'Walking' a fine line

Distorted expectations may explain SEC's growing misdeeds

As the popular saying goes, football in the South is a religion.

If so, the line at confession must be awfully long these days.

Since the start of the year, Alabama and Kentucky have gone on probation, LSU self-reported minor recruiting violations and is looking into allegations of academic misconduct, and Arkansas is the subject of an ongoing NCAA investigation into a booster's activities. Now we find out the SEC is re-examining allegations of academic fraud at Tennessee.

The day is drawing near where, if you're an SEC program not under investigation, people will start to wonder.

Some critics are already comparing today's Southeastern Conference to the now-extinct Southwest Conference, but South Carolina coach Lou Holtz, who while at Arkansas from 1977-83 saw the league reach its peak of corruption, says the SEC's misdeeds have not approached that extent of flagrancy. In terms of the caliber of crime, he's probably right.

What the two do have in common, though, is the same sort of nastiness between rivals that ultimately led to the SWC's demise.

Within a day of the latest Tennessee story breaking last week, one Atlanta sports talk station, its audience brimming with Georgia fans, was playing a parody of Rocky Top mocking the Vols' academic reputation. One visitor to a popular Bulldogs message board already had created a logo that read "Tennessee Cheats." Their zeal about seeing Tennessee's possible undoing is immense, yet no more so than Tennessee's toward Alabama during its troubles a couple years back, Alabama's toward Auburn before that, and so on.

Give SEC fans credit. Their desire to win is as intense as any place in the country, if not more so. But at what point does that passion become unhealthy?

Is it when a feud between rival boosters helps land a program on probation, as Memphis' Logan Young and Roy Adams did Alabama? ('Bama fan Young is the man accused of funding Albert Means' recruitment; Young pleads innocence and claims Vols diehard Adams slandered him.) Or how about when a coach wins 66 percent of his games, four consecutive bowls and still gets fired? (Georgia's Jim Donnan.)

Or maybe it's when nearly half a league's teams have been or could soon be hit with sanctions.

"Sometimes when you get to this state, it actually helps," Mississippi State coach Jackie Sherrill said recently. "Because it forces everybody to understand that when you throw mud, that mud sometimes sticks where you don't want it to stick."

Is it reprehensible if, as retired school administrator Bob Gilbert and English professor Linda Bensel-Myers claim, Tennessee players were afforded seemingly limitless grade changes, steered toward easy courses like "Walking" and "Bowling" and completed four or five years of college without having basic reading and writing skills? Absolutely.

But it's also easy to see why such blasphemies might occur at Tennessee, or any other program that wins 85 percent of its games and contends regularly for the national title. In fact, many of those same fanatics who clamor for an arch rival to get caught in a compromising position are also the reason their own programs are driven to impropriety.

The overwhelming majority of fans want their team run a clean ship and play by the rules. But, if that team happens to be one of the 15-20 widely considered among college football's elite, they also want it go 10-1 every year.

The men entrusted with fulfilling these modest expectations -- coaches, athletic directors, university presidents -- are, on the whole, as morally sound a bunch as any. You could find a much higher percentage of misfits in any number of other professions, probably because they don't face near as much scrutiny.

So why then, when faced with the possibility of the starting cornerback flunking out, the star running back getting arrested or the must-have recruit drifting toward another school, might such a person go against his better instinct and bend a rule, make an exception or look the other way?

Because if he doesn't, he might suffer a fate far worse than guilt: going 6-5. The natives might begin to wonder about the need for that coach and his seven-figure paycheck. Some of those 100,000 seats might go empty on Saturdays. And those donors who built the sparkling new practice facility might suddenly find it difficult to locate their wallets.

"You try to keep up with the Joneses," said Holtz. "All anyone wants is a level playing field, but the playing field is never going to be level, we know that."

That league-wide obsession with keeping the playing field level is exactly what's causing the SEC to spin apart. And on top of that, it will soon be without its leader of 12 years, retiring commissioner Roy Kramer, who has steered the league to unprecedented financial heights.

Then again, the league's more conspiracy-wrapped faithful probably view Kramer's departure as a positive. After all, he's the one accused of shielding Tennessee from the NCAA's wrath. Once the Vols "get theirs," the road to the SEC championship becomes a bit smoother for everyone else.

That is, unless by then everyone else gets theirs, too.

Are the plane tickets refundable?

Most of us could think of nothing finer than a late-November trip to Hawaii. Washington State coach Mike Price wants out of his.

The Cougars are negotiating to get out of their scheduled Nov. 30 game against the Warriors -- but there's an explanation. That date was originally supposed to be WSU's regular-season finale, before ABC convinced the Cougs, 10-2 a year ago, and UCLA to shift their Nov. 16 contest at the Rose Bowl to Dec. 7.

With the lure of a national TV audience (the WSU-UCLA game replaces Oregon-Oregon State this year as the network's appetizer to the Big 12 championship) plus the opportunity for a bye week leading up to WSU's Nov. 23 Apple Cup showdown with Washington, Price couldn't pass up ABC's offer. But it would require the Cougars to travel from Hawaii back to Pullman, Wash., on Dec. 1, then depart for Los Angeles five days later, an undesirable option for a team that hopes to be closing out a Pac-10 championship right about then.

The only way out of the Hawaii contract is for WSU to find a suitable replacement. Athletic director Jim Sterk says he's got one -- a "perennial powerhouse with a huge national following," according to the Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review -- and is waiting for the school to formally accept the deal. If it falls through, the Cougars will have to suck it up and play the game as scheduled.

Technical knockout in waiting

Every year there's a team or two ripe with potential but whose season quickly becomes derailed by an overly ambitious schedule.

In 2000 it was Colorado, which, as it turned out, was talented enough to win the Big 12 a year later, but started that season with losses to Colorado State, USC, Washington and Kansas State and limped to a 3-8 finish. Last year it may have been UNLV, which garnered considerable preseason attention after the way it ended the 2000 campaign but stumbled to an 0-4 start at the hands of Arkansas, Northwestern, Arizona and BYU. (The Rebels finished 4-7.)

Not to rain on anyone's party already, but a prime candidate for that role this year might be Texas Tech.

Sure, the Red Raiders return prolific QB Kliff Kingsbury and 16 other starters and have won seven games each of the past two seasons. But the non-conference schedules during those campaigns included the likes of New Mexico, Utah State, North Texas, Louisiana-Lafayette, UTEP and Stephen F. Austin. This year, Tech opens at Ohio State in the Pigskin Classic, then, after a date at lightweight SMU, hosts Ole Miss and N.C. State, both dangerous teams. All this before a Big 12 schedule that includes Texas A&M, Colorado and back-to-back season ending tiffs with Texas and Oklahoma.

Worth noting

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