For their own sake, I hope Georgia Southern got their fill of celebrating their “Draining of the Swamp”
Oh my.
Yesterday, the NCAA released an infractions report on Georgia Southern’s football team that unveiled some behavior that was less than ethical and more than shady. The violations occurred under former head coaches Jeff Monken and Willie Fritz in the 2013-14 and 2014-15 academic years, respectively.
Among the findings were two eye-popping cases of blatant cheating. First, a former assistant director of student athlete services somehow got ahold of the academic login information of two players, did extra credit work for both of them, and submitted them online through the players’ accounts. And guess what- despite the illegal help, both still failed the class. In addition, there was an assistant compliance director at GSU who gave a player a flash drive with completed assignments in a class that she had taken while she was a student; the player then submitted the woman’s work as his own.
You can read all the details of the case here.
But this is a Gator blog, and if you’ve put two and two together, you know why I’m writing about this. Georgia Southern used players who either received impermissible academic assistance or knowingly plagiarized academic assignments. As of now, the NCAA has only ruled that GSU is guilty of the first of those two no-nos, but that’s still bad enough to warrant forced vacation of all wins in games in which those players suited up for. And one of those wins those players presumably participated in was- you guessed it- over Florida in 2013.
The only thing standing in the way of the Gators getting to (sort of) remove that horrible blemish from their program’s history is the release of the NCAA’s public report. All they did yesterday was publicize the broader aspects of their findings, but the complete report will reveal the players’ identities; at that point, the games in which the players participated will be stricken from the record books. The assumption is that at least one of the players participated in that Florida game.
I’ve studied the NCAA rulebook, and unfortunately, it looks as though forfeiting the game to Florida is off the table. Gator fans will have to settle for the knowledge that Georgia Southern can no longer claim the win, and the list of lasting repercussions of that loss would be reduced to catching flak from bored FSU fans (to which the response has become simply directing them to this chart.) And while no retroactive findings by the NCAA can lessen the everlasting scar that game has left, it would admittedly serve as a nice bit of closure.
