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When Tyrants Rule: Husker Fans Maligned by Big 12 Conference as Dallas Police Deny Investigations: A Conference Commissioner and the NCAA Death Penalty in College Athletics

By Andis Kaulins

Divide and conquer. It is an old primitive strategy and people still fall for it.

Read a past inside report here about an incident last season that was clearly the day some Huskers may actually have "left" the Big 12 Conference internally.

We can not escape the feeling that the Big 12 Conference made a gigantic mistake in hiring as its commissioner three years ago someone who had previously been the head of enforcement at the NCAA, whose previous investigations allegedly led to the unforgivable imposition of the so-called NCAA death penalty against SMU in the late 1980's, and who apparently brought his personal tyrannical police mentality with him to the Big 12.

We have been great critics of the NCAA in recent years precisely because of this strongly emerging police mentality, a police mentality that has nothing to do with the sustained long-term welfare of athletes, players, coaches, fans or sponsors of college sports. Rather, NCAA policies seem to serve increasingly to increase NCAA powers, rather than to work for the benefit of athletes.

For example, the timing of and the way the Cam Newton story has been released and handled by the NCAA recently is a disgrace. It is an ongoing political saga that has little to do with "amateur" athletics. It takes no account of the welfare or reputations of athletes or their families, who, due the way the NCAA has handled the matter, are tried in public before anyone really knows all the facts. Newton, whose fan we are, can, however, be lucky that the current Big 12 Commissioner is no longer at the NCAA as an investigator, though his henchmen may still be there, so don't expect anything good for college football to emerge. Whatever happens, the only thing certain is that it will expand NCAA powers, that is all.

We are not against rules and discipline, by the way. We are the first to argue e.g that college football players should be protected better by more stringent rules on the field, as enforced by officials on the field, which is their job.

However, conference commissioners on the other hand should be working for the good of their conferences and the NCAA should be working for the good of all college athletes. Neither of the two should be playing policeman -- and apparently biased policeman at that. At fault here also are the responsible college executives, whose decisions and votes at the NCAA have led to the current regrettable situation of an octopus-like NCAA that has accumulated powers far beyond its legitimate scope of action.

A good example of the police mentality at work in college athletics is the Big 12 Commissioner's Office, which issued a unilateral suspension for one game against Nebraska linebacker Eric Martin for a hit that was not flagged during the Oklahoma State game but which the Big 12 Commissioner's Office discovered on a video after the game.

To our knowledge, no similar video-based penalty suspension has ever been issued to any other Big 12 player, even though game videos are full of hard hits to which suspensions could be applied. SELECTIVE suspension of one player is BIAS PER SE and unforgivable from a legal and administrative standpoint. This is the type of rule by fiat that modern democracies were set up to eliminate. RULES have to be enforced UNIFORMLY and EQUALLY. That is the essence of American law and fair play.

A Big 12 Commissioner -- trained in the law no less -- who does not understand this is an anathema.

If game videos are to be used to discover otherwise unflagged rule infractions and to enforce after-the-game suspensions, then every Big 12 game must be scrutinized closely and EVERYONE who was not penalized during the game should be penalized after the game. Indeed, there should be a special committee of officials to do this, not just some commissioner-tyrant.

Everyone, on every team in the conference -- not just Huskers -- should be subject to penalty.

As an immediate example, "Ball-Clutching" by a Texas A&M player -- leading to 30 yards of clueless penalties called on the victimized team rather than the perpetrator -- surely falls in this category, and yet, not even the simplest reprimand by A&M coaches or the Big 12 has yet been made in that case. Our complaint here has nothing to do with "partisan" football, it has to do with justice in any system. Anytime you enforce rules one-sidedly, bias is at play. Right now, the Big 12 is a farce and the honest people of Nebraska can be glad that the Huskers are leaving that conference as it now stands.

An "enforcement" mentality is the hallmark of tyrants constantly pushing the envelope to increase their own selfish and self-serving powers. The world is full of little Napoleons, that is of course the reality, but they should not be running college football conferences, nor should they be on staffs at the NCAA.

Equally sadly, among other things, the imploding Big 12 Conference, shaken to the core by its own overwhelmed conference non-leadership, has inexcusably maligned Nebraska Cornhusker fans for alleged threats made to the Commissioner, with neither the content of the threats nor the actual identity of the instigators actually being known.

The following report indicates that there are some essential discrepancies between what has been reported recently in the press --we presume via the Big 12 -- and what is actually true. Read:

The Independent : Dallas police not investigating [alleged] threats

Some reporters have even gone out to regrettable extremes in their reporting, losing sight of their journalistic duties of fairness and balance. People writing that kind of diatribe should be out of a job quickly.

We ourselves, as nearly everyone else too, do not know all the facts -- nor does anyone outside of actual insiders. Every fan group may have fanatics who go beyond what is acceptable, and these must be restrained, but the few exceptions do not warrant maligning an entire fan base.

Moreover, we are certain that if the wrong man is running any organization, football conference or otherwise, chaos and especially ill-will is predestined, and the spreading of ILL WILL seems to be a trademark of current Big 12 leadership today.

As a normal Nebraska and Stanford alum and as a fan of both schools, it would seem from this vantage point that the vast majority of Husker fans over the last decades has had few serious complaints about the Big 12 Conference.

Rather, complaints have surfaced only recently and are focused primarily on the Big 12 leadership of the last three years. It is a leadership, which by general consensus -- at least general Husker consensus -- has not been acting in the best interests of the University of Nebraska or in the best interests of the EXISTING conference of 12 teams.


That situation has -- inevitably, so we think -- led Nebraska to move to the Big 10 next year and Colorado to the Pac 10. These are monumental and financially expensive changes for both schools which are not made without severe and justifiable reason.

There are of course many other possible reasons for the Nebraska move, e.g. as reported here:

UNL News Release, University of Nebraska-Lincoln to join Big Ten Conference

Marcia Claesson at Suite101.com, Nebraska Chose to Join Big 10 Conference for Several Reasons

Andrew Robeson, Bleacher Report, Nebraska Cornhuskers Football: 10 Reasons the Huskers Can't Wait for the Big Ten

Dale Schmidt, WalletGenius.com, The Value of the TV Contracts of the 6 Major NCAA Conferences

Ghosts in the Big 12 explosion? Really?

The just reported move of Texas Christian University (TCU) to the Big East rather than to the geographically more logical Big 12 tells us more:

Carlton: TCU never had a chance at joining the Big 12

Crossposted to SportPundit.

Full post as published by LawPundit on December 04, 2010 (boomark / email).