88 wrote:The Ohio State University compliance department has tried for years and years to keep the "supporters" and hangers on from getting too close to the athletes. The have more staff than most other college programs, and they self-report every violation that they are made aware of. I will be shocked and disappointed if the compliance department at tOSU is found to be complicit in any of this. And if it turns out there were people in the know who did nothing about it, then The Ohio State University deserves to get hammered at least as hard as U$C.
Not saying they are complicit of this, but this is up the ally of what we were talking about:
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An audit of Ohio State University's compliance department in November found that it was not doing enough to monitor the use of cars, uniforms and equipment by athletes.
A month later, OSU suspended six football players for violating NCAA rules by trading or selling memorabilia for tattoos. And in March, coach Jim Tressel admitted to a serious NCAA violation of his own by not reporting that he knew about the player violations. He resigned on Monday.
Now, OSU President E. Gordon Gee says university officials are "taking a look at our failures" in the compliance department. Gee said he wants Ohio State to set the standard for how a compliance department should operate.
"We have an opportunity through this process not to hunker down, not to get into a bunker, but to set very high standards. And that's precisely what we're doing," Gee said Wednesday. "We'll take a look at if we have the best compliance system in the country. That will be our goal."
Once heralded as the gold standard in big-time college athletics, OSU's compliance department now is under scrutiny like never before.
The OSU auditors wrote in November that the department needed to pay more attention to athletes' cars, particularly those driven by football players, and needed more control over the inventory of uniforms and equipment.
Both deficiencies now have come back to haunt Ohio State officials.
Athletic director Gene Smith said in an emailed statement today that "(at) Ohio State, we actively examine our compliance program on an ongoing basis. That includes evaluating our monitoring systems to ensure they are the best they can be."
Compliance director Doug Archie has defended his department frequently in recent interviews with The Dispatch.
"As with any monitoring system, we are continually refining and improving our program. We set the bar high and then look for ways to raise it even higher," Archie has said. "When we benchmark ourselves, we do more than most."
OSU's compliance department is expanding to eight full-time positions from six to monitor OSU's 1,100 athletes. Archie said he requested the two new positions before Christmas to keep pace with other major athletic departments. They have not yet been filled.
Internal auditors wrote in April that increased scrutiny of equipment and the department's plans for a beefed-up car-registration database, more frequent cross-checks of other campus car-registration databases and increased NCAA-rules education for football and men's basketball players would meet their standards.
Problems within the football program surfaced in December, when the U.S. Department of Justice notified OSU that it had recovered autographed jerseys, pants, cleats, gloves, helmets and game footballs, among other things, during a raid of a suspected drug dealer and tattoo-parlor owner. The six football players later admitted that they broke NCAA rules.
NCAA rules prohibit athletes from keeping their uniforms until their college careers are completed, according to the audit report. However, they can purchase equipment at the fair-market value under certain circumstances. It's unknown whether any of the equipment seized during the raid had been purchased by the football players.
In May, The Dispatch found that:
At least eight athletes and 11 relatives of athletes had purchased vehicles from the same salesman in the past five years. The salesman then confirmed to The Dispatch that he had sold nearly 50 vehicles to OSU athletes or their family members in recent years. OSU compliance officials said they would investigate and later said they would wait for investigators from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles to finish examining the role of the dealers in the sales.
At least nine players had been issued traffic citations in Franklin County while driving vehicles with dealer license plates. OSU compliance officials said the majority of those players purchased used cars and were given a dealer license plate while waiting for the new registrations. Archie said "you would have to ask the dealers" as to why the players' cars had hard license plates as opposed to the cardboard temporary tags that typically are issued.
The NCAA is investigating quarterback Terrelle Pryor's ties to at least six different cars.
Archie has defended the way his department monitors athletes' cars even though officials don't check for traffic tickets off campus, don't follow up on campus car-registration forms that are often incomplete or inaccurate, and only spot-check car values.
He also said there is no extra scrutiny of star athletes who may be targets of rogue boosters or fans. "We treat all of our student athletes the same," he has said.
In 2005, former OSU president Karen Holbrook tapped then-outgoing athletic director Andy Geiger to overhaul the compliance department after problems with boosters and academic tutors. As a result, the compliance director was reassigned to other duties and Doug Archie was hired to take over in 2006.
Archie has been praised by his supervisor for running a tight ship. He received the highest rating - exceeds expectations - during his most recent performance review.
"Compliance in central Ohio is a bear, but Doug has done a very good job managing the beast," senior associate athletic director Miechelle Willis wrote last July.
In a 2009 job evaluation, Willis wrote that Archie knows "what it takes to keep our program out of jail."
Under Archie's watch, Ohio State has reported more NCAA violations than any other Division I school, in part because OSU has more athletes and sports than any other school, but also because of Archie's mandate that even the most minor misdeed will be reported.
"We have high ethics here, and we want the coaches to think of self-reporting as good and healthy," Archie told The Dispatch in 2009.
The NCAA requires schools to audit their compliance departments every four years. Ohio State, however, has done an audit annually since at least 2005, each year looking at different compliance areas.
In 2006, the auditors' review of athletes' car registration forms found that they were incomplete and sometimes inconsistent with the car registry maintained by University Transportation and Parking. Compliance officials vowed to correct the problem.
But last year, the auditors reviewed car registrations of 152 athletes and observed vehicles driven by football players to spring practice. Auditors found that 44 athletes bought parking permits for, received parking tickets in, or were seen driving cars that weren't registered.
Records obtained in May show that football players continue to submit incomplete forms, lacking sales prices, dates of purchases, co-signers and other required information.
Dispatch reporter Encarnacion Pyle contributed to this story.
all suspending would have done is sweep the mess under the rug and let tressel continue his holier than thou act all the longer. you act like this was limited to just those five, or that this was out of character for tressel.