ‘don’t write papers for players.’
- Fab Melo flunks a class or classes, making him ineligible.
- Jim and staff look for a way to make him eligible. They find out he could write a paper and one of Fab’s professors will change his grade. Cool.
- I assume Jim instructs the director of bball ops to coordinate the completion of the assignment with Fab and the professor.
So far, all appears reasonable, yeah? Or no?
- Fab writes the paper but it sucks, so the director of bball ops takes it a step further and edits the paper to make sure Fab gets a good grade.
That’s the smoking gun that JB didn’t care about compliance? Or worse, that’s enough to be confident JB told his employee to tamper with the paper? How? What was the alternative?
