Watch how neatly Jim Delany flips the premise of the questioner completely on its back here:
Q: If the NCAA’s ruling on Jim Tressel doesn’t meet your expectations, would you consider additional sanctions as a conference, as SEC commissioner Mike Slive did after Bruce Pearl violated NCAA rules, then lied about it to investigators?
JD: “We haven’t really acted in what would I describe as an enforcement way. I know the SEC took action against Bruce Pearl, but that was very unique for them and unique to them.
“We get involved in education. We get involved in guiding our schools along a path of compliance. We also provide advice to our schools. But if you followed the Big Ten or the Big 12 or the ACC, you wouldn’t see these conferences acting in an enforcement way. It’s simply because we don’t have the machinery for enforcement. We’re not out in the field and we’re not out processing the cases in any substantive way…”
Get that? The SEC’s peers don’t do enforcement because, unlike the SEC, they’ve never needed to do enforcement.
This guy’s good.
Get The Picture 
“We get involved in guiding our schools along a path of compliance.”
Which means he can guide Ohio State along the correct path later, if the pressure gets too great.
“Guiding our schools along a path of compliance.” Boy, could George Carlin have some fun with that.
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I’m not a fan of Delany taking veiled shots at other conferences, but he’s right about when to assign punishment. Conferences should wait until after the NCAA to add punishment, and the SEC did it wrong for the Pearl case.
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Punishment in college sports is more like playing dog pile on the rabbit. The school tries to punish itself just enough but not too much, the conference can add to it and then the big dog NCAA comes in to finish it off. That is no way to run a rail road.
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Perhaps this explains why Illinois (twice), Indiana, Michigan (once with another currently pending), Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern (Northwestern!), Ohio State (once with another currently pending) and Purdue have all been found guilty of major violations under Delany’s watch.
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Precisely. I don’t know what kind of “mechanism” this guy thinks is needed to do enforcement as a conference, but it looks like he’d better figure it out before the rest of the country figures out that his league is getting down and dirty with everyone else. It seems to me that the only “mechanism” Slive needed was to call Tennessee and say “he’s not coaching.”
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Let me put that statement through the BS translator:
“We can’t very well punish our own so we have to have someone else do it for us. We’re the ‘friend parents’ and we hope this way works”
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Or instead of parenting, we’d rather be buddies with our kids
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Or it’s much more fun to tsk-tsk the someone else’s eye than to do anything about the log in our own.
(Yeah, I got straight Biblical on that ass. Happy Easter weekend, everyone.)
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Sorry, that should read “tsk-tsk the speck in someone else’s eye,” obvs.
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“we’re not out processing the cases in any substantive way…” because it wouldn’t be in the best interest of its shareholders so why bother to have an enforcement mechanism. Someone might expect you to use it.
Besides NCAA enforcement always gets top-notch cooperation from the Big 10 teams anyway
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/05/31/FERPA_OSU.ART_ART_05-31-09_A14_D4E14K6.html?sid=101
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