Most Fans Will Never Notice NCAA Sanctions

The NCAA (finally) gave its ruling in the Nate Miles/Josh Nochimson recruiting brouhaha and UConn men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun has been cited as “failing to promote an atmosphere of compliance.” Sounds pretty scary, right?

I imagine that means he was immediately fired. Probably banned from coaching in college sports ever again.

And scholarships, forget scholarships. UConn must be getting sent to the Ivy League model. We’re going to be ruined.

UConn won’t be able to beat E.O. Smith High School! My God, the kids must already be lining up at the Wilbur Cross Building to transfer. And I don’t mean the players. I mean every student! This is ruinous. Devastating. The worst occurrence in the history of college sports.

What?

Wait, what? Three games?

Oh, sorry, nevermind.

Well, I’ll be. The NCAA laid the hammer down and honestly, it really just glanced our collective thumbs. Thor it wasn’t. More like a rubber squeaky hammer.

Calhoun was suspended for three Big East games … next year. And yes, they placed the program on probation, lost one scholarship and limited some recruiting visits for the staff. It does not include a postseason ban, the only meaningful penalty the NCAA can really deliver.

The penalty that looks the worst is the limitation of scholarships. Every NCAA program has 13 scholarships to play with. UConn will now have just 12 for the next three years. In a year in which Calhoun had no idea what his lineup would look like once he got to the conference schedule, he still only played 11 scholarship players this year. And that includes Enosch Wolf’s 24 total minutes this season.

Somehow I imagine they probably could have survived with using only 10. Fans won’t even recognize the team only has 12 scholarship players. I imagine the majority of fans don’t even know the Huskies have Michael Bradley (who?) on their roster taking up a scholarship right now.

We don’t know the Big East schedule for next year yet, so we don’t know what games Calhoun will miss. But honestly, the last few years Calhoun has seceded control to George Blaney for a few games each year anyway. Blaney will be fine. You’ll find a shocking number of UConn die-hards who wouldn’t mind seeing Blaney coach every game (trust me, I’m not one of them).

Bragging doesn’t become anyone, but this was hardly surprising. A couple years back (yes, two years) when Yahoo! Sports broke the Nate Miles story, it was all doom and gloom for the Huskies. The words “major violation” were thrown around in every article you read. Very few bothered to note that major violation is a specific NCAA designation, not just a word chosen to show how bad the violation was.

It did not speak at all to what the penalty would be, just that there likely would be one (as opposed to a minor violation, like the ones cited by Tennessee women’s coach Pat Summitt during UConn’s recruiting of Maya Moore – i.e., that visit to ESPN studios in Bristol).

Well, this was the punishment. It’s one that no fan will notice and one that, more importantly, no recruit will notice. In fact, if you’ve read the book “Play Their Hearts Out,” by Sports Illustrated writer George Dohrmann (and I would recommend it), the violations Calhoun committed (and don’t get me wrong, he did commit violations) were minor.  And yes, that’s an adjective, not an NCAA designation.