Group investigating Will Wade, other NCAA cases was a massive waste

Nearly six years on from the FBI arresting college basketball coaches and the NCAA vowing to root out the cheaters, the relative wrist-tap given to Will Wade on Thursday is worth far more amusement than outrage. 

If it takes your organization 51 months to come up with a 10-game suspension and some various minor recruiting restrictions for a guy who was caught on a wire tap talking about buying a player and paying players from a joint bank account with his wife, in clear violation of NCAA rules, there’s not much use enforcing them in the first place.

Wade, who was ultimately fired from LSU, will serve the suspension in his new post at McNeese State — a clear step down the career ladder, but a place that will allow him to refurbish his coaching credentials. In the current environment of college sports, where many of the things Wade was doing illegally in 2017 and 2018 are allowed, he’ll be back in a big-time job before you can say “strong-ass offer.” 

That catchphrase, which was captured by those pesky wiretaps, will define Wade’s career for the humor far more than the actual punishments it led to. That’s because the IARP — short for the Independent Accountability Resolution Process — passed on an opportunity to drop the hammer, just as it has done in every other case that crossed its desk. 

Once the IARP rules on Kansas — and, based on precedent, we shouldn’t expect much actual accountability from the accountability folks — they will be shut down and remembered as the biggest waste of time and money in the history of NCAA governance. 

This isn’t the IARP’s fault. After the FBI scandal, the NCAA and former president Mark Emmett convened a blue-ribbon panel led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with a mandate to do something about the corruption that had been found. It was typical NCAA thinking: Get some big, well-respected names in a room to come up with a big, splashy action plan. 

The problem is, it was all the wrong people prescribing the wrong medication. Instead of Grant Hill and David Robinson — guys who played at Duke and Navy and were decades removed from their college basketball careers — this panel needed the very AAU hustlers and college coaching cheats the NCAA was trying to root out. 

Ultimately, every one of the Rice Commission’s suggestions was a failure, but none moreso than the IARP.

The idea was to bring professional investigators and big-time lawyers into the process of adjudicating complex cases to give the NCAA some teeth. Instead, these folks looked around at how the NCAA’s enforcement system prosecuted cases and laughed. 

It’s hard to blame them. Generally speaking, these are smart, accomplished people who work on significant cases in a legal system where the burden of proof is high. The NCAA has operated in a different way.

Without subpoena power and facing significant investigative headwinds, the NCAA enforcement staff often had to seize on whatever facts it had and make logical connections to charge programs and coaches with violations. For people who are used to dealing with actual crimes, that is considered shoddy work.

As the IARP winds down, those who spent their precious time working on the committee will leave with far more contempt for the NCAA and its internal processes than they had when they signed up. And it’s hard to say they’re wrong. The NCAA, now under a new president in former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, is working the halls of Congress, trying to get laws written that will give the NCAA far more power to enforce its own rules in the wake of NIL run amok. 

But maybe, just maybe, the problem was always the rules themselves. 

How is that not the takeaway here? Will Wade did things at LSU — many, many things, with more than enough text messages implicating him — that were clearly and flagrantly against the rulebook. There’s no gray area about that.

If there were ever a template for a years-long or even lifetime ban from college sports under the old paradigm, Wade would have fit it like a glove. Instead, the IARP found him guilty of some stuff but looked at other parts of the case and said the evidence wasn’t good enough because it didn’t directly link him to the alleged violations. That’s how you end up with a suspension that seems shockingly light to anyone with a history of following college sports.

But the NCAA has a bigger problem than how many games Wade sits out at McNeese State. On a larger scale, it has lost the argument that paying players is wrong -- even if it comes right out of a coach’s bank account. 

These days, of course, Wade wouldn’t even have to do that. If a player needed money for medical bills or groceries or because his mother was about to have the lights turned off back home, they’d figure it out through NIL. And it would all be perfectly legal. 

Isn’t that a better system than the sham trials and the trumped-up cases that don’t pass muster for people who deal with real crimes and don’t end up holding anyone accountable anyway? Who wants or needs that system? What’s the point? 

So now, the NCAA has a choice to make.

It can either try to go backwards to a day and time where it spends a lot of money and wastes everyone’s time trying to keep money out of athletes’ pockets, or it can transition to a regulated, collectively bargained profit-sharing system where figuring out how to divvy up the money simply becomes part of Wade’s job.

The FBI investigation into college basketball feels, literally and figuratively, like a really long time ago. Hopefully, what it wrought will end up being remembered as a relic of the dark ages.