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Andrea AdelsonESPN Staff Writer
The NCAA Committee on Infractions could have suspended head coach Rick Pitino up to a year for failing to monitor the "repugnant" actions of basketball operations director Andre McGee.
Instead, it opted for five conference games, a punishment that will serve as a blip on the road to another run at an NCAA championship. This specific decision begs closer scrutiny, considering the ramped-up awareness surrounding sex culture on campus and locker rooms, and the roles coaches must play as stewards of both.
Rick Pitino, Louisville find new ways to fail in response to sex scandal
The NCAA charged Rick Pitino with a failure to monitor his program, but his defiant response to those charges is his real failure. Louisville will fight to keep its national championship, but it has lost its chance to reclaim its dignity.
The committee's 35-page report proves that point. Throughout the report, the committee noted McGee's conduct was "disgusting and inexcusable," "repugnant" and "disgraceful," explicitly stating "Without dispute, the bylaws do not allow institutional staff members to arrange for stripteases and sex acts for prospects, enrolled student-athletes and/or those who accompany them to campus."
Further, McGee "created an environment that has no place on a college campus and was directly at odds with the NCAA Collegiate Model." According to the report, at least seven and as many as 10 of the prospects involved were minors; three were 16. Pitino has maintained that these sordid activities happened over a four-year period without his knowledge; the committee rejected that argument, saying Pitino "failed to rebut the presumption that he was responsible for the activities."
The NCAA enacted stricter bylaws to hold coaches more accountable in October 2012 and completely changed its penalty structure. Because the infractions at Louisville happened before and after the new infractions process, the committee compared the two penalty structures and opted for the more lenient one.
Carol Cartwright, chief hearing officer in the case, explained the decision this way, "It's our process that when violations occur both before and after the new structure, we do the analysis. In this case, the violations were about evenly distributed between the old and the new. It's our standard process in those cases to use the more lenient process and that's what we did in this case."
"To say that you believe coaches have some kind of profound responsibility for the culture within their team but then when presented with a situation where that clearly has not been manifested, the question is what is your behavior?" said Larry Roper, interim director of the School of Language, Culture and Society at Oregon State. "There's a difference between being skilled in the rhetoric and another in being committed to the behavior. It seems in this situation, the NCAA missed the connection between what their espoused values are, versus what their enacted values are."
Roper, who has written about the ethics of the collegiate locker room, points out the message that is sent when prostitutes and strippers are introduced to recruits. Not only does it undermine the values any university wants to show off and promote, it also implicitly gives these players the idea that behavior like this should be expected once they arrive on campus. That could end up serving to condone misbehavior toward women.
"If you started off with strippers or prostitutes, then you're setting some pretty strong values about what seem to be important features of the culture," Roper said. "When people re-enter the culture later, they come in with the expectation where here's the type of activities I can expect, or here's the kind of behaviors that members of this community somehow endorse as significant. If you introduce people to the objectification of another person, you don't just isolate that to a particular place. You sort of accept that objectification is something that can be carried to other parts of the culture."
Even before this case became public, Louisville did not have a sterling reputation for its culture. Pitino kept his job in 2009 after admitting to an extramarital affair and paying for his mistress' abortion. In 2014, athletic director Tom Jurich took withering criticism for hiring Bobby Petrino for a second stint as football coach, two years after Petrino lost his job at Arkansas for his own extramarital affair.
More criticism followed when Louisville signed defensive end Devonte Fields in 2015, after he was kicked out of TCU after allegations he punched his ex-girlfriend.
Once the allegations surrounding McGee and the basketball program surfaced, reaction outside Louisville focused on the idea that the program would do anything to win. The defiant tone Louisville and Pitino struck after the sanctions were announced only reinforced the perception that winning there supersedes cultural values.
Louisville has disputed that characterization for years. Nancy Theriot, professor and chairwoman of the women's and gender studies department at Louisville, said in an email message that she had not heard of an unfriendly culture to women in the athletics department. She added, "As a UofL faculty member who interacts with students and wants a campus environment free of sexism and exploitation, I believe the sanctions are justified given the seriousness of the infractions."
Louisville plans on appealing all sanctions, including the order to vacate games in which it used ineligible players. That means 108 regular-season and 15 NCAA tournament games are in jeopardy, including the 2013 national championship.
Josephine Potuto, a law professor at Nebraska who served on the NCAA Committee on Infractions for three terms, including chair from 2006 to '08, did not want to discount how seriously schools take vacating wins. Indeed, Louisville is dogged in its determination to keep that banner. Which penalty has the larger impact, especially through the lens focused on locker room culture?
"In terms of deterring the behavior from happening or in his case encouraging more protocols to monitor, losing the coach probably has more impact but in terms of the institution and the coaches' reputation, losing a national championship, losing games that lead to a national championship is a big deal," Potuto said.
Sure, vacating wins is a big deal. But if the goal is to send a message about the way women are perceived and treated on campus, taking down a banner or two isn't enough.
http://www.espn.com/mens-college-ba...tic-programs-involves-incidents-sexual-nature
