We’ve done our best to stick to just football this week. Whether it be unsettling reports in the media regarding the Lizzy Seeberg case or sticking to just on-the-field matters when it comes to discussing USC and the major sanctions the NCAA imposed on its athletic department, we decided to stay in the football writing business because that’s what this is, a Notre Dame football blog.
That said, it’s been hard not to discuss the elephant in the Coliseum this weekend, the USC Trojans and the massive sanctions handed down by the NCAA in June, a ruling nearly four years in the making after Yahoo! Sports broke open the Reggie Bush scandal.
I have no desire to recap or judge the findings of the NCAA Committee on Infractions, a committee that Notre Dame deputy athletic director Missy Conboy serves on, one of ten members. (For an in-depth article on the members that heard USC’s case, read George Dohrmann’s excellent piece at SI.com) But there seems to be an undercurrent flowing through the USC fanbase that both points blame at Notre Dame’s role in their athletic department’s demise and pointedly questions why the NCAA committee that a Notre Dame administrator sat on could levy such serious penalties on Heritage Hall.
Dan Weber, the writer who we exchanged questions and answers with via email earlier this week, writes for USCFootball.com, a website that’s been incredibly critical of the sanctions on the football program. Earlier in the week, the website launched a campaign targeting Conboy:For those who paid close attention to the NCAA’s embarrassing Committee on Infractions USC saga, next week will offer an opportunity. The Trojans host Notre Dame for the 43rd time in the nation’s most historic intersectional college football series that opened here in 1926 and helped make Notre Dame a national name. Much of that is thanks to a respected West Coast school like USC willing to play the Irish when a number of Midwest powers -- Ohio State, we’re talking about you -- would not.
Next week will also be a time to remember that Notre Dame’s senior deputy director of athletics, Missy Conboy, joined with the gleeful Mr. Dee in the scandalous over penalizing of USC in a manner that branded the Trojans as one of the all-time rogue programs in college football history.
We know a number of you haven’t understood how anyone from Notre Dame could have possibly come to such a conclusion about the school that’s been there toe-to-toe with the Irish academically and athletically for 84 years.
All we know about the actions of Conboy, a Notre Dame grad with a law degree who’s been an athletic administrator there for 23 years, is that she recused herself when the Committee unbelievably talked about penalizing USC by taking the Trojans off TV. Recused herself because that could have hurt Notre Dame.
But what we don’t know is what in the world was Conboy thinking? One ineligible player, 30 scholarships? Could she possibly be serious? Should she have recused herself on the entire case? It would seem someone at Notre Dame would have to because they would know USC couldn’t possibly be as guilty as the Dee scenario called for it to be, allowing his Miami program not to go down as the most lawless in modern history. Wouldn’t a Notre Dame administrator just recuse herself for fear of looking like she’d given up on the Irish ever beating USC again unless someone took 30 scholarships away from USC.
So here’s your chance. We’re creating a thread on The Peristyle this weekend called “Ask Missy” where each of you can list the one question you’d like to ask a person on the Committee on Infractions about the USC case. Sure, she won’t answer them. But we’ll work to get them to her, or to South Bend, or to a place where maybe, just maybe, she’d have a chance to read them. And think about what she and Dee have done.
No profanity. Be respectful. This is serious business.
In our original Q&A, I asked Dan two questions about the NCAA’s rulings. The first was asking for an explanation of why he thought the sanctions were heavy handed and the second dealt with his critical comments on Dee and Conboy, and what blame he would hand to Mike Garrett, Pete Carroll, Tim Floyd, O.J. Mayo, and Reggie Bush. His responses were extensive and pointed, especially his characterization of Conboy, so I asked for a response from Notre Dame before I posted any of his responses.
Here’s the response I got from Notre Dame after I shared the original question and answer:
After talking with Brian Hardin at Notre Dame, he explained that Conboy has stepped off the committee multiple times before, like when UConn basketball came in front of the committee, or when Arizona State baseball coach Pat Murphy came in front of the board, because Murphy is the former baseball coach at Notre Dame. She even asked to be recused during the recent Michigan hearings, but was asked specifically by Michigan that she stay on.
In a posting yesterday, a few days after I agreed not to publish our questions and Notre Dame’s response, the “War Room” was at it again, this time pointing to the Kim Dunbar scandal, which resulted in the Notre Dame football program being placed on probation for two years and losing one scholarship for two consecutive seasons, the first major violation of NCAA regulations by any Irish athletic program.
From the War Room:One thing that you realize quickly if you engage in this dialogue with the ND folks is how much they don’t know about the USC case, and never will. And do not care.
Sure, they’ll still argue, more than a decade after the fact, how unfair it was what the NCAA Committee on Infractions did to Notre Dame. How it had to go to a tiebreaker vote to declare the Notre Dame booster club member and $1.4-million-dollar embezzler who just liked to “date” Notre Dame football players, a “booster.”
Sure she took trips with them and showered them with presents over a five-year period, something an Irish assistant coach admitted he knew about but never bothered to inform the NCAA because, as one ND official said, the rules were “convoluted.”
What a miscarriage of justice, they’ll tell you, costing the Irish one whole scholarship a year for two years.
But they’re little concerned that the NCAA, after the fact, declared a whole slew of passers-by in the lives of Reggie Bush and O.J.Mayo USC “boosters.” After all, the USC case was about a lot more than that, they’ll tell you. You USC fans just “lack introspection” to see your program as others see it, they’ll say. Sure, ask them to name the other USC athletes involved, unlike the eight from ND, and all you’ll hear is crickets chirping.
And that’s when you realize where this case was lost. We’d forgotten about the USA Today national survey of nearly 25,000 readers published the day after the NCAA’s ridiculously unprecedented penalties were revealed in June.
Only 16 percent thought the USC penalties too harsh. A whopping 42 percent thought that the loss of 30 scholarships and a two-year bowl ban for one player on the take from outsiders encouraging him to leave was letting USC off way too easy. Another 41 percent thought that was just right.
So there are the numbers: 83 percent thought the NCAA was either too easy on USC or got it right. Just 16 percent understood what had happened. And that’s what the NCAA was clearly counting on.
Nearly four years of relentless hammering had done its dirty work. Nearly four years of failing to answer back, to respond in any way, to make the USC case, to let others fill in all the negatives, well, even if USC’s lawyers had gotten the Trojans off, it might not have mattered. USC was guilty as charged, or guiltier -- if that’s a word. And as dirty as a program could be. It had to be.
How else do you win three Heismans in four years to tie the almighty Irish? How else do you play in seven straight BCS games and win 34 straight games and seven straight Pac-10 titles and hammer four straight SEC teams whose names begin with the letter “A” if you’re not doing something outside the rules?
And if you come to South Bend next October to play the 85-scholarship-strong Irish with the same number of 51 scholarship players you took to Stanford this season, well, that will be just fine, Notre Dame fans seem to be saying. It’s about time the playing field was leveled.
Comparing the Dunbar case to the violations committed by the Trojan athletic department doesn’t make much sense when you look closer at what actually happened. That Dunbar was convicted of embezzling $1.4 million from her employer wasn’t an NCAA violation. That Dunbar, starting at the age of 20 and until she was arrested at 25, dated a few different football players, had a child with one, and occasionally purchased travel and gave them gifts also was not an NCAA violation. What turned the Dunbar fiasco into an NCAA violation was that she gave $25 in 1996 to a (quickly defunct) Quarterback Club that supported Notre Dame athletics, which turned her into a booster.
It was far from an easy decision for the NCAA, who -- as the War Room points out -- needed a tie-breaker to determine if Dunbar was a booster, making the comparison of the then-22-year-old Dunbar to Lloyd Lake, Michael Michaels, Rodney Guillory, or any of the other unsavory characters in the USC case not too appropriate.
USC will go in front of an appeals committee in the near future, asking to cut in half the sanctions they received, and athletic director Pat Haden believes that USC has a strong case, even if only 10 percent of all sanctions are overturned in appeal. For the sake of the student-athletes that were in junior high when Reggie Bush was committing violations, maybe lessening the penalties is the best thing that could happen, with most of the major player long gone from the Trojan athletic department.
But even though Garrett, Carroll, running backs coach Todd McNair, Tim Floyd, O.J. Mayo and Reggie Bush are a memory now doesn’t make any revisionist history including Missy Conboy, Notre Dame close to appropriate.
Harsh or not, any penalties levied on USC were their own fault.