Rutger's Coaching Abuse--Assume Athletes are Students

The tape of how Mike Rice treated Rutger’s basketball players speaks for itself. It chronicles months of a coach who “motivated” athletes through physical grabbing, pushing, throwing balls at unprotected heads and genitals while hurling endless curses and anti-women and anti-gay slurs. Only after the tapes reached the public thanks did the President and Athletic Director fire Reid. Now the Rutger’s athletic director and the senior Vice President who prevented Reid’s firing are gone. The media has covered many angles of what is horribly wrong here; I want to focus upon one.

Let’s assume athletes are students and coaches are teachers.

This is the fundamental moral claim of college athletics. If athletics belongs in the university, then it's teaching should align with the mission of helping students grow as persons and acquire high order cognitive and character attributes.

Rice’s actions represent profound moral failure and do not belong in the university dedicated to teaching students to learn and master themselves and knowledge.

Most college coaches I know choose college over professional ball because they see themselves as teachers. They love the game, they love helping young men and women grow into adults. The best are appalled at what they saw. Jim Boeheim in 35^th year coaching it best, “Honestly I couldn’t watch it anymore.” Boeheim had the courage to admit the relentless pressure on coaches can drive them to behaviors, “I get verbal, I’m on players. I don’t like to curse. I do curse sometimes.”

Boeheim also highlights an almost universal response among coaches. The Rutgers' coach did not need this demeaning and degrading style. “The tragedy is his team would have played exactly the same, or better, if he hadn’t done any of that…If he never threw a ball, never touched anybody, his team would have played, I think, better, in my experience.”

My point is not that this is a bad way to get winning team. Even if his team was winning, his style of coaching did not belong on a university campus, period.

Let’s assume practice is a classroom, coaches are teachers and athletes are students.

A good class and teacher have goals and a lesson plan. Good coaches have practices planned and know what their goals are for each practice just as good teachers.

If athletic practices had a syllabus, the class goals would read something like this.

1.   Understand the basics of the game and the team plays.

2.  Develop one’s talent and perfect skills that enable a person to achieve at the highest level he or she can.

3.  Understand how to scout, read and successfully play against an opponent.

4.  Develop the physical and mental endurance to play at a high level in intense competitions.

5.  To develop the emotional capacity and self-discipline to be team oriented, stay focused amid chaotic competition and efforts to disrupt concentration.

6.  Develop the cognitive skills to recognize patterns make decisions and act upon trained perception and knowledge.

The coach’s athletic class aims to help the student develop physical, emotional and cognitive skills that empower the student to achieve at their highest possible level.

The student should develop a strong sense of oneself as a confident, high achieving, team oriented individual capable of assessing, adapting and acting under fast moving conditions of competition.

Many modern university classes make no pretense to train pattern recognition, decision-making or impact character. A subset of modern university classes does pursue these goals. Modern science labs teach students to practice and contribute to doing science. Professional schools often create high pressured environments to replicate the stress students might face on the job. Old style law classes employed a tyrannical and fear driven style humiliating and attacking students to prepare them for the rigors of trials. The singular world of performance training requires students such as singers, actors, musicians or artists to confront super tough teachers. Students face endless and sometimes intimidating critiques.

Many classes and teachers use fear as an aspect of motivating students. Despite endless studies that strength based positive reinforcement works better, most teachers mix fear into their classes. The simple reality of grades mixes fear of failure into classes. Harsh and demanding teachers can intimidate students. Sometimes the fear can work well and help challenge students to do more than they dreamed they could. 

Every university will have crazy, ditsy and abusive teachers. I have dealt with all kinds. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they cross lines where they abuse and hurt their students. Sometimes in the name of demanding excellence they move over into a bizarre form of domination and abuse. When teachers cross these lines they need to be disciplined or terminated.

In teaching and coaching process matters as much as the outcome. Students learn to internalize how they are taught, not just the outcomes. Every teacher presents a role model for how to pursue a profession, how to relate to other people and how to exercise knowledge and performance.

Physical and emotional abuse, endless screaming of obscenities and homophobic slurs fundamentally fail as college teaching. No university should want their students demeaned and taught to see themselves as body parts, stereotypes. No university should permit their students to have their heads or genitals battered by basketballs. Even basic training does not permit such treatment.

Two things hit me about this. Most coaches at some point in practice yell, scream and are quite capable of creative insults and profane curses. It really struck me how many of Rice's players saw this behavior as not unusual—I don’t even want to talk about what this tells us about the type of coaching that goes on at high school and AAU teams. Second, any of us who have experienced different styles of coaching or teaching know that you can teach different ways and be more affirming and strength based. We know that a lot of this stuff rubs off your back after a while, it becomes noise not signal. Now this has a real downside because it means that people can become so inured to abuse that they accept it and internalize the demeaned identity and just get on with life.   

Good teaching and coaching means teachers simulate some of the stress and anxiety of such competition and speed. This can be done in many ways and has family resemblance to techniques used in professional schools. When this crosses a line to moral and physical abuse; when it makes a student less of a person, the college should stop it whether in athletic practice or a classroom.

Reforming Not Outsourcing NCAA Enforcement

We can assume the NCAA will continue to investigate and adjudicate violations of the membership’s rules. We can assume the decisions will continue to call down firestorms of protest. We can assume that the process will periodically make mistakes that lead to flawed judgments.

Endless variations exist for addressing self-regulating investigations and adjudication. Organizations can keep  them in house or outsource them. Most recent critics call for outsourcing the functions to eliminate possible conflict of interests. Yet outsourcing has serious problems with accountability. Whatever it does, any self-regulating organization such as NCAA has to be relentless in recruiting, training and professionalizing investigators. I also think NCAA internal reforms on  infractions and sanctions have a chance to make adjudication more consistent, legitimate and transparent.

Self-governing professional associations live with the paradox that peer governance creates inherent conflict of interest. Peers legislate for the good of the profession, but also legislate to protect competition and protect an equal playing field. Self-governing groups are tempted to over-legislate to offset the ability of the powerful to dominate and anticipate abuses. Professional enforcement faces pressures through clubby hiring practices. Peers judging peers invites the perception that peers will go easy on each other as in law or medicine or will be too hard on each other by trying to cripple teams as in sports.

These inherent strains lie at the heart of complaints about the NCAA and all self-governing associations. The most commonly tried "solutions" include: deregulation; outsource investigations; outsider based tribunals.  Let’s examine the three in NCAA context.

DEREGULATION:       The modern NCAA has made deregulation a central tenet. Deregulation should minimize picayune rules that lead to intrusive enforcement and burdensome record keeping.

Deregulation, however, is not as easy as it sounds. Most rules were legislated to combat booster abuse or excessive tactics by very rich schools. The elaborate regulations limiting meal expenditures and travel, for instance, came up to stop lavish banquets, private jet flights or clandestine booster gifts. Limits upon communication arose because student athletes complained about being bombarded.

Deregulation will advantage very rich schools, invite garish expenditures and intrude more on students. Schools have already asked for an override on a package of deregulations that would delimit recruiting staff and numbers of sent information. Deregulation makes a lot of sense in many areas and can lessen record keeping and interventions, but we have to accept the costs in excessive and lavish expenditures and launching new arms races in outlandish recruiting ploys.We have to accept that the rich will get richer under deregulation.

OUTSOURCING INVESTIGATIONS:              This approach is often tried and usually taken back in house, but might be worthwhile on a selective basis.

Day-to-day self-reporting, negotiations and discussions lead to the internal resolution of thousands of compliance issues. The NCAA should keep internal precedents and strong staff knowledge to make this work well. NCAA central compliance trains individuals who are recruited to work at schools, and this spreads professionalism. Central staff sponsors seminars and teaching as well as communication updates. Educational and everyday standard enforcement belong in house.

1.     Major investigations are another matter. The NCAA has demonstrated uneven ability to recruit, train and hold accountable field investigators. This is not an easy job, and investigators face resistance, withholding, and lying. Direct NCAA connections, however, help accountability and link continuously with legal staff and senior leaders. This approach does not guarantee against mistakes as my UW case demonstrated with a 4.5 million dollar judgment or against bad judgment as Miami illustrates.

a.     It may make sense, as the government and corporations do, to use outside investigators during very high profile cases. This should be a rare occurrence but might make sense if very high revenue schools or schools with histories of NCAA conflict are involved.
b.    It might make sense to narrow investigation scopes and bring sequential judgments to expedite the time and encourage earlier resolution of outstanding remaining violations. This will be hard, however, because the ultimate decision about "lack of institutional control" often involves linking together a pattern of infractions over time and across several areas. 

b.     Many groups usually bring outsourced investigations back in house for three reasons.

                                               i.     They cost more money, and outsiders have incentives to extend the cost.  The association loses control over investigators, and some agencies hire untrained and undermanaged folks to maximize profit.

                                              ii.     Legal accountability is harder to maintain with external investigators.

                                            iii.     Investigators will want return business and will adapt to the ethos of their client. Many outsourced consultants end up looking like internal staff to get return business.

2.     It makes far more sense for the NCAA to hire better-qualified investigators and train and monitor them better. This requires relentless effort. Outsourcing involves a small universe of specialized firms, and most of them will have colleges as clients. This dual client world would create even more conflicts of interest.

OUTSOURCE ADJUDICATION JUDGMENTS:                       The most vexing dilemma remains how to ensure fairness and legitimacy of infraction decisions. Past practice had a 10 person Infractions Committee meet to adjudicate all the major infraction cases brought by NCAA after investigation. Although often criticized for slowness, the slowness in bringing cases really results from the difficulty of doing investigations without subpoena power.

The Infractions Panel steadfastly refused to be bound by precedent or guidelines for penalties. It insisted each case was unique and had to be addressed on its merits. This lead to what many, myself included, saw as sanctions that often did not make sense in light of past practice. It made it hard to write careful decisions that would guide colleges. It made it hard to see consistency across not only decisions but application of sanctions.

This refusal to create consistent patterns generated the suspicion that the Infraction Committee would go easy on or strike hard for political reasons. Very little evidence exists to support this contention, and certainly no strong link has been made between members of the panel who are respected and careful in their decisions. In addition members with conflicts and conference affiliations recuse.

New NCAA rules try to address these issues in 2013.

1.     The NCAA  will impose strict accountability on head coaches for the actions of their assistants and staffs. This will prevent the endless excuse giving that head coaches have used for the last decade.

2.     The NCAA is creating four categories of infractions that have guidelines for sanctions. This will produce greater clarity and predictability for schools.

a.     These categories are: Level I—Severe breach of conduct, Level II—Significant breach of conduct, Level III--Breach of conduct, and Level IV—Incidental issues. Each level has a set of guidelines for sanctions.

3.     The Infractions Committee will grow into a pool of 24 individuals from whom panels will be formed to adjudicate cases. This will permit greater attention and quicker action on the range of cases.

The proposals make a lot of sense to me but have aroused misgivings especially around the issue of consistency across panels. Yet little consistency exists now because of the refusal to deploy precedent or guidelines. The new panels will have greater clarity on magnitude of the violation and stronger guidelines on the sanctions. This will focus its obligations to explain decisions. I appreciate unique circumstances arise but believe the Infractions panel has an obligation to explain its deviation from past practice or its expansion of precedent. This would require greater transparency in decisions.

I believe that the new pool approach could be improved by requiring an independent nonaffiliated neutral on each panel. Many other professional associations have gained from ensuring one voice is neutral but expert and the proposed pool can easily accommodate such individuals. This required neutral places an internal discipline on deliberations.

Outsourcing in such sensitive areas is overrated and not validated by other experience. I believe that the new approach on specifying violations and guidelines has real hope of increasing quality, transparency and clarity of decisions. The NCAA has to get a handle on consistency and internal accountability in its quality of investigators as well as ensure some neutral voice whether on the panel or with internal ombudsmen in its work.

Why Do Coaches Lie?

“Own it!”

“No excuses!”

“Take responsibility for yourself?”

“You can only control one thing, yourself!”

Coaches scream the words and as they stalk the sidelines and tower over practices. They engrave them in the minds of their players. These words define the credo of every good coach who works with young athletes.

With their visibility, celebrity and stature coaches are elevated into role models and moral arbiters beyond the field of play. They even author books like Sean Payton of the New Orleans’ Saints with Home Team. Jim Tressel at Ohio State authored a passel of motivational and leadership books such as The Winners Manuel: For the Game of Life. Coaches become spokesman for values and leadership.

For good coaches it begins with coaching a person to accept responsibility for him or herself. A strong coach builds the foundation of honest self-assessment and growth. If a person does not take responsibility for actions, she or he will never acknowledge problems or failures, a player will never see the need to change and learn. Players who do not take responsibility for themselves never grow.

Honesty grounds responsibility. A person has to be honest with him or herself to have a chance to acknowledge mistakes, learn what they are doing wrong and practice getting it right.

A good coach knows this and inculcates it in their style. Respect for a sport, respect for a person and the passion to help a player get better and a team to succeed require transparent honesty—sometimes hard even harsh honesty to get through to an athlete who needs to get over their ego and start developing as a person and player.

Honest responsibility drives a coach to x-rays the player’s performance to identify strengths and weaknesses and then help an individual get better. As important, a good coach self-critiques. A good coach is brutally honest with themselves and takes responsibility for their mistakes—my bad—as team slang might say.

This honest self-criticism and taking responsibility leads coaches to spend hours on tape and break down their own past performance as well as that of players and opponents.

Good coaches model the responsibility they so passionately preach.

So why do they lie when they get into trouble?

This year bursts with examples. Jim Tressel, the successful and devout football coach at Ohio State, lied to his boss and then the NCAA to “protect” his all star players and protect a bowl season. When he found out his own players had violated NCAA regulations on a regular basis, he should have accepted responsibility and demanded they accept responsibility. Instead he hid the corruption, then he lied about to everyone.

Sean Payton tacitly and probably not so tacitly condoned creating a culture that encouraged and rewarded his defensive team to deliberately set out to maim, injure and damage the brain functioning of opposing players. Payton clearly benefits from a culture of immoral and illegal actions that violate the moral core of the sport. He ignores it with culpable negligence and rewards the coaches who lead it. When it comes out or when he knew, he should have stopped it immediately. He should have changed the behavior of his coaches and acted to inform and protect his bosses. Instead when it leaks, Sean Peyton misrepresents it to his bosses initially and then directly lies to the Commissioner of the NFL.

Now Bobby Petrino the coach of Arkansas, a bluff motorcycle riding good old coach, has an fairly serious accident riding his hog, sorry about the bad pun for all you razorback fans. Blood splatters with broken bones and fractured vertebrae in his neck, he snuck away from the accident and got his body guard to get him to the hospital. He told a bystander not to call 911 and cooperated with the police. He told everyone that he was riding alone after a day with his wife. Twice he made it clear in public environments. Turns out he had a passenger, a 25 year old stunning blond ex-volleyball player whom he had hired the week before. Oops. Turns out he was having an “inappropriate relationships” with her—read betraying his wife and family and having an affair.

Did Petrino accept responsibility for the accident, yes, sort of, but he did his best to cover-up with lies the unfortunate fact that he was joyriding with a girlfriend half his age. He lied to the press, his boss and his team and his wife.

These are just three examples this year. What befuddles me is how these men who so passionately preach and demand accountability and responsibility from their players abandon all these principles when it comes to them.

Tressel lied to protect his team, his record and himself. Payton lied to protect his team but also cover his own negligence and to spite a type of control over safety that he despised as weak. Petrino lies to protect his reputation protect his job and in theory protect his family from the embarrassment.

All three coaches live and die by honest demanding responsibility. All three fail when it comes to demanding it of themselves.

In this they join politicians, business leaders, clergy and many folks in power who default to lies and denial rather than taking responsibility. Unfortunately we have heard the story before and will hear it again.

What matters here is not that the coaches screwed up, we all do. What matters is that they lied and tried to shirk responsibility violating their own basic moral code.

We make coaches bigger than life in the press and in our own worship of them. We turn them into moral and leadership guides for players and fans and even buy their books. I even taught a chapter from Tressel. The media, ownership, colleges and we all collaborate in this collective conceit.

Turns out they are not heroes nor necessarily heroic. Turns out they work better on the field than in real life. Folks who get used to power and adulation begin to believe they are immune to the rules. They get so protected, even with their own body guards, and they are so successful in one area of life, that they begin to feel entitled in other areas of life. They take risks but most importantly they never believe they will be caught. At worse, they are so used to being right, they do not notice they are dong wrong. They are so used to being protected that they assume either their own power or their own network will protect them even against the truth.

I could cite hundreds examples of failed liars, but none of them seem to learn from each other. Payton did not learn from Tressel and Petrino did not learn from either.

Turns out they lie to protect themselves. They lie to evade or hide responsibility for their own moral failings—the very stance they condemn in their players

Turns out they are mortals after all, a fact they often forget in their celebrity.

Coaches should remember that for good or bad, we and their athletes take what they say seriously, too bad they don't.

These three will be back because they can win games, but if I simply cannot take them or their words seriously, how can their players?

Sports Ethics: Put on a Game Face

"Put your game face on" is one of the many sports expressions that pervade American English. It's an odd expression. I mean how do you put on a new face? Much as I'd like to do it, it seems very hard. Of course in LA plastic surgeons will do it for you.

Putting on a game face means something quite important, plastic surgery aside. Have you ever stood in front of a mirror and practiced different faces, no, not guitar gyrations, but different faces? It turns out that something important happens when we change our facial expression.

The human face is so powerful and human perception is so face dependent, that faces not only communicate immense amount of information, but they influence our cognitive and emotional states. Changing your face can  literally change our brain activity. Smiling can be an exercise to become more happy; frowning can make you more sad, scowling more angry. The face is an exquisite monitor of our emotions but it is also a generator. So putting on a game face can involve changing your internal emotional and cognitive balance.

When an athlete prepares for his or her game, he or she attempts to develop a focus for the game that is appropriate to how they carry themselves best in the game. Some players play best angry or fierce. Others take on a role of care free but focused players. Still others develop an eerie calm that helps them persevere with an even temper amid the chaotic emotions and emotional momentum of a game. Others manifest a preternatural concentration that unites their body, mind and emotions into a flowing zen like movement. Putting on a game face reminds us athletes perform just like Greek tragedy actors who donned masks to play their roles.

The game face focuses and carries the player into combat. Putting on a game face also implies an element of choice and control. If someone "loses it" in competition, they lost their focus and their face reflects it first. They lose the tuned balance of emotion, focus and skill deployment that enables them to perform at their best. Many game plans are built around trying to get players out of their game face and to lose it. Losing it can be contagious neurologically and socially. Whole teams can lose their composure and you see it in their faces. Teams often know when they've won long before they take the lead by the faces or body carriage of an opponent.

Last weekend I watched the University of Washington team have what their coach called a "melt down." In the third quarter of the game the players clearly lost focus, and their faces and body language showed it. They lost some bad calls and could not let go of the calls. Their anger and frustration kept them from complete focus upon the play at hand, instead they were resenting or replaying what they lost. The team imploded with sloppy play and penalties. But the issue here covers not just players but coaching accountability. If you watched the bench, the coaches yelled and rattled around. They contorted and yelled and shouted at the ref. Several had to be restrained from running on the field.

The coaches are leaders. Their demeanor models what the students expect and live up to. If coaches lose it and yell, how are the twenty year olds supposed to keep focused on the game?

Coaches must also put on game faces. Players take their cues from coaches, and as Sun Tzu and his followers emphasized in the Art of War, a leader must be tranquil and clear thinking at all times. Coachers may think they are firing up their players, but their bulging faces and angry strutting only model losing it to their players. Their own contorted faces give permission to players to remain upset.

The coaches' faces create contagion and pass on to the players the anger and lost focus, not just energy and intensity. Coaches need game faces too and having seen enough coaches lose it and not help their teams, I am becoming more comfortable with the Bill Bellichick or Tom Landry school of keep it intense but keep it controlled. Game faces matter for coaches and players. The Washington Husky's young coach Steve Sarkesian admitted as much in a post mortem, ""I am a passionate guy," he said. "I want to do everything I can for our kids to give them the best chance to win. And I felt like there was a point there that maybe my emotions got the best of me because I didn't feel like it was right. But I've got to show more composure, if I want our kids to show more composure." Motivating athletes is one thing; leading them off the edge is another.

Putting on a game face is fundamental to being an athlete or a coach, or for that matter being a professional of any sort. Like the Greek insight into play, when we "play ball' we put on masks that help us perform but also change and reflect whom we are.

NCAA Needs Program Wrecking Sanctions I & II

Reggie Bush returned his Heisman this week. A sad, symbolic, meaningless gesture that does nothing to take away the besmirching of a great heritage award.  At the same time new NCAA President Mark Emmert announced that he expects the NCAA to continue pursing major violators. More centrally he  agreed with the program crippling sanctions imposed upon USC for ignoring Bush's relationships with agents.

Soon the NCAA will pass judgment upon Michigan's football program for excessive coaches and  practice time. Soon they will dismantle North Carolina's program for cheating athletes & tutors  and a passel of players who consorted with agents. Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia etc etc. are all under investigations for agent related charges. Calipari's Kentucky is bound to give them an opening soon, he can't help himself. It is vital for the health of college sports that the NCAA not lose courage and continue with aggressive program wrecking sanctions.

I said program wrecking, not program destroying. The NCAA has been hamstrung for years by its obsession with the A-bomb of sanctions, the dreaded "death penalty" that it once applied to SMU. The point of the game is this obsession made the decisions too stark, all or nothing. Better to simply wreck a program, not destroy it.

What do I mean by wreck a program? The violations must strike at the program's ability to sustain a level of competitive excellence in the highly competitive environment. The USC sanctions demonstrate this in a way. They stripped titles and awards; but this is palliative. They took away bowl games; this matters; they cut a lot of scholarships; this matters profoundly. What they did not do but the NCAA needs to do more of is cut the TV money.

The reason the bowls, scholarships and TV matter is how it impacts recruiting. Programs and great coaches attract kids; but there are a fair number of good programs and a number of great coaches. Students will want to play for bowls, titles and TV exposure. The key impact  lies in the competitive recruiting disadvantages that sanctions generate. It becomes much harder for even great coaches to recruit top players if other great coaches can offer them bowls, TV exposure and scholarships. I know, I watched the Washington program stumble and stagger for years after its major probations.

Emmert can build upon the USC decision. The NCAA needs decisions that wreck programs; only wrecking programs will finally get coaches' attention. He has met with the barons of college football coaching to remind them that their own programs now lie at risk of carpet bombing just like USC. Finally the coaches, who are often more powerful than their putative bosses, college Presidents, now are vulnerable. When Nick Saban correctly calls agents pimps, he does so from self interest and outrage. Now  Emmert can harness that coaches' self interest as well as outrage to take on the agent and other issues.

It's time to act consistently, aggressive and massively against the programs; nothing else will change behavior. I will discuss this in the next post.

For years the NCAA enforcement lay supine; every now and it roused itself to  to take action, but never systematic and patterned. The enforcement staff remained a well intentioned backwater and with remarkably indifferent leadership and mediocre competence. My own experience arises from watching them botch a sure case against Washington coach Rick Neuheisel by not following their own rules. They turned a strong case into a multimillion dollar settlement with a corrupt coach on the basis of slipshod work. Programs worried about investigations but seldom feared them.

The new NCAA President Emmert can  change this by building on the USC success. He is radically altering the enforcement leadership structures. The number of investigators has risen to 23 from 12 in five years. The NCAA SWAT team to investigate the cesspool of college basketball recruiting and AAU teams has doubled; however that can be just a down payment given the magnitude of the problem. Emmert has made clear that he will continue to beef up the staff. More importantly he has removed the leadership obstacles to hiring a higher quality and more aggressive staff and legal counsel. The NCAA has been hamstrung by mediocre legal quality of its own staff and its outside representation for years.

Increasing staff quality, quantity and competence is critical. Emmert has made clear that even if he cuts the NCAA's staff, he will not touch enforcement. But that is only half the equation. The NCAA must create serious program wrecking penalties.

USC is the harbinger. The penalties put superstar coaches on notice that no one is immune. More importantly it let them know that not only will the NCAA "vacate" titles and games, but will aggressively chop scholarships. The vacated games did not matter to Florida State; the vacated games and title did not matter to Pete Carroll after he left USC. The vacated games and titles certainly have not stopped John Calipari.  No the vacated games are only a start. Take away  bowls, deny championships and above all reduce scholarships and reduce TV money and exposure; these strike at the heart of a program's ability to sustain itself against other ferocious competitors.

Another key for the new NCAA approach will be absolute accountability for head coaches. They all claim it for themselves to garner high salaries and adulation for their successes. But when something bad happens, suddenly the all-knowing coaches fall into denial mode. These "who me?" "I didn't know" attitudes pervade college sports. Just watch the comments of Rich Rodriquez at Michigan; Pete Carroll of USC  or Butch Davis at North Carolina.

The NCAA must demand absolute accountability from coaches. Creating a portfolio of a coach's history of academics and violations just dips into the water. It will be good to have a public record of academic and compliance success or failure. But no penalties attach to coaches. And no penalties follow them. To be blunt, if coaches win, they will be hired again regardless of the portfolio.

This new accountability that puts whole programs at risk will force coaches to follow up their own rhetoric. This kind of program future accountability will also force ADs and presidents to be more prudent when they hire coaches who can walk away but leave a program in shambles for years.

Enforcing higher standards and program crippling penalties will demand coaches match their rhetoric and power by taking responsibility for the athletes they recruit and build their reputations on. It will force them to protect the institutions they claim to be loyal to. It takes immense self deception and denial to ignore the problems around cheating tutors, agent money or excessive coaches. The program wrecking approaches will force the coaches to do what they should do. They would not accept from players the excuses they offer for themselves. 

Coaches are often beyond the effective control of Presidents and Boards. They usually have their own supporters on Boards limiting Presidents who try to control them. The NCAA has always had the potential to take high profile coaches on but been cowered by its own lack of competence and the need to preserve the TV deals that lionize and make marketable stars of coaches.

Cripple a few more programs. Not the death penalty, just wound them seriously, so the other programs can smell blood and circle around and tear them apart. A few more and the NCAA might once again be taken seriously as the guardian of the games.