ALABAMA SEEKS FINAL JUDGMENT
Aug 15, 2002
STEVE KIRK and STEVE IRVINE
News staff writers
The Birmingham News
A University of Alabama defense team leaves today for Chicago, where it
will fight to overturn two bowl bans and six additional scholarship reductions
given to its football program by the NCAA Committee on Infractions six
months ago.
An eight-person traveling party led by university counsel Stan Murphy
and Mobile attorney Robert Cunningham Jr. will present the university's
case at 8 a.m. Friday in front of the NCAA Infractions Appeals Committee
at The Westin hotel downtown.
A decision won't be announced for several weeks.
University of Wyoming Law School Dean Jerry Parkinson will represent the
infractions committee, which announced Feb.1 that it considered shutting
down the Crimson Tide program after a 11/2-year investigation uncovered
numerous recruiting violations by UA boosters.
The infractions committee placed Alabama on five years' probation,
increased UA's self-imposed penalty of 15 scholarship reductions to
21 over three years, banned it from postseason in 2002 and 2003, disassociated
three UA boosters for life and restricted all boosters from traveling
on team charters, attending closed practices, assisting in summer camps
and attaining sideline passes for games.
The bowl bans especially stung the Tide program, considering it is expected
to lose at least $4 million in revenue if they stand.
The appeals committee was formerly chaired by newly hired Southeastern
Conference Commissioner Mike Slive, but he recused himself from Alabama's
appeals hearing.
That leaves a four-person committee to hear Alabama's case. It will
be chaired by newly hired Clemson Athletics Director Terry Don Phillips,
formerly AD at Oklahoma State. It also includes University of Southern
California Faculty Athletics Representative Noel Ragsdale, Harvard University
attorney Allan Ryan and Robert Stein of the American Bar Association,
who is the committee's mandated member from the "general public."
It has the option of upholding the infractions committee's penalties
or vacating any part of them.
The last SEC school to go before the appeals committee saw mixed results,
which is likely UA's best hope. In a 1999 men's basketball case
against Louisiana State University, the committee upheld all scholarship
reductions against the program but vacated a postseason ban.
Alabama officials said they will not comment on the case until its conclusion,
but Cunningham said, "Everyone interested in this appeal should understand
that we face a very uphill battle."
Murphy made it known in a letter to NCAA President Cedric Dempsey that
Alabama plans to contest nearly every penalty beyond what the university
self-imposed last fall.
The point of the hearing is not to retry the case, which largely centered
around alleged improper payments and benefits by boosters Logan Young,
Wendell Smith and Ray Keller. In fact, the university agreed with many
of the 15 allegations it faced when it went before the infractions committee
on Nov.17.
It will now argue that the penalties are excessive, using other decisions
as examples. For instance, on June 26 the infractions committee gave the
University of California one bowl ban and 13 scholarship reductions, even
though repeat offender Cal was found to lack institutional control and
committed academic fraud two charges absent from UA's case to go with
numerous recruiting violations.
Procedural issues:
Those close to the case say there are critical procedural issues that
UA will argue loudly that the infractions committee ignored:
That the university shouldn't have been considered a repeat offender,
and therefore penalized so harshly, since the 1998 infractions case against
former Tide basketball assistant coach Tyrone Beamon was caught by the
school and self-reported.
That the NCAA enforcement staff's use of an unidentified "secret
witness" in its case is against NCAA bylaws.
That the NCAA's statute of limitations policy should have applied
to the illegal recruitment of Stevenson lineman Kenny Smith in 1995, possibly
the most detrimental allegation the Tide faced at Indianapolis.
That the NCAA enforcement staff failed to supply information concerning
the illegal recruitment of Smith and Memphis' Albert Means in 1999
in a timely fashion.
Alabama's traveling party is much different from the one that went
to Indianapolis to meet with the infractions committee. Faculty Athletics
Representative Gene Marsh and former compliance director Marie Robbins
will not make this trip. Both have been mostly uninvolved in the appeal process.
Repeat members of the traveling party will be Murphy, Athletics Director
Mal Moore, university counsel Glenn Powell, outside counsel Rich Hilliard
of the Indianapolis firm Ice Miller and former university President Andrew
Sorensen, who has since begun his presidency at the University of South Carolina.
Interim university President Barry Mason will attend for the first time.
But it's the other new defense members who symbolize the university's
aggressive strategy for its appeal. Cunningham is a litigation attorney
for the firm Cunningham, Bounds, Yance, Crowder and Brown, which successfully
represented the state in a recent high-profile case against Exxon.
Meanwhile, Alabama law school graduate Charles Cooper will help as well.
Cooper belongs to the Washington, D.C., firm of Cooper & Kirk.
The defense team will argue against most of the specific findings pertaining
to Smith and Means, and it will also argue a charge against alleged booster
Jim Johnson, a Columbus, Ga., car dealer who sold former Tide linebacker
Travis Carroll a vehicle; and the handing out of four $100 bills by Keller
to an unnamed Tide player in 1998 and 1999.
Alabama will not argue several findings that Young provided an improper
loan to former assistant coach Ronnie Cottrell, that Means received two
expense-paid recruiting visits, that Young and Keller made improper, in-person
contact with recruits, and that recruits received "excessive entertainment,"
including parties with strippers.