Whitey23
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Deadspin
Just to be clear on the institutional-control question: Syracuse stands accused of not keeping tabs on a drug-testing program it wasn't required to have in the first place. Specifically, we're talking about less than one bad pee test per year. Now, for my money, a school that ignores the results of a totally superfluous and self-destructive drug-testing regime is showing an admirable level of institutional control. In fact, if we're talking about institutional control as an actual thing and not the NCAA's catch-all term of art, doesn't Yahoo's own reporting show something very different from a lack of control? Despite a decade's worth of unpunished positive tests at Syracuse, nobody's dealing drugs or overdosing, so far as we know. There is no slippery slope here. Control!
But Yahoo gazes upon Syracuse and its bad pee tests and is somehow reminded of Baylor.Baylor? That school went down because one basketball player murdered another basketball player, whereupon coach Dave Bliss enlisted his team in an effort to smear the dead kid so no one would notice that Bliss had been making paper airplanes out of the NCAA bylaws. The drug-testing was a subordinate clause nestled in among some genuinely ugly business. It was the dime bag found on the counter of a blood-spattered crime scene. In a sane world, that context would matter. This is not that world.
If it wasn't clear already, college-sports scandal-hunting is now deep in its Officer Krupke period. A rule is a rule is a rule, the thinking goes. Last week, Sports Illustrated published an exposé of the UCLA basketball team under coach Ben Howland that was fascinating if only for the insight it offered into the brainless authoritarianism of the scandal hunters. At one point, SI gets a player to acknowledge that he and some teammates attended a New Year's Eve rave and dropped Ecstasy, which is the sort of thing college students will do. Not long after the rave, someone—it's not clear who—ordered those players to take a drug test, which is the sort of thing East Germany would've done.......
Just to be clear on the institutional-control question: Syracuse stands accused of not keeping tabs on a drug-testing program it wasn't required to have in the first place. Specifically, we're talking about less than one bad pee test per year. Now, for my money, a school that ignores the results of a totally superfluous and self-destructive drug-testing regime is showing an admirable level of institutional control. In fact, if we're talking about institutional control as an actual thing and not the NCAA's catch-all term of art, doesn't Yahoo's own reporting show something very different from a lack of control? Despite a decade's worth of unpunished positive tests at Syracuse, nobody's dealing drugs or overdosing, so far as we know. There is no slippery slope here. Control!
But Yahoo gazes upon Syracuse and its bad pee tests and is somehow reminded of Baylor.Baylor? That school went down because one basketball player murdered another basketball player, whereupon coach Dave Bliss enlisted his team in an effort to smear the dead kid so no one would notice that Bliss had been making paper airplanes out of the NCAA bylaws. The drug-testing was a subordinate clause nestled in among some genuinely ugly business. It was the dime bag found on the counter of a blood-spattered crime scene. In a sane world, that context would matter. This is not that world.
If it wasn't clear already, college-sports scandal-hunting is now deep in its Officer Krupke period. A rule is a rule is a rule, the thinking goes. Last week, Sports Illustrated published an exposé of the UCLA basketball team under coach Ben Howland that was fascinating if only for the insight it offered into the brainless authoritarianism of the scandal hunters. At one point, SI gets a player to acknowledge that he and some teammates attended a New Year's Eve rave and dropped Ecstasy, which is the sort of thing college students will do. Not long after the rave, someone—it's not clear who—ordered those players to take a drug test, which is the sort of thing East Germany would've done.......
