Should the NCAA Unleash its Brand of Capital Punishment on the University of Miami?

It seems the University of Miami is up to its old tricks again. Infamous for its swagger, especially from the University's football team, “The U” is again under intense scrutiny over NCAA violations after allegations from a convicted member of a ponzi scheme, Nevin Shapiro has offered up the details of improper benefits he provided university football and basketball players from 2002-2009.

In a Yahoo Sports report, Charles Robinson, outline the “illicit benefits” that over 70 University of Miami Hurricanes student-athletes received during the eight-year stretch. According to Robinson these benefits including cash, prostitution, jewelry, bounties for on the field play that led to the injury of another player, and even one abortion. The allegations are heinous, even by Hurricane standards and according to Shapiro, several university coaches and officials were complicit in his actions and were even paid themselves in some cases. The football program based in Coral Gables, FL, a close suburb to the City of Miami, has had a sullied reputation in college sports for many years that includes brash behavior on the field, previous violations and punishments levied by the NCAA.

For its part, the NCAA, in an attempt to maintain the integrity of the scholar athlete has strict rules in place regarding the provision of money, favors even gifts to student athletes of any sport with the threat of punishment to the school as a consequence. The punishments levied by the NCAA usually come in the form of probation, loss of scholarships and tournament and/or post-season play, such as college bowl games. Most notably, the NCAA instituted a punishment, in what has become known as the “death penalty”, to Southern Methodist University in 1987.

SMU, which at the time was producing a very successful football program, had been found to be playing players even after being on probation for numerous violations as far back as 1974. The NCAA took the action to cancel the 1987 season as well as all home games the following year for SMU football along with and extended probation attached to the existing penalty thereafter for a period of 3 years, which included a ban from bowl games and live television broadcasts. The program was forced to forfeit 55 scholarships over the next four years, with no off-campus recruiting privileges until August in 1988. The Penalty resulted in the full release of any current scholarship players, and a full cancelling of the 1988 season, as the program didn't feel it could field a competitive team. The NCAA penalty decimated the program to the tune of potentially billions of future dollars according to a 2008 report by CNBC’s Darren Rovell. SMU football, once a stalwart in the old Southwest Conference would lose out on the big-bucks bonanza, the creation of the Big 12 Conference would facilitate for the schools in the defunct conference. The program has never recovered fully and is still a peripheral figure in the college football landscape 25 years after the penalty was instituted.

The subsequent fate that befell SMU leads most prognosticators to claim that the “death penalty” is too harsh. That in todays era of big-time college sports that cutting off the trough would be draconian and unfair to any school of higher learning, even going as far as to offer up the idea of finding some sort of fair compensation for college athletes to receive in order to stem outside influence from boosters and agents such as, in the case of the University of Miami and Shapiro. But is the punishment too harsh? Shouldn’t the University of Miami, multiple time offenders, learn its lesson and stand as this era’s, a new era in which the game generates for universities the kind of money professional franchises make, Southern Methodist?

If the allegations are indeed true and the NCAA finds in its investigation that the University is complicit in this matter, shouldn’t the program be shut down? Paying players and providing gifts are violations that have been more of a part of the college sports landscape in the 25 years since the SMU punishment. The NCAA has never again levied a punishment of its like since and maybe that is the problem.

Shapiro, if his charges are true, wasn’t just a booster to the University of Miami football and basketball programs, he was a benefactor, pimp and even medical consultant. This goes beyond paying players or offering free travel, automobiles or the like. These allegations include felonies certainly in cases of prostitution, assault and battery (willfully injuring opposing players for money) and depending on the circumstances and Florida state law the claimed provision of an abortion. These particular allegations attack the ideology and morality of higher learning and should merit more than just a loss of bowl eligibility or scholarships but instead become a monument to the consequences of egregious behavior in the manner that SMU penalty was proposed to be and failed.