Sorting Through Michigan’s Alleged NCAA Violations

Right on the cusp of the first game week of the season, the last thing any team needs is a distraction.  Whether it is in the form of an injury, a quote from a press conference, or something else, distractions are never welcome with a game right around the corner.  Unfortunately, an enormous distraction has hit Michigan with less than a week until the first game: allegations of NCAA violations.

The Free Press put together a report on how much time Michigan players spent at the football facility during the season and how much time they spent participating in offseason workouts that have a very big gray area as far as whether or not they were mandatory or voluntary.  The details in the report were provided by “current or former” players, which is more troubling than the allegations in my opinion.  Former players speaking out about this is no big surprise, but for players still on the team to basically tell on the coaches is astounding.  Regardless of what you think about the allegations (which I’ll get to in a second), the source of them is the most troubling part and worries me about the current status of the locker room.

The allegations put forth are basically about how much time players are allowed to spend on football each day and each week.  In the offseason, players are allowed only eight hours of mandatory workouts a week.  They can spend more time than that working out, but only on a voluntary basis.  That is where a gray area exists, though anyone who has played a sport before knows that voluntary stuff is voluntary only for people who don’t want to play.  A phrase Michigan coaches have says it best: “Workouts aren’t mandatory, but neither is playing time.”

In the past two off-seasons, players said, the Wolverines were expected to spend two to three times more than the eight hours allowed for required workouts each week. Players are free to exceed the limit, but it must be truly voluntary.

The players said the off-season work was clearly required. Several of them said players who failed to do all the strength and conditioning were forced to come back to finish or were punished with additional work.

“It was mandatory,” one player said. “They’d tell you it wasn’t, but it really was. If you didn’t show up, there was punishment. I just felt for the guys that did miss a workout and had to go through the personal hell they would go through.”

The quote above shows much of a gray area this is.  If the coaches said the workouts weren’t mandatory but pointed out that neither is playing time, that doesn’t mean that they were officially required.  Like I said earlier, anybody who has played sports knows that you better be there if you want to see the field, but that still doesn’t mean the workouts are officially mandatory.  If there is an actual physical punishment for not attending a voluntary workout, then you are walking a very fine line.  If the punishment is simply not playing and being in the doghouse, however, then the only issue is the fact that the coaches knew who was and wasn’t going to the workouts.  That’s another fine line, as attendance isn’t supposed to be taken for voluntary workouts.  Again, though, if you’ve ever played sports and didn’t show up to a voluntary workout, you can bet the coaches would find out about it one way or another.  Another gray area exists in that sense, as it depends on if official attendance was being taken or if it was all word of mouth.

The next allegation has to do with in-season time spent on football.  No more than 20 hours a week can be spent on it, and that includes no more than four hours a day.

Players spent at least nine hours on football activities on Sundays after games last fall. NCAA rules mandate a daily 4-hour limit. The Wolverines also exceeded the weekly limit of 20 hours, the athletes said.

The allegation about Sundays was backed up by ESPN’s Joe Schad, who posted the following two things on Twitter.

Former Michigan starter tells me he would put in 11-hour days on Sundays (4 hour required is max)

Another UM player told me he was usually the facility on Sundays from 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. The maximum allotment per day is 4 hours.

Once again, we have a gray area.  I do find it surprising that players were at the facility for that long on the day after a game, but how much of their time there was mandatory?  Stuff like spending time with the medical staff and eating lunch are not counted against the four-hour daily maximum, and later in the Free Press’ story it says that players weren’t required to show up until noon.  A weight-lifting session was first on the agenda, and then there were meetings.  A practice, usually under the lights, concluded the day.  It still looks like Michigan exceeded the limit, but by how much when you break down what players actually did on Sundays?  Overall, it appears Michigan went over the 20-hour limit as well, but as the Free Press later concludes, it wasn’t by more than a few hours.

With three hours on Saturday and a full day on Sunday, players tallied about 12 hours on those two days. They were off Monday. Players said they would spend an additional three to four hours with the team on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, bringing the weekly total to 21-24 hours.

Just because Michigan went over the limit by only a few hours doesn’t mean it isn’t against the rules, but I would be surprised if many teams truly spent only 20 hours on football a week.  Paul Gattis of The Huntsville Times feels the same way.

I’ve always found that somewhat of an unwritten joke in college athletics. To think players spend no more than four hours per day in athletic-related activities is to stretch the realistic bounds of the imagination.

Just 20 hours a week on football? What do you think? I’m pretty skeptical of that myself. And that doesn’t even begin to wade into the offseason workouts debate — you know, those voluntary workouts that are “required”.

Just because everyone does it doesn’t make it legal, but the fact of the matter is most schools probably go over the limit.  That is why I’m more concerned about the fact that players were willing to share this with the Free Press.  You don’t see that happening all over the country, and that worries me more than the actual allegations.

Speaking of which, here is the other main allegation:

Players said members of Rodriguez’s quality-control staff often watched seven-on-seven off-season scrimmages. The noncontact drills, in which an offense runs plays against a defense, are supposed to be voluntary and player-run. They are held at U-M’s football facilities. NCAA rules allow only training staff — not quality-control staffers — to attend as a safety precaution. Quality-control staffers provide administrative and other support for the coaches but are not allowed to interact directly with players during games, practices or workouts.

This doesn’t seem as serious as over-working the players, and Michigan sort of responded to it in its official response from associate athletic director for compliance Judy Van Horn.

“During the season, the NCAA limits ‘countable’ practice activities to 20 hours per week. There are activities that don’t count, such as rehab and getting taped. We educate our coaching staffs and student-athletes (in all sports) to keep everyone informed of the rules. Also, compliance and administrative staff conduct in-person spot checks of practice during the academic year and summer. We have not had any reason to self-report any violations in this area with any of our sports.”

So where did all of these allegations come from?  I’ll let the Free Press explain.

For this report, the Free Press interviewed 10 current or former players and the parents of four others. In separate interviews, five players gave almost identical accounts of how the program is run, and a sixth player confirmed most of the descriptions. Other players, as well as parents of additional players, discussed the conditions in general. Several players declined to be interviewed at length but did not dispute the allegations when asked specifically about them.

This all seems very vague, but it does look like Michigan was over the time limits.  By how much is tough to judge, but that will be important if and when an actual investigation takes place by Michigan and/or the NCAA.  I think it’s safe to say there will be an investigation, as this story isn’t going away anytime soon.  It has been the top story on ESPN.com since it broke and has already made its way around the media.  To put it bluntly, it’s a big story.  Anytime you have the mention of NCAA violations it will be a big story, but when Michigan football is involved, it is taken to another level.

With that in mind, what effect will these allegations have on Michigan?

For Rich Rodriguez, rather than getting to talk about the season opener and how excited he is for the first game, he is going to be inundated with questions about these allegations.  He has already released a statement flat out denying any violations, but he is going to have to continue to answer questions until this story subsides.  The best way to make the story subside is by opening the season with a win against Western Michigan.  Winning does sort of cure these types of situations, and beating WMU would hopefully take the attention off the allegations and back on football.  On the other side, a loss will cause shit to hit the fan more than it already has.  Rodriguez needed to have a good season before these allegations, but now he is really on the clock.  It won’t take much for his support to fall apart in certain circles now that NCAA violations are being alleged, so Michigan better start winning sooner rather than later.

As for the team, it’s tough to tell how they will be affected.  The fact that current players shared information for this story, as mentioned earlier, concerns me greatly.  It tells me not everyone is on the same page, and most certainly not everyone is “All in for Michigan.”  That could divide the team and hurt its chemistry if players are suspicious of each other over who leaked out what.  On the other hand, for players who do buy into the program and are “All in for Michigan,” this could be a way to rally around their coach and take on an “us against the world” mentality.  Of course, the best case scenario is probably that the team stays focused on Western and doesn’t worry about this story, but considering a few current players helped create it, that will probably be tough to do.

As far as the NCAA’s response to this goes, I’d imagine they will conduct an investigation of some sort.  As Brian pointed out on mgoblog, a similar list of allegations led to very little punishment for Southeast Missouri State, so there is some precedent established.  Of course, Michigan isn’t Southeast Missouri State, so that could work for or against U-M.  It does worry me that these current and former players have no problem sharing these allegations with the media, so that could make it easier for the NCAA to investigate the claims.  Even so, punishment likely wouldn’t be anything more than a loss of scholarships, a loss of practice days, and probation at the very worst.  If Michigan does its due diligence and shows that these claims aren’t accurate, it could very well mean nothing happens.  That is obviously the best-case scenario, as committing any violation that causes the NCAA to do something would be embarrassing, to say the least.

I tend to think that little to nothing will happen from the NCAA based on the fact that such a big gray area exists in the whole mandatory/voluntary thing.  Also, although it seems like Michigan players spent an awful lot of time at the practice facility on Sundays after games, a gray area exists there as well in regards to what players were actually doing.  I do think Michigan went over the time limits, but it could defend itself based on technicalities of what was and wasn’t countable and what was and wasn’t mandatory.

Regardless of what the NCAA does, the damage has already been done as far as negative publicity goes.  This story spread like wild fire and became national news almost immediately.  It is one of the top sports stories out there and will probably be a hot topic for a while with the season starting this week.  Much like the Ann Arbor News’ academics investigation a couple years ago, it is unneeded negative attention on Michigan.  The bigger problem this time around is the timing of when the story was released (just a week before the season) and the fact that NCAA violations are at the forefront of it.  The AA News piece was more about Michigan making life easier for its athletes than NCAA violations, which is what the focus of the Free Press article seems to be.  Nothing may come of the allegations, but the damage has already been done perception-wise and in the PR world.  The only way to divert attention back to actual football is by playing a game, so in that regard Saturday can’t get here soon enough.

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I didn’t fit this into the main part of my post, but I wanted to bring attention to this quote from the Free Press’ article:

One player, echoing the words of others, said the workouts in the past two off-seasons at Michigan “affected people’s grades. People were falling asleep in class.”

If the Free Press was interested in presenting both sides of the story, this would have been a good time to mention that last year’s football team set a 20-year high in GPA.  Also, I know the player mentioned this, but many students are busy enough to the point where they are “falling asleep in class.”  Some students work when they’re not in class or studying, so football players aren’t the only ones with a full schedule.