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Facing N.C.A.A., the Best Defense Is a Legal Team
The black binders contained more than 700 pages and documented the misdeeds of the University of Kansas men’s and women’s basketball and football programs. Among the findings were payments to athletes and academic fraud. The report suggested remedies like self-imposed probation and a reduction in scholarships.
The investigation and the sanctions did not come from the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Instead, they were produced by a private law firm stocked with former N.C.A.A. investigators and hired by Lew Perkins a day after he became the Kansas athletic director in 2003.
Last October, the N.C.A.A. accepted most of the recommended sanctions and agreed not to impose a postseason ban on its teams. For two years of legal work, Kansas paid the law firm, Bond, Schoeneck & King, nearly $480,000. It was nothing, however, compared with the $23 million that the basketball and football programs generate annually.
When the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament field is announced next week — Kansas is among the favorites — the money will prove to be well spent.
Mr. Perkins hired Rick Evrard, who spent seven years as an N.C.A.A investigator, to navigate the complex college athletics rulebook. Just like the lawyers who leave government agencies to work for companies they used to regulate, Mr. Evrard has walked through an increasingly lucrative revolving door in big-time college athletics.
To Kansas, Mr. Evrard represented a fresh start.
“I’d rather have him tell me our problems than someone from the N.C.A.A.,” Mr. Perkins said.
While in that role Mr. Evrard is an advocate for a university accused of wrongdoing, and he is also its chief investigator. Beyond experience and expertise, he said, his firm offers confidentiality. For many, however, this arrangement is too cozy and emerged out of the N.C.A.A.’s flawed system of enforcement.
“You’re talking about a big-time commercial entertainment business that generates millions upon millions of dollars for institutions,” said Gary Roberts, who directed the sports law program at Tulane Law School and was the university’s faculty representative to the N.C.A.A.
In fact, a total of $132.6 million will be distributed through their conferences to the 65 teams that qualify for this year’s N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament. A major bowl game last season was worth $14 million to $17 million to each of the conferences of the participating teams.
“There are those who argue that the enforcement process is, in a large part, window dressing,” Mr. Roberts added, “that it is part of keeping the commercial enterprise viable. I don’t think they are crazy.”
Mr. Roberts, who will become the dean of the Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis in July, said institutions that hired specialized law firms usually fared better than those that did not.
It used to be that the N.C.A.A. caught wind of a problem at a university, investigated and meted out punishment. Now, with a stretched staff and member institutions often feeling wary of the enforcement process, outside firms have become the nexus for law and order in college sports.
Bond, Schoeneck & King made a name for itself in the wake of an academic fraud scandal involving the University of Minnesota’s men’s basketball team in 1999. The firm’s services cost the university $920,000.
Kansas paid the firm $477,000 to ferret out infractions that occurred in the athletic department from 2000 to 2003. The university spent $65,000 more than that to run its baseball team for one season.
Similarly, Ohio State paid the law firm nearly $511,000 from 2003 to 2006 to investigate its men’s and women’s basketball teams and to examine accusations of academic misconduct by Maurice Clarett, a former star running back for the Buckeyes. That, too, seems like a small investment to protect programs that generate more than $73 million in revenue annually.
The N.C.A.A.’s Division I, the major athletics division where the bulk of serious recruiting and academic violations occur, has 325 institutions and 150,000 student-athletes. Yet the enforcement division for major violations has only 29 staff members, with each working on no more than three cases at a time.
Since 2003, the N.C.A.A. has ruled on 59 major infractions cases and investigated many more that resulted in no punishment. Bond, Schoeneck & King and other firms were involved in many of them. The penalties ranged from a ban on postseason competition and forfeited games to a reduction of scholarships or a limit on the number of campus visits recruits could make.
David Price, the N.C.A.A.’s vice president for enforcement services, acknowledged that many athletic programs continued to bend, if not outright break, the rules. And his staff, which has nearly doubled in the past few years, cannot hope to catch them all. The N.C.A.A. does not have subpoena power, and it must get all information on the record to build a case.
“We’re certainly very busy, but I also think the N.C.A.A. membership doesn’t want a police state,” he said.
That is why representatives from law firms like Bond, Schoeneck & King; Ice Miller in Indianapolis; and several others consistently attend the 15 to 20 hearings a year held by the N.C.A.A.’s Committee on Infractions. These law firms are the first places athletic directors turn to when confronted with allegations of wrongdoing by their teams.
Athletic directors say a thorough and quiet internal investigation provides an institution with a greater understanding of what went wrong and minimizes the risk of a public relations disaster. Because these lawyers were once a part of the N.C.A.A., they say they understand what punishment fits a particular a offense, so they recommend a course of corrective action for the university and penalties it can immediately impose.
Although the N.C.A.A.’s infractions committee sometimes adds further restrictions, it rarely rejects the recommended sentence.
Bond, Schoeneck & King leads this niche primarily because the founder of its Collegiate Sports Practice Group, Michael Glazier, is credited with creating this market in the mid-1980s with Mike Slive, the current commissioner of the Southeastern Conference. The firm represents more than 60 colleges and universities on matters like eligibility, compliance and major infractions investigations.
“Some institutions distrust the N.C.A.A. enforcement staff,” Mr. Evrard said. “There is a feeling that the N.C.A.A. is not attuned to the sensitivities of the institution. And some of it is that the N.C.A.A. staff are often young professionals just out of law school, and they are running a case from beginning to end, which, if they were litigators at some firms, they may not be allowed to do for 10 or 12 years.”
The University of Oklahoma hired Ice Miller when it faced investigations involving its basketball and football programs. The former men’s basketball coach Kelvin Sampson made prohibited phone calls to prospects, and two football players were found to have received no-show jobs at a booster’s car dealership.
Ice Miller’s collegiate sports practice offers Robin Green Harris, who spent nine years at the N.C.A.A., including a five-year stint as the director of the infractions committee, and Mark Jones, who spent 18 years at the N.C.A.A., most recently as managing director of enforcement. Oklahoma’s athletic director, Joe Castiglione, said the firm’s credentials attracted the university, which has paid $336,000 in legal fees since 2003.
Last May, the Oklahoma men’s basketball program was placed on probation for two years and lost scholarships and some recruiting visits and calls. Now at Indiana, Sampson has been barred from calling and visiting potential recruits for a year.
On the advice of Ice Miller, Oklahoma disassociated from the booster, and reduced the number of football scholarships and limited the number of coaches allowed to recruit off campus. In April, the university will appear before the N.C.A.A. infractions committee, which will decide if these football penalties are sufficient.
David Ridpath, an assistant professor of sports administration at Ohio University, has testified before Congress about the N.C.A.A.’s lack of due process and excesses in rules enforcement.
In 2001, as the assistant athletic director for compliance and student services at Marshall University, he took the brunt of the blame for its violations, which involved a pattern of easy, high-paying jobs offered to athletes by a prominent local booster. He said that the practice had begun long before he arrived and that he knew nothing about it.
Mr. Ridpath said the N.C.A.A. enforcement staff has used heavy-handed tactics to force cooperation. “I’ve seen them threaten people’s careers, badger them to get the answers they want, belittle them and make people cry,” he said.
He also said he saw how lawyers specializing in N.C.A.A. matters operated. Marshall hired an Ice Miller partner at the time, Richard R. Hilliard, who was once the N.C.A.A.’s director of enforcement.
“They are very adept at how to satisfy the committee to minimize the damage to their high-paying client,” Mr. Ridpath said. “They have no problem advising their clients to sacrifice someone lower on the totem pole. You never see a high-profile coach or administrator losing their job.”
At Marshall, Mr. Ridpath said, he was sacrificed instead. He has sued the university in federal court for $1 million, an apology and the removal of negative comments from his file. Mr. Ridpath also sued Mr. Hilliard for malpractice; Mr. Hilliard settled the case in January and paid Mr. Ridpath an undisclosed sum.
“There’s a lot of doubt about whose interests are actually being represented,” Mr. Ridpath said. “Many of these lawyers have personal relationships with N.C.A.A. staffers and decision makers. They are lobbying and doing what they can to manipulate the system.”
Mr. Hilliard, who is no longer with Ice Miller, could not be reached for comment. His lawyer, Stephen R. Crislip, declined to comment.
Ms. Green Harris of Ice Miller also refused to comment about Mr. Hilliard. But she rejected the notion that she and other lawyers with N.C.A.A. experience were trading on prior relationships on behalf of clients.
“I suppose some people feel that way,” she said. “We are adversaries, though. We’re going to challenge the N.C.A.A. staff, and they are going to challenge us. Each side values its credibility.”
For Mr. Perkins, the Kansas athletic director, the law firm Bond, Schoeneck & King continues to earn its money.
“We get anonymous calls 10 or 15 times a year about one thing or another our kids are doing wrong,” said Mr. Perkins, who assigns the law firm to check them out. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, it is inaccurate. But we follow it up and report it to the N.C.A.A.”
