In wake of the NCAA’s ruling of punishment against Michigan Football over the Connor Stalions’ sign-stealing saga, reactions have come pouring in from the proverbial coast-to-coast of college athletics, including from most of the biggest names covering college football.
One such reaction came from Josh Pate, who over the past several years has become one of the faces of college football coverage on his podcast, Josh Pate’s College Football Show.
“There was a lot of hope by Ohio State fans, Michigan State fans and also just a lot of people that think wrong was done and they wanted to see it punished that a big NCAA bombshell was coming, that a big NCAA hammer was gonna drop,” Pate said. “And, I didn’t disagree with you that it may be deserved, I looked at the findings, I looked at the allegations — you have multiple Level 1 violations — to me, in any former life, that means you’ve got big sanctions on the way. But, this is not a former life, this is the current life.”
While Pate has not offered a strong opinion on whether or not the Wolverines‘ deserved the NCAA ‘hammer’ to drop on them due to the scandal, he explained why the hopes of rival fans for a multi-year postseason ban and heavy sanctions against Michigan Football were always a false hope.
“I need to tell you four letters that are irrelevant from this point forward when it comes to collegiate athletics, and that is N-C-A-A,” Pate said. “Those letters are dead. Those letters no longer mean what they meant when I was a kid. They no longer mean what they meant when Jim Tressel was the head coach at Ohio State, or Bo Schembechler was the head coach at Michigan, or even Lloyd Carr was the head coach at Michigan. It’s just a different world now.
“The reason I thought Michigan would avoid the postseason ban is not because they didn’t deserve one. Again, if this exact list of allegations happened in 1988, Michigan would have gotten annihilated today. If it would have happened in 2011 they may have gotten annihilated. We don’t live in that world anymore. So, to understand why the NCAA is completely powerless to really punish a program anymore, you need to understand what the NCAA is.
“The NCAA is just the enforcing branch of the governing body of college athletics. The governing body of college athletics is what? It’s the university presidents. That’s what the governing body is, so the NCAA is this nameless, faceless, like, blue circular logo with four letters in it that’s meant to do the bidding of university presidents, so it can be the bad guy. They don’t want to be the bad guy, it can be the bad guy, and it used to be that they let it do it’s job.
“But, nowadays, when you’re media rights deals are in the billions of dollars — if you’re in a deal with FOX, or you’re in a deal with CBS, or you’re in a deal with ESPN, or NBC, or all of the above — you do not enter into those kinds of media rights deals, at that altitude, sign the check, have that media partner pay you billions of dollars, and then in return have your own enforcement mechanism, that you control, damage the viewership viability of one of your assets. Translation: FOX is not coming to the Big Ten and saying, ‘Here are billions of dollars’ and then the Big Ten says, ‘Thanks’, cash the check and then, ‘Um, Michigan did something bad. We’re going to do a postseason ban on them, which shaves their viewership viability eight to 10% on any given Saturday’, and FOX says, ‘Okay, that’s the right thing to do.’ That’s not the thing that they’re gonna do, whether it’s right or not.”
According to Pate, with the NCAA’s enforcement power all but diminished, the onus is now on individual conferences — the Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Big 12 and the Group of Five leagues — to police themselves moving forward.
“Here is the big hammer-home point. This should be the takeaway: I think everybody can look and say, it’s a different standard now. Michigan getting off, to the light degree they did, is evidence that it’s a different standard. Like, if you’re a Michigan fan even, and you’re listening and saying, ‘No, we did nothing wrong.’ Forget about that, whether you think it is right or wrong or not — you have multiple Level 1 violations levied against you. In any other period of time in college athletics, that would have been complete hammer time. So, even you guys, even though you’re happy today, you have to admit it’s a different era now.”
“So, the question is — today it was you, tomorrow lets say a massive scandal erupts in East Lansing, or Columbus, or State College, and all of a sudden it’s you that has your torch and pitchfork out and you want someone to do the right thing — my question there is, who does the right thing? Who are the cops? Who’s the arbiter out there, the independent arbiter? I’ll tell ya, it’s not the NCAA…It’s the leagues, it’s the conferences. They have to take it upon themselves.
“Everyone’s screaming, ‘I want guardrails, I want guidelines, I want rules’. Okay, well, then hand autonomy to big brother — not at the NCAA level, at the conference level. You’ve got to be able to police your conferences. You’ve got to be able to police your leagues, and I wonder what the takeaway from this is moving forward as it relates, not to this case, but to what’s going to happen in the future.”