By ANTHONY ALI
STAFF WRITER
The NCAA has announced that they will mete out their punishment of the University of Miami for consorting with convicted felon Nevin Shapiro. Shapiro, who had been arrested for swindling around $1 billion dollars, began alleging that he had been spending millions of dollars on new recruits, players and coaches who were part of both the men’s football and basketball programs. As this is a clear infraction of NCAA regulations, the NCAA promptly launched a probe in 2011, investigating the extent of Shapiro’s laundering, as well as the extent of the school’s knowledge of his wrongdoing. An analysis of the NCAA’s case conducted by the Associated Press found that the NCAA had discovered $173,330 in extra benefits, more than half of which was divvied up between two former players.
A year later, the NCAA came out and accused the university of not exercising institutional control, an accusation which is considered to be the most severe allegation that could be leveled towards a member school. Being that the infractions committee had yet to enact a punishment, the school sought to punish itself in an attempt to mitigate the harshness of any punishment that the NCAA could enact. As a result, the Hurricanes sat out of two bowl games and the Atlantic Coastal Conference title game, with a self-imposed reduction in recruiting compounding with these suspensions to form their attempt at reconciliation with the NCAA. For this reason, Miami has publicly made known their intentions to fight against any further suspensions that might be thrown against them.
As they still reserve the right to appeal, the university’s president, Donna Shalala, announced the university’s intentions. “We believe strongly in the principles and values of fairness and due process,” she said. “However, we have been wronged in this investigation and we believe that this process must come to a swift resolution which includes no additional punitive measures beyond those already self-imposed.”
Despite the university bearing most of the culpability in this incident, the NCAA also deserves a bit of criticism for their conduct in this debacle. The NCAA could have prosecuted this case more precisely, but some of their potential accusations were removed when it was found that investigators had improperly cooperated with Shapiro’s attorney. The alliance that investigators had struck up with the attorney evoked an outcry from university officials, with Shalala saying that it proved how the school was not being treated fairly. The university may have already paid the price by self-imposing several bans and restrictions, but the fact of the matter remains that the university should not have done so knowing that they could face further punitive measures from the NCAA. By enacting their own punishment, the Hurricanes simply made themselves more vulnerable. Luckily for Miami, the NCAA did not come down too heavy handed on them. A minimal scholarship loss for both football and men’s basketball is all that the Hurricanes received. No matter how small the punishment, this investigation and Miami’s actions during it have further exacerbated tensions in an already shaky relationship between the school and the NCAA.