The Beast : Who’s To Blame?

There’s one thing about a scandal, it turns your life upside down. I didn’t mind the 5:30 am wake-up calls all week, home by midnight and able to ‘nap’ for a few hours. Early mornings are bleeding into long afternoon and late nights. Sleep? Overrated. My brain? Mush. So much for enjoying those last few days of summer with family. Duty calls.

As we continue dealing with the fog of war, I feel it’s important to discuss some things. For starters, it’s easy to take shots at Nevin Shapiro, but that’s the easy route. Yes, he’s a snitch. A liar. A felon. But none of that matters and there are two other groups of people we need to think about lumping some blame on.

The national media (and most non-UM fans) are focused on past and present players. The allegations are numerous and things don’t look good – but let’s be honest; this isn’t SMU. No recruit was given a house or car. There’s no cheating scandal going on and I’ve yet to see any allegation concerning the drugs. The kids made some bad decisions and there’s a price to pay, but “death penalty” talk is way over the top.

Regarding accountability, I don’t want to hear about the rules kids from inner cities live by being different than those that are in line with the rules the NCAA has put in place. Yes, the system is flawed and needs to be changed. The players absolutely deserve a piece of the pie. Playing college football is the only way one reaches the NFL, therefore making it an unfair system. Still, that doesn’t excuse breaking rules.

We have one road system in the United States and on all roads are speed limits. If I drive, I have to abide by speed limits whether I personally agree with them or not and there’s no other road system to choose from.

Student-athletes know right from wrong regardless of their background. Yes, the average English major can hit up Club Mansion, have relations on a yacht, gamble on billiards and nobody will care. To that point, they also didn’t sign a contract mandating that they don’t do such things. The rules comes with the territory, even if you feel they’re unfair.

The media and anti-Miami fans will focus on the players, but the more I’m hearing, this investigation is going to be about the adults in charge. Yahoo! wrote a thorough article (yes, I’ve seen the blog that points out holes), however they only had one source – the jailed Shapiro. The NCAA has another source; the University of Miami.

One would assume if there was some internal discussion about Shapiro there would be a paper – or electronic – trail on that. Hypothetically speaking, what if there were emails sent around late 2007 after Shapiro got into it with compliance director Dave Reed at the Orange Bowl during the Virginia debacle? What if those emails were ignored?

What if lower staff members that were doing research on Shapiro warned higher ups and those warnings were blown off? It’s this type of information that Yahoo! wouldn’t be able to get a hold of, but the NCAA will.

It’s going to be very hard to prove that “player x” was at a hotel on South Beach with Shapiro recreating a scene from “The Hangover”, thought it might not be as difficult for the NCAA to find evidence that Miami knew about Shapiro’s ownership stake in a sports agency or that some assistant coaches had “interesting” relationships with Mini Madoff.

In the end, this investigation will come down to what Donna Shalala, Kirby Hocutt, Paul Dee, Frank Haith and a handful of both football and basketball assistants knew or didn’t know. What they did or didn’t do. Of course that’s not as sexy as the thought of some of today’s biggest NFL names allegedly engaged in shady activity on a yacht with an Ponzi schemer while going to school in Coral Gables and spending down time on South Beach, which is why Yahoo! did what they did.

It’s been a circus in the Gables the lat few days, but I have a feeling the show is about to hit the road. Lubbock. Louisville. Columbia. Gainesville. Tuscaloosa. Brace yourselves folks, the circus is soon coming your way.

IN OTHER NEWS : We’re most likely doing allCanes Radio next Thursday at a special time (4-6pm ET) due to a scheduling conflict. The show will move back to its normal time (4-7pm ET) on Thursday September 1st and more good news on the radio front, our great friend The Wizard has gotten us back up on iTunes. Click here to subscribe to the podcast.

Lastly, thanks to show sponsor the Miami Seaquarium, we’ve launched a weekly “Best Tweet” contest and the winner gets a chance to “Swim With The Dolphins”. Fire your best Tweets to us at either allCanesBlog or allCanes Radio and don’t miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity.

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