I know I’m just a lowly blogger with a law degree and I know that living in this country over the past decade means witnessing an appalling retreat from our constitutional guarantees in the name of the Wars on Nouns (much of which has the enthusiastic support of people who like to bleat loudly about personal freedom, ironically), but I still wound up shaking my head over this exchange between the noted legal scholars Dennis Dodd and Urban Meyer:
CBSSports.com: What about subpoena power for the NCAA in its investigations? Is that something you’d welcome?
“Absolutely. The problem right now the investigation process takes five years, four years. USC can’t go to a bowl game. They [current players] were 14 years old, 15 years old when this was going on.
“The two areas that are missing in my mind are fear and lack of knowledge. Fear on the side of the coaches and lack of knowledge on the side of the NCAA. Why not combine the two? Every quarter you have a conference call [with coaches].’ What do you hear? What’s going on? We hear about these recruiting services or camps or bumps. They put a memo together and send it out. ‘This is what we hear is going on. If you get caught here is the punishment.’ ”
“You won’t catch everybody, That’s not the goal. You want to stop the behavior.”
So, we’re going to give a non-governmental entity the power to issue subpoenas. Did either of these scholars stop to think that the NCAA isn’t bound by little niceties like the 4th and 5th Amendments? And how, exactly, would the NCAA be empowered to enforce this?
This is what comes from serious people who believe something should be done without first engaging their brains. Which is to say, it’s pretty typical thinking for our times.
(Thus endeth the rant.)
Get The Picture 
Idealists are the worst kind of snobs.
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Oddly enough, we realists are usually the worst louts, as well.
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I think the NCAA should have the authority to waterboard Cheeznik -but that’s just the way I roll 🙂
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Senator, I actually like that you occasionally hint at political leanings that you know won’t be all that well received. It’s infrequent enough to be charming rather than preachy. I hope, however, in this case it doesn’t distract from the point that this really is pretty hilarious. What the hell?! Perhaps we should give the NCAA the nuclear option, too? Not that they’d ever have to use it, of course, but just so it’s on the table and folks know they mean bidness.
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What makes you sure they’re not engaging their brains, such as they are?
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You have a point, sir.
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Personally, that scares me more than believing they are just willfully ignorant. It’s the same with politics, sometimes. I’d rather believe they’re idiots than think they truly believe some of the batshit insane things they say.
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“Batshit insane”? Is that someone sittin’on a mound of guano in a cave, throwing batshit in the air and crying “Somebody stole my freedoms!”. If so I have an ex-wife who lives in Texas and fits the description. True, right down to her photo on the front page of a sizeable Texas city’s newspaper with a Tea Party sign and her idiot second husband.
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I doubt either Corch or Dennis Dodd know that private entities can’t issue subpoenas.
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I doubt either Corch or Dennis Dodd actually understand the subpoena process or anything about what it actually entails…Meyer is probably pretty smart in a very narrow way, Dodd….well, he’s a journalist more or less, and I can speak with some authority, ain’t none of them guys geniuses.
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Talk of subpoenae is going around in circles. The NCAA can compel member institutions and their agents to respond to questions. They already have that power, but they need to make clear what the “poena” is for failing to respond. You punish institutions that don’t cooperate with investigations (but maybe you make it harsher than they just did with GT).
NFL agents (or NFL-agent-like substances), players’ parents, players’ parents’ churches, banks, scouting services, car dealers, tattoo artists, and even boosters don’t have to talk to anybody.
So it seems to me, the NCAA already has all the subpoena-ish power it can possibly have.
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I’m assuming these geniuses are proposing subpoena power to be directed against third parties who aren’t governed by the NCAA.
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Can you imagine the conference call with all of the SEC coaches? No way it devolves into a series of accusations and recriminations.
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“I know I’m just a lowly blogger with a law degree …”
Well I for one enjoy the blog and believe I might miss it if it were to ever go the way of Catfish and Cornbread.
“I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling.”
— Hunter S. Thompson (The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time)
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Corch Meyers, meet Edith Heare.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/somebody-should-do-something-about-all-the-problem,11018/
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Good football coaches generally give good commentary about football. Similarly, good actors generally give good commentary about acting.
Not sure either should venture too much in the area of governing.
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Irvin the Thirsty Authoritarian “wants somebody to make college football’s trains run on time.”
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These blogs are my best source of humor all day. If any of you would like to go fishin’, drink beer and tell lies sometime, please give a call. Then we can go gator hunting. I use gamecocks for bait.
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Am I missing something here? I see where Dodd asks a question about a subpoena power, but Corch does not really address compulsory disclosures (or suggest that they should apply to non-member institutions). I generally have no problem with his proposal other than echoing the earlier doubts as to whether coaches would be willing to share these rumors. Phil Fulmer might disagree.
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The Dept of Education has warrant and swat team authority. Why not just extend that to the NCAA? I can’t fathom anything bad that can come from that!!
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Right. The Swat Team would be feckless since the NCAA couldn’t find most wrongdoing with both hands and the search warrant.
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Subpoenas?!. Hell no, we need an all powerful Czar (Tsar? – the spelling always seems to be changing). Anyway, we need a Great Wizard of Oz or Grand Poobah – like Kennesaw Mountain Landis, to ‘protect the integrity of the game’. Somebody who’s above those who are above the rule of law.
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