OU's fast reappearance might be a factor

INDIANAPOLIS — If David Boren and other Oklahoma administrators experience an uneasy déjà vu this morning, it's to be expected.

They were here just 51 weeks ago.

Not the Downtown Marriott. Not Indianapolis. But a very similar hotel conference room, for a very similar reason.

OU appears before the NCAA's Committee on Infractions today to answer allegations of major rules violations involving improper benefits to football players — specifically, that Rhett Bomar, J.D. Quinn and Jermaine Hardison were paid for work they didn't perform at Big Red Sports and Imports, and that OU didn't detect the violations in a timely manner.

And here's the potential rub: 358 days earlier, OU met with the same committee in Park City, Utah, to answer allegations of major rules violations in the men's basketball and gymnastics programs.

Although the cases are unrelated, it's uncertain how the Committee on Infractions might connect OU's quick reappearance.

"That's not a good thing, just atmospherically. … It can't help but be a negative,” said Gary Roberts, deputy dean of the Tulane Law School and a longtime observer of the NCAA process. "How much of a negative and how it might actually affect the outcome, I don't think anybody can predict.”

Although OU is currently on a two-year probation for the earlier rules violations, the school is not subject to "repeat violator” status, which could trigger accelerated penalties, because the violations in the football program occurred before the probation began.

There's technically no link between the cases. OU law professor David Swank, a former chairman of the Committee on Infractions, said the Committee "will consider the situations separately.”

But one similarity could prove sticky — the involvement of OU's compliance department.

OU won't contest the allegation the players were overpaid. Bomar and Quinn were dismissed from the program last August as a result of the school's investigation; Hardison was dismissed a short time later for what OU said were unrelated reasons.

But OU will contest a charge that it failed to adequately monitor the employment of football players, instead saying compliance procedures functioned correctly.

"We strongly disagree with this charge,” OU president David Boren wrote in a letter to the Committee on Infractions that accompanied OU's official response to the charges.

A year ago, OU successfully contested a charge of "lack of institutional control” in monitoring calls by basketball coaches to recruits. The Committee found OU guilty of the lesser charge of "failure in monitoring.”

Could the Committee suspect the school's compliance department has been asleep at the switch?

"It's not exactly the same kind of thing that they should be monitoring,” Roberts said, "but it just sort of creates the impression that these were a bunch of guys that aren't paying a lot of attention to the kinds of things that compliance offices are supposed to be paying attention to.”

The enforcement staff contends OU failed to adequately monitor in two ways:

It did not collect gross earnings statements in a "timely” fashion for 12 players employed at Big Red during the summer of 2005. And it didn't detect Bomar, Quinn and Hardison worked at Big Red during the school year — and Bomar and Quinn during the 2005 football season.

In documents obtained by The Oklahoman under terms of Oklahoma's Open Records Act, the NCAA enforcement staff concluded these "constituted a fundamental breakdown of the … monitoring system,” and prevented OU from discovering the violations until a year later.

In its official response to the charges, OU admitted not collecting the statements, but said it occurred during a transitional period; oversight of athletes' employment was shifting from the academic counseling department to the compliance department. OU also noted the compliance department was occupied during the summer of 2005 with the investigation into the men's basketball program.

And OU contended in its response that the enforcement staff was attempting to hold the school to "absolute perfection” in monitoring "that would be impractical, cumbersome…”

In his letter to the Committee on Infractions, Boren said OU "met, if not exceeded, industry standards” in monitoring and "there were no other reasonable additional steps we could have taken that would have prevented these violations or detected them any sooner.”

What the Committee might see is uncertain. As is the question of whether the Committee might subconsciously link this year's monitoring charge to last year's.

"Obviously, the Committee is going to remember that,” Swank said. "You can't erase that from the Committee's corporate memory.”