Tuesday, August 31, 2010

First They Had No Mascot, Now They Have No QB

Late this afternoon, the NCAA denied Jermiah Masoli's petition to transfer to Ole Miss without sitting out a season.

First, read Mellencamp's entirely-too-hilarious-to-skip take.

Second, while I've got no regard to speak of for Houston Nutt or any team he happens to be coaching at the moment, this is another good example of the NCAA's institutional lack of reliability.  Was the grad-student transfer rule intended to facilitate playing time for guys who get kicked out of a program one week and jump to a different one the next?  Of course not.

Does that make it okay for the Mandarins of Indianapolis to apply that rule selectively, just because they think Nutt is a sleaze?  Nope.  Not even if Nutt is a sleaze (which he is).

Nutt, who got himself into this mess, deserves what he's getting; Ole Miss, which hired him, deserves it by extension.  But that still doesn't make it all either okey or dokey.   If the NCAA didn't want the rule to apply to booted-out program jumpers, they should have written it to say so--and not having done that, they should have followed the letter of the rule today, instead of following their subjective inclinations and denying Masoli's request.

UPDATE:  Tony Barnhart agrees.  Neal McCready REALLY agrees.

1 comment:

mwdeav said...

Completely agree, sir. This is essentially "legislating from the bench."

The NCAA making rulings based on what the "intent" of the rules is rather than what the rules actually say is a very dangerous precedent indeed.

Spoke to someone in an SEC SID tonight and heard that the NCAA apparently has a checklist of documentation required to submit for a player to transfer under this rule. No where on the checklist does it question whether the player is transferring as a result of being dismissed or other disciplinary issues ...

The NCAA is making up the rules as they go along. Maybe if certain SEC coaches weren't lodging complaints ...