Here's the case for the death penalty for Louisville as laid out in the article Paultzman posted:
Perhaps, but if Bowen’s account was true, they most certainly were paying players, or at least the parents of players. That is a clear major violation. This isn’t in the gray area. And it occurred a little over two months after getting drilled in a separate major violation case. Plus, just two months prior Johnson claimed there would never be a payment and now he was making a payment, so whether this would really be a one-time thing is questionable.
We never got to find out, of course. By late September, when the scandal broke, Johnson was placed on administrative leave. He was fired in November and now works as an assistant at LaSalle. That school has offered no comment yet on the allegations Tuesday.
The NCAA’s stated criteria for implementing the “repeat violator” legislation and enacting the so-called death penalty is straightforward.
“Following the announcement of a major case, a major violation occurs … within five years of the starting date of the penalty assessed in the first case,” NCAA documents read. “The second major case does not have to be in the same sport as the previous case to affect the second sport.”
In this case it isn’t just the same sport, men’s basketball, it’s the same coaching staff, Rick Pitino’s. And forget five years, Louisville didn’t make it five months.
The first, with the strippers and the prostitutes, occurred because of the direct actions of director of basketball operations Andre McGee, who was gone by the time the sanctions hit. This one, if true, would be the associate head coach.
Perhaps even worse for Louisville, this trial isn’t even half over. The prosecution has already stated, without details, that another assistant coach, Jordan Fair, paid $900 to a separate student athlete at an undisclosed time. It is also possible that a secret recording of a meeting in Las Vegas may be introduced featuring Fair. That’s three separate members of Pitino’s staff that would be implicated.
The NCAA has brought out the death penalty only once, barring the SMU football team from playing the 1987 season and limiting the 1988 season to only home games for violating NCAA rules while on probation. The school decided to sit out 1988 also.
This is similar, sort of. Prostitutes, strippers and then alleged direct cash payments, only not from rogue boosters or in the shadows via agents, but Pitino’s own hand-picked staff members.
If the committee on infractions doesn’t have the courage to implement the death penalty on that, then the NCAA should just give up and take it off the books.
If the allegations of Bowen Sr. are true, the facts fit the penalty suggested. Frankly doesn't matter that they got rid of the two actual violators after each offense.
