FSU icon Bobby Bowden still wants his victories back, and it’s about dad-gum time for the NCAA to give them back.
In the wake of the decades-long academic fraud that has gone on at the University of North Carolina, the NCAA — in the name of fairness — has one of two choices:
(1) Give Bowden, the legendary former coach at Florida State, the 12 victories he was forced to vacate as part of the school’s penalty for a cheating scandal in 2006-07 involving 61 student-athletes in an online music appreciation course.
(2) Hammer UNC’s entire athletic department and force the program to vacate two basketball national championships and hundreds — if not thousands — of victories in other sports as a penalty for the nearly 1,500 athletes who took bogus classes in the shady African and Afro-American Studies department over an 18-year period from 1993-2011.
“I’d like to have my wins back,” Bowden said when I contacted him earlier this week. “Our case was something our coaches had nothing to do with and had no idea was going on until after it came out. And once it was discovered, our administration did everything in its power to get to the bottom of it.”
Bowden’s old boss — former FSU president T.K. Wetherell — is much more adamant: “When you think about what we did and compare it to what has happened at Penn State and North Carolina, Bobby Bowden got screwed and Florida State got railroaded.”
Wetherell is absolutely right, especially when you consider it’s looking more and more like the NCAA might allow North Carolina’s athletic program to escape the embarrassing sanctions that were levied against FSU in an academic-fraud case far less serious than what transpired in Chapel Hill.
One major loophole North Carolina is trying to slip through is that the bogus African and Afro-American Studies classes were available to other students as well as UNC athletes. Well, guess what? So was the single music appreciation class that FSU was hammered for back in the spring of 2007.
The differences are many: FSU was guilty of one bogus class for a couple of semesters; UNC had an entire bogus department for a couple of decades. FSU self-reported its one fraudulent class; UNC’s widespread scandal was only discovered because of incredible reporting by the Raleigh News & Observer. FSU willingly cooperated with the NCAA; UNC has tried to whitewash its scandal and has dug in its heels during an NCAA investigation that has been going on for seven years.
The NCAA put FSU on four years of probation, hit the Seminoles with scholarship sanctions and forced them to forfeit victories and championships in multiple sports. FSU not only vacated Bowden’s 12 wins in football; it gave up its 2007 NCAA championship in men’s track and field as well as victories in basketball, baseball, swimming, golf and cross country.
If those are the sanctions FSU received for one class, then the NCAA Committee on Infractions must come down on UNC with the full force of its disciplinary arsenal. If FSU’s track national championship had to be vacated then, so too should UNC’s 2005 and 2009 basketball championships. Those UNC teams had players who enrolled in these laughable classes — classes in which students were not required to attend, had no oversight from a professor and were required to write one term paper that, regardless of quality, was rubber-stamped with either A’s or B’s.
If the NCAA lets UNC skate, then — dad-gummit — FSU president John Thrasher should fight to get Bowden’s victories reinstated as well as the track national championship.
“I think the NCAA just does what it wants to do,” Bowden said. “If they want to excuse you, they excuse you. If they don’t, they don’t. They forgave Joe Paterno and gave him his hundred-and-something [111] wins back; you’d think they’d give me back my 12 wins.”
Even if the NCAA were to restore Bowden’s 12 victories, it would still only give him 388 — 21 victories behind Paterno’s record-setting FBS total of 409. But that’s not the point. The point is: Why can’t the NCAA be fair and balanced when judging cases?
How could the NCAA not give Bowden his wins back but restore the 111 victories it originally stripped from Paterno for his part on the Jerry Sandusky child-molestation case? Paterno was directly tied to the most heinous scandal in college football history; Bowden was not implicated at all in cheating that happened in one on-line music class.
“Of all the people who knew absolutely nothing about the on-line class, Bobby was at the top of the list,” Wetherell recalled. “He was so far removed from that situation. We found out what was going on and we immediately self-reported it to the NCAA and turned ourselves in. We could have easily covered it up and the NCAA would have known nothing about it.”
You know, sort of like North Carolina did for decades.
Sadly, UNC’s strategy will probably be more effective than FSU’s.
“We were trying to cooperate and be good guys to the NCAA,” Wetherell said. “My recommendation now would be to never again be good guys to the NCAA.”
Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on Twitter @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9 a.m. on FM 96.9 and AM 740.
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