A great take from my friend who is lawyer.
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http://syracusefan.com/threads/plausible...ity.88441/
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ReedinNY
1) A high-major college hoops coach of JB's stature has a huge amount on his plate and simply can't be in 6 places at one time. His primary duties are national recruiting, supervising team practices and traveling the country to coach 30 or more games each season. In these areas, the ones over which JB had direct control and involvement, there were no allegations of improprieties. Boeheim also has general responsibilities ... working with the league (contract issues, scheduling, etc), directing players and staff, and, I'm sure his personal favorite, representing the team before the national media. NCAA academic compliance issues were handled by the director of BB operations. I'm not sure but I believe this position reports to the AD, not Boeheim. But either way, the coach took on the most recent DOBBO (Stan Kissel), and had general supervisory interactions with him and other administrative staff. The coach obviously does not have time to tutor individual student athletes, or to oversee individual players' academic progress issues. Nor would we want him to take on sole responsibility for all NCAA compliance requirements: lots of time, along with a certain amount of specialized expertise and objectivity, are required to adhere to NCAA rules. Compliance is a full-time job: according to the NCAA report, over 80% of the DBBO's duties involved compliance issues. After the problems with Kornish emerged in 2007, JB brought in Kissel .. someone he intended to clean up and improve the University's compliance record. So, you can certainly blame him as the "CEO" of SU BB. But he had no choice but to delegate NCAA compliance responsibilities -- the whole point of bringing Kissel in. To me, this is not indicative of an attitude of indifference by Boeheim towards NCAA rules. To the contrary, he picked someone to clean up the program; the person just failed to get the job done. Some questionable oversight by the AD himself on the Fab melo situation didn't help. Regardless, none of the infractions justified more than 100 vacated wins and a half-season suspension .. these are unprecedented penalties for a coach without direct involvement.
2) The kornish situation is ugly, BUT is a lot less serious than the Penn State (systematic child abuse) or Miami (hundreds of thousands of dollars and more than a decade of extra benefits) situations. We're dealing with five athletes and $8k. Nothing to be taken lightly, but hardly jaw-dropping. The U vetted Kornish before they allowed any involvement with him. He was a licensed NYS employee working at the local YMCA part time. He had no criminal background, and was neither a coach nor a teacher. He was basically an athletic event enthusiast and organizer, who helped administratively with various AAU programs, YMCA bb camps and I believe the SU elite camp. Ordinarily, even if he hung around the weight room or went to staff weddings, I would not think his activities as a camp organizer would have qualified him as a booster (he was not personally coaching, teaching or directing student athletes). However, once he started coordinating SU players as "volunteers" and supervising the community service of one SU student athlete, he probably qualified at that point. However, at approximately that point, the U sent him a compliance manual and reminded him of the prohibitions against extra benefits. The fact that he ignored these warnings was not SU's fault. But it was SU's fault when he started paying SU staff on the down low. This was, at least to my mind, an indictment of the SU BB's oversight program and should have been discovered (and reported) earlier. In this context, I have to agree with the NCAA that Kornish was operating under the nose of SU officials. All that considered, I seriously doubt that JB had any inkling before 2007 of Kornish's activities. In fact, avoiding another "Kornish" situation was his motivation for hiring Kissel.
3) SU's alleged drug policy violations represent a red-herring IMHO. The idea that players can smoke all the weed they want at Kentucky or other institutions that have NO POLICY, but at institutions that do, like SU, players have to comply to the letter, is seriously flawed. All this does is incentivize member institutions to drop their policies to avoid scrutiny. Obviously, this is an undesirable outcome. In any event, we had a policy, and I believe that players' drug tests (under the policy) were to be sent to the head coach. This was not done in practice -- going back to DG's predecessor -- because it was better to have the information go to the AD and have the decisions made administratively. Positive drug tests usually required counseling and even treatment in some cases. Suspensions were provided if the student re-tested positive. But clearly, some flexibility was appropriate in the counseling and treatment process -- unless the tests revealed performance-enhancing substances producing a competitive advantage. To my knowledge, that wasn't the case. So ... suspending the head coach, fining the university over a million dollars and penalizing hundreds of innocent players because a few athletes were found, over a long period of time, to have tested positive for low-level marijuana use is overkill.