Crime and Punishment
August 17, 2012
In my previous posting I identified three criteria that have helped the MHSAA decide what its responsibilities should be, which is worth re-reading in the context of the widespread debate about what the NCAA’s role should be in the wake of the Penn State tragedy.
In essence, my last posting stated that the MHSAA has neither the legal authority nor the resources to be involved in protecting young people at all times and in all places. It is in the area of sports, and especially within the limits of the season and the boundaries of the field of play, that the MHSAA has a role and rules.
So obviously, if I had been asked about what the NCAA should do about Penn State, I would advise the NCAA to look at its Handbook. If its member institutions have adopted policies and procedures to be followed and prescribed penalties to be enforced that apply in this matter, then by all means, follow the rules. But if not, stay out of it. You’ve got enough to do that’s not getting done where you have the requisite expertise and responsibility.
Clearly, the NCAA leadership took a different position, apparently preferring to absorb criticism for going too far rather than suffer criticism that it did too little in response to horrific behavior at one of its member institutions.
Unfortunately, in stating publicly that the severity of the penalties was intended to send the important messages that football should not outsize academics and that success on the field should not be at the expense of the safety and nurturing of athletes and that coaches should not be treated as larger-than-life heroes, the NCAA misses the point that the system the NCAA itself has created or allowed is much at fault for such excesses.
Any system that allows such lavish expenditures on the sports program and its personalities the way it is allowed in NCAA Division 1 football and basketball will continue to have serious problems, every year and at multiple institutions. Penn State is not the first university to have screwed up priorities; it just has the most recent and tragic victims.
For its part, the MHSAA has rules designed to position athletics secondary to academics, keep the pursuit of success secondary to safety, and maintain administrators’ authority over coaches, whose pay may not exceed the supplementary pay schedule for teachers and may not flow from any source but the school itself. We are striving to have policies now that will make it unnecessary to impose penalties later for sports programs that are out of control.
Limitations of Rules
November 15, 2013
Those who make rules ought to have knowledge of the limitations of rules, lest they overreach and over-regulate.
Dov Seidman writes in how: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything: “Rules fail because you cannot write a rule to contain every possible behavior in the vast spectrum of human conduct. There will always be gray areas, and therefore, given the right circumstances, opportunities, or outside pressures, some people might be motivated to circumvent them. When they do, our typical response is just to make more rules. Rules, then, become part of the problem.”
The NCAA is under constant criticism for its voluminous rule book which seems to pry into myriad of daily activities of athletes, coaches, boosters and others with so many rules it’s impossible for people to know them all. So university athletic departments must hire compliance officers to guide people – effectively absolving the people in the trenches from knowing the rules and committing to their adherence; and the NCAA office must hire investigations to sort through all the allegations of wrongdoing.
While much trimmer than the NCAA Manual, the MHSAA Handbook is much larger today than its original versions. Still, every year in December when the MHSAA staff conducts a series of meetings that kicks off a six-month process of reviewing theHandbook, there is a concerted effort to “make the rules better without making the rule book larger.”
We know that unless the rules address a specific problem and are written with clarity and enforced with certainty, rules do more harm than they do good. “This,” according to Seidman, “creates a downward spiral of rulemaking which causes lasting detriment to the trust we need to sustain society. With each successive failure of rules, our faith in the very ability of rules to govern human conduct decreases. Rules, the principal arm of the way we govern ourselves, lose their power, destroying our trust in both those who make them and the institutions they govern.”