The tampering is the part with the catchy name, so it's the part everybody will talk about. It's also the least interesting thing in Friday's NCAA ruling against Ole Miss. The real story is that the school was told in 2017 to cut a booster loose, never did, and let his money keep rolling into the athletics foundation.
Let me give the phone calls their due first, because I'm old and I try to be fair. The Committee on Infractions found that Wes Flanigan, then an assistant on the men's basketball staff, talked on the phone 16 times and traded 10 texts with the adviser of a player at another school who hadn't entered the transfer portal. That's against the rules, and the NCAA says he knew exactly whose adviser he was calling. He got a one-year show-cause and a two-game suspension he already served last December. Fine. Rules are rules.
But look at what the rule actually caught. The player never visited Oxford. He never got a scholarship offer. He went into the portal and transferred somewhere else. ESPN pointed out that the release doesn't even say when the calls happened, and most of the recruiting penalties were served over the past two seasons. So we have a punishment, mostly finished, for a recruitment that never happened, on a timeline nobody will specify. I've sat through a lot of compliance stories in a lot of folding chairs, and I can't think of one that'll change less about how anybody recruits.
I'll say where I stand, since I'm the guy who thinks these kids should have been paid decades ago. A coach talking to a player's adviser is how a player with options finds out what he's worth. A rule that says nobody can have that conversation until the kid's name shows up in a database was written for a sport that doesn't exist anymore. I'd rather see it rewritten than enforced like this.
Now the booster. The NCAA found Ole Miss never actually disassociated a booster it was ordered to cut off in its 2017 case. During the stretch when he was supposed to be gone, he gave to the athletics foundation 18 times, $109,240 in all, and kept his premium seats. That's a Level I failure to monitor, the heaviest finding in the whole case, and it should have been the headline.
Think about how that happens. Disassociation isn't a gray area. There's a name on a list. Somebody processes a gift with that name on it, then does it again, 18 times, and somebody else keeps his seats in the good section. You don't need a rogue assistant with a cell phone for that. You need an athletic department that never got around to reading its own punishment.
The fair counterpoint is that the school took its medicine: two years of probation, a $455,000 fine, and a negotiated resolution it can't appeal. True. But a school doesn't get credit for accepting a penalty for ignoring its last penalty. And it took a case about somebody else's phone calls for any of this to come out in public.
If anybody in Oxford asked me, and nobody has since roughly 1978, I'd tell them to send the $109,240 back and say so out loud, which is the one fix on the table that would actually cost them something.
The NCAA put "Tampering violations occurred" at the top of its release. If I'd turned in that headline, my editor would have handed it back and asked me where the booster went.
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