College Scandals and the Death Penalty...

First read this  http://msn.foxsports.com/collegefootball/story/NCAA-death-penalty-just-doesnt-work-090511  and either remember or Google (yes it is a verb) the NCAA scandals of the past few years...
   This guy has it right..now I do not support "paying" college athletes, but do support Gregg Easterbrook's call to penalise poor academic schools and boost the better ones.... like bowl bans and etc. I do not believe in the Death Penalty and as the article says, it doe snothing but punish those who come after the guys who broke the rules break them.... I think every scholarship and atheltic department contract should include things like punsihments if the people involved are caught wrongdoing..including maor fines, having to return pay and schlarships for the years rules were broken and being banned from the sport..no hiding at other colleges or within the professional ranks.
  Now I also believe scholarships should be all inclusive, fact is, unlike normal college students, scholarships athletes do not have the same opportunities to make additional money and the time of year they can work is severely limitted.... seriously.. scholarship fottball players to meet academic elligibility honestly and keep up with their sport can only work for a short time every year..too much either way and their academics suffer or their game and sport preperation does. It also doesn't help that coaches do push them into hollow degree programs and majors to keep them on the academic easy streetin most colleges. Most current athletic scholarships leave a $4,000-$6,000 dollar gap in what is needed for the players to attend school expense wise... this should not be so for any scholarship student... it's like winning a lotto and not having the vehcle or gas money to go collect on it.
 Now there is a small segment of college athletes that are paid, the military academies pay their students (they are, after all, members of the military)...but this is all stuents, not just student athletes and service academy members not only have their regular courses to attend (usually a heavier load then non service academies), but all the other military details to cover like PT, field training, and etc. during non class times.,,they can also be aclled up even before graduation for service in war time and sign a contract for service after their graduation, meaning most are not out to get NFL jobs....which amazingly only a few hundred out of thousands who bank on it actually get a shot at.
  Fact, schools do make money off fo football programs and basketall, some even off of baseball and other sports... but those two are the money makers. .. the NCAA in fact probably makes more money a year off of sports then the professional leagues do... and spend less on  paying people then others. Hell, the football factory schools have better support facilities then most pro organisations do. ..something noted by many a draftee... yet still leave much to desire.
  Want to know the true state of college football, just look at the pro-world. More and more pro's get in trouble each year..why? Because years of "entitlement" have lead to this... when ever since high school you get treated special and lie a god, you expect the same when a pro..and then it changes. Coaches, AD's, and even school Presidents are not concerned abot the "student athlete" as much as they are their revenue and winning... boosters come and go spending huge amounts and only do so as long a sthe wins are more then the losses... and theplayers get cheated out of education and etc. becaus eof this.
  Now to be fair, college football and basketball does support virtually all college sports... the nonprofitable ones as well. Without UT (Tennessee, not that failed program in Texas) football, you wouldn't have the legendary UT Women's Basketball program. Just like without North Carolina's basketball program you probably wouldn't have their legendary women's soccer team....the money does go to supportng all the other sports... and is not just spent back int the football or basketball pool. This is why they are so against losing the bowl format..it brings in too mush money to be set aside lightly... and fact is a playoff may not be fair at all. Look at the NFL where a losing team made the play-offs last year while weveral teams with better records sat at home.... conference championship games show this weakness, remember when Oklohoma, Texas, and Texas Tech were tied and the chosen winner ha to play a team for teh conference championship with a way worse record then any of them?... Kind of unfair...same has happened in the SEC and other conferences with championships...a team with a better winning percentage even when in the same division (Georgia a few years ago had a better record then TN and a better record then LSU and still didn't make the SEC title game or the National Championship)... The whole system needs reworked especially punishment for those who cheat.
  Players do not need to be paid, they do need better scholarships and to be pushed for doing better in school..realising the fact is most will not even get invited to try out for an NFL team period. Their sense of entitlement needs to be killed even before college... High Schools are bigger cheaters then Colleges and still make sure moronic players are elligible for Fridays when the fact is they should probably be still in the third grade academically. Back when i was in high school more then once I was approached to test for athletes and trned them down..why? Well, i was already well known myself in academic circles and played sports myself..so it was not possible for me to take two tests at once (back when a 1400 was a perfect score on the SATs I made a 1360 on the PSAT and 1400 on the SAT, Maxed teh ACT, scored a 96 average on the ASVAB...aced my various AP exams... receiving full credit for them..in fact for many during the essay question and because I finished with more then half the time to spare I answered not only the required essay question and the one choose from this lsit of 5 questions, but the other 4 as well...why? We had to all stay until the time was up.
  I played basketball 3 years, tennis two, track 3, football 2 and other sports and never took anything but advanced and AP classes and did other extracurricular activities also...chess, drama, chorus, and etc... my lowest GPA was 3.56..I graduated after taking a year off with a 3.92...the University of Georgia used to require scholarship male football players to have a 1.09..moved up to a 1,19..female athletes needed a 2.10 GPA... that's a high F for males..and C's for females to gain and keep scholarships. Herschel walker cold barely read and write when he left College for the USFL... he amitted this in many magazine articles. This was a crime, because that man was intelligent and trly gifted.
  How can I say that? he could and did understand gameplans and etc...and could run like no other...athletes are not stupid, just ignorant of most things outside of sports and the world they choose to live in... because of the God complexes given them by tme they enter high school. A lot of people see the continual arrests of athletes in certain programs as a sign of bad things..not me, what worries me is the program's that do not make the news in this way. Program's who do so are proof the local authorities do not coddle their college athletes.... where as those school's you never hear anything about make you stop and wonder about. Like compate Florida with USC..every year you will hear about at least 2 Florida players getting arrested... how many do you hear of at USC in a city with far more crime and distractions?... or how about Texas... Benson started suddenly just getting arrested and breaking laws after graduation or going into the NFL?..yep, you rarely hear about Txas players getting in trouble.. now a reminder Texas is where the big SMU scandal of the 80's took place..and it reached up to the Governor's office.... those school's scare me.
  Another thing that scares me..multiple suspensions and students who get suspended at one school going to another..and the NCAA allows it... I think there should be a definite rule about that and multiple suspensions. In fact...students who are felons should lose all scholarships or rights to play (most schools will boot normal students over this), busted with illegal drgs and substabces the same, underage drinking also, and finally no more multiple suspensions....like Garcia in South Carolina..5 suspensions..no way he should be playing. They should also ban players who parents try and gain from their abilities..ie: Cam Newton's dad...who's Church mazingly received numerous donations after he went to Auburn and even more after the NC.
 How to fix this, you can keep the bowl format, but do a plus one when there are two undefeated teams...keep the BCS Championship...tag it with the NCAA one also, but if there's a dispute..play another game for the NCAA one. Disallow more then one cupcake game..and make it so cross conference games are a must... This will help clear up a lot of the problems..and keep teamslike Kentucky who schedule a lot of easy Non-conference games to make a bowl every year on purpose. Next, pass a rule coaches cannot make more then their bosses. Quite frankly it is bullshit a collegiate president responsible for the entire college gets $500k while his coach gets $5 million a year.
  Next.. like I said earlier, make scholarship offers contracts, students and their parents have to sign... stating penalties for breaking the rules and fines for not living out their scholarships lifetime...also penalise coaches who force athletes out so they can open another scholarship for another player. This can be repaying the scholarship in full plus any legal fees incurred by the school over their cheating and more. Same for coahes..start making them pay and it'l straighten up. Next..have the NCAA form a real unit with real powers, backed by a congressional mandate to be able to actually investigate these matters and add to it the weight of the law..as in felonies and etc... for blocking such investigations and being caught anyway. As it stands the NCAA can only request people to speak to them and evidence..nothing else...they cannot force testimony or even gather evidence without cooperation...and that is thetruth and why the whole Reggie Bush debacle at USC took so long...they don't want to take that long and even have  been blocked from taking action because of this (TN 1998 championship team was reported for across the board academic cheating... none chose to talk, neither did the coaches, and the tutor filing the charges and making the accusations stopped also aftet the University gave her another higher paying job..after they originally fired her, plus a large bonus), these rules need to change.
  Also, the NCAA needs to make the rules and penalties clearer and fair across the board..smaller, unknown schools get hit harder then major money making ones...which is unfair. Also they need to come down hard on reportng schools..TN reported the entire Means deal to the NCAA only because their arch Rival Alabama won the bidding war..and their Coach Fulmer stopped making appearences anywhere where he could be subpoena'd to testify about it. Reports stated almost all the SEC and Southern schools in general were part of that whole bidding war except for the Florida schools and several others. Bowden and Spurrier are cleaner then that and Miami had their own conduits to gain talent and didn't want or need him. Tennesse, Alabama, Auburn, LSU, the MIssissippi Schools, Georgia, Georgia Tech, and several other schools were all involved in the bidding..and because they lost TN reported it.
  Big note here I am a Florida fan and live in Tennessee (originally from NE Florida) and can tell you honestly UT cheats..or rather did for years...and it was and is openly talked about around here among UT fans....who also claim whenever they lose the oher team cheats even worse, because they can't see how a team that plays by the rules can beat their team when it doesn't. This cheating involves recruiting (Johnny Majors got a slap on the wrist for his football camp scheme), academic elligibility, illegal bonuses for players..I worked in Knoxville and have seen UT players get into clubs free and not have to pay for anything, even when shopping at malls and etc. Hell I lived in Florida drig high school and when visitng one summer in Knoxville after our basketball team made the state final four... was approached at a restaraunt where I was eating with my older brother by their basketball coach who tried plying us with bear and wine and paying our tab...my brother who was 6 years older then me drank freely...I did not and I paid our tab, while letting them pick up his beer tab... but refused to commit or even visit the campus (I had already been numerous times visiting a step dad with cancer and friends I knew there).. now I was honored..my brother was shocked because he was the supposed athlete of the family and never was treated that way in school... and did not turn them in and made sure everyone knew they were not payng and I was not drinking....frankly, since I had family in TN and if I hadn't of taken that year..I may have accepted the offer even as a Florida fan. He was nice and respectful, even of my preference for schools... and talked about the upcoming college football season, which we agreed hinged on who won the Florida-UT-Georgia-Alabama games as usual..UF was out being under suspension by the NCAA, but their winning or losing would affect the other teams.
  Because I was into sports and was recruited awhile did see the bad side...it's actually quite open and out there believe it or not...things like Georgetown having a 99% white school population and an all black basketball team, Boston College and Notre dame being Catholic schools and having so many non-catholic scholarship athletes, and etc. Hell Florida itself is on par admission wise and rep wise academically as a Southern Ivy League school, yet look at the athletes who get in... I believe only Vandy has harsh academic levels for scholarship athletes in the SEC... and having such is not a sure sign of being a bad school.
  Notre Dame is only recently bad..they've always had higher academic elligibility requirements for football players then other schools, Stanford is another... in fact several schools who are perennial top 25'ers are like that. The service academies are even worse. A note here, some atletes are actually quite good about getting their degrees, Bo Jackson made sure to get his, because in his words, if he didn't would have been breaking a promise to his grandmother...and he did it while being a professional two sport athlete. Also, the rumours of him using steroids and etc were proven wrong..his injury was so bad because, yes he did have a less then healthy low body fat count...but not from steroids, but from a hard life and hard work even before college. Not enough body fat has been proven to cause major problems with injury recovery..the reason why those skinny young gymnasts take two years to recover from normal springed ankles.
  That's another thing the NCAA should do, across the board testing for illegal and prscribed drugs...a real problem at the collegiate level and one who's policy is not NCAA wide or even conference wide, but a school by school basis... each school decides what's proscribed and the punishment for it...hence why some schools have a high level of marijuana users busted during the NFL combines and others get nailed for performance enhancers. (Florida and USC...respectively).
  My answers... either do it themselves or Congress do it, but give the NCAA more power and have it backed by the law when it comes to investigating..make sure the punishments are fair across the board and those breaking he laws are punished, not those who follow, get on board with the pro's to do this also. Make the rules across the board the same from school to school and drug testing and what constitutes being punishable the same with the same penalties. No more multiple suspensions or moving to avoid punishment...repeat offenders get lifetime bans from such.
  Make scholarships all inclusive..meaning covering all the expenses and provide more opportunities for college athletes to find real and meaningful jobs in the community...work with High Schols also to reig in the sense of entitlement and local law enforcement to make sure athletes are not getting passes by homer cops and others... and stop plea bargains down to unpunishable misdemeanors...that keep schools from using rules about felonies to boot troublesome athletes. I do agree with one statement about a possible $300 a month additional stipend for all college athletes to help out... the time to stay honestly in shape and to get ready for seasons and etc does take a ot of time and make it hard for them to find decent jobs... and honest jobs. Do not bust them for selling their own personal memorabillia...this is patently unfair. Colleges can and do make money off their likenesses and etc..why can't they?
  Honestly i do not care about the Ohio State guys trading things for tattoos as much as I do them hanging out with a known drug dealer..tattoos are expensive and the coaches should have been wonderig how these supposedly poor guys could afford them and the nice cars they drove...which also bothers me more. The school make moeny off of appearences by coaches and athletes..why can't the athletes themselves..many of which won't receive a chance otherwise to proffit on their sports careers because most will not see any beyond the collegiate level...this is no brainer. Now I'm not talking endorsement deals..but maybe paid appearences at grand openings and etc....I also have no problems with them receiving discounts at stores they freqent, clubs, and etc... their appearence there will gain said places more custom anyway. Hell, when iwas a manager I gave discounts to regulars who brought large crowds in or used our place as a hang out...and our bottom ine showed it. We did this for car clubs and etc...and gained off it on otherwise slow times. Hell, we weren't a sports bar, but made moeny during seasons just because I talked the owners into just one TV out in the lobby placing them all around..and were packed whenever games were on.Our only slow night was  Tuesday and Wednesdays because their were games on all the other nights... we also let the local schools know we'd give a discount for after game meals... and for them to let their opponents outside the area know also... and that this included bands and cheerleaders...plus anyone with a student ID for both schools...other restaraunts were mad because we received all this attention..hell we'd stay open late if they wanted coming home from away games.
  The rules can be very honest and less hrahs and keep the "amateur" quality of the college game.... if done sensibly... but they don't want that...and that is wrong. The death penalty only punishes those who follows..SMU's boosters, the regents, governor, and etc. were not punished...only the players and school...which was the real crime.