Derpa meets FERPA.

Clemson’s vowed search for the truth as to the cause of how three of its players came into contact with an illegal PED is beginning to resemble O.J. Simpson’s promise to track down Nicole’s real killer.

Clemson athletic department staffers started asking each other tough questions immediately after three football players were suspended just prior to the Dec. 29 Cotton Bowl. The school had until an extended NCAA appeal was finally denied in late May to look into how Dexter Lawrence, Braden Galloway and Zach Giella ingested the performance-enhancing drug ostarine.

But Clemson won’t share its findings with the public.

If the school knows how the players came into contact with an illegal PED, if the source was inside or outside the athletic department — or if the problem was more widespread — it is not saying.

And probably will never say.

Clemson cites a privacy law.

“That (NCAA) appeal was led by the student-athletes’ representative. Any investigation into the source of ostarine contamination is a part of that appeal and is, therefore, a student record subject to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act,” a Clemson spokesperson told The Post and Courier this week.

A football program can never go wrong doing it for the kids.  Even if it really isn’t.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which applies to the privacy of student education records, would apply to information specifically about Lawrence, Galloway and Giella. It would not prevent Clemson from releasing a general look at such things as the results of in-house PED tests during the playoffs or opinions from outside experts, if either of those situations applied in this unusual case…

“It is true that FERPA protects the education records of students,” South Carolina Press Association attorney Taylor M. Smith IV said. “But it is also true that the use of any exemption in the S.C. Freedom of Information Act is not mandatory. In this case, it seems the players involved (and perhaps other players not mentioned) would provide consent to the school to release those records, protected under FERPA, so the public can be made aware of how these tests were failed.”

Well, that makes sense, if you had failed tests.  What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a school that’s written checks with its mouth that its ass can’t cash.  Thank Gawd for privacy rights.

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