Newton affair shows desperation and pressure

Who owns the past? In this state it is Alabama. Unfortunately, Auburn is located in Alabama. At least that is unfortunate for Auburn. Alabama has won 13 national championships. Auburn has won two, sort of. The jury is still out on whether 2010 will count or not. The one the Tigers snared in 1957 was not without controversy. If I remember correctly Auburn was on probation shortly thereafter casting doubt on the validity of that championship. Auburn won the AP crown but of course, were not allowed to play in a post season event. I see trend developing here.

Two brothers were paid $ 500.00by an Auburn coach to sign with the Tigers. For a fledgling NCAA whose infractions committee was only four years old putting a team on probation wasn’t an easy thing to do. To deny a team the right to play in the post season game was highly controversial. It was a decision that was as popular as outlawing State’s rights at that time.

The truth is that almost no one outside of Auburn really cared because the national crown was not a huge deal. In fact, the Auburn SID, worked hard for his school to win the crown. In those days it meant that an SID would pick up the phone and remind the voters that they should vote. So that is exactly what happened. The plucky SID thought this national championship thing might mean something one day and he called every writer he knew and asked them to vote for the Tigers. No doubt that was an early example of lobbying. I have doubts a couple of bottles of bourbon changed hands as well.

Now flash forward to 2010. Auburn was playing fast and free with NCAA rules. They had recruited a player who asked for 180,000 thousand dollars to play for Mississippi State. Fans across the nation wondered how much did Auburn pay. Well, in fairness to Auburn it isn’t clear that they did. The only thing that was clear was that Auburn was ready, willing, and able to put themselves in the middle of a maelstrom in order to allow Cam Newton to play at Auburn. No one doubted that Newton’s father, a minister by trade and apparantly a crook by intent, tried to sell his son. The question is whether it was to the highest bidder. A subpart to this question is whether the player would be declared ineligible if the player had no knowledge of his father's auction.

The SEC Commissionar’s office worked hard with the NCAA eligibility committee and said “the kid didn’t know what the Reverend did”. So the leadership of college football tried to sell the idea of a loophole.
Newton did not expose a loophole. This knowledge issue had been decided in many forms in prior cases. The NCAA just said they had found one. Mike Slive became an apostle for lies the NCAA needed the media to buy.  Ask Southern California if not knowing meant anything to them about Reggie Bush. No, they just the eligibility committee said that "knowledge thing" sounded pretty reasonable, and if we find him eligible all those suits from CBS Televsion will go away. But the money would stay.

Mike Slive, the SEC Commissioner, who claimed to be the new sheriff in town, and had vowed to clean up the SEC,  was instrumental in the NCAA decision. Just as a side note - Slive had dismantled the SEC investigation and enforcement committees. If no one could enforce infractions or even investigate potential infractions it would make it seem to the world that things were looking up on the cheating scale around the SEC. A lot has been written about Mississippi State’s failure to notify the SEC of Newton’s offer. I’m not sure who they could have even reported such an event. How far do you think a call from Mississippi State’s eligibility committee would have gone when made to Slive? All he could do was call the NCAA.

So here we are in the nation’s greatest football conference. Or better said, here we are in the nation’s most corrupt football conference. I understand the Auburn fans and why they don’t want to address that question. You can’t blame the fans who love their Tigers for trying to justify their title. (i.e. we won it on the field an they can't THAT away from us) - Perhaps one day they will be justified, but that justification is based on a technicality and as a lawyer I know that crooks who walk on technicalities are not popular. Why? Because they might have been legally correct but they still had a heart of darkness. Same thing with Auburn. What is unfair to Auburn is that a rational and reasonable investigation could have convinced the rest of the football world that Cam and Auburn really and truly was innocent. But Auburn wasn’t ready to let that happen, and the behind the closed door meetings that made Newton eligible only served to make Auburn, the SEC Commissioner, and the NCAA look like an unholy trinity. So Auburn declared Newton ineligible because they had already cut a deal with the powers to be. If it sounds sleazy it was because it was sleazy.

And why did all this happen? It is because Alabama owns the past in football history in the Deep South and the State of Alabama. Auburn can’t handle this and will do whatever is necessary for change.  How can you change the past? You can’t. What is sad for all those average Auburn fans, like all of us average Alabama fans, is that deep in our hearts we know that events that occurred in the fall of 2010 won’t change the future either. It only makes Auburn seems even more desperate. At least that’s how it seems tome.