August 21, 2008
Albuquerque Journal
Lobos Hit by NCAA
By Greg Archuleta, Journal Staff Writer
Six hours after the Lobos beat on each other during morning football practice, they took another beating from the NCAA.
The NCAA rules infraction committee on Wednesday put the University of New Mexico football program on three years probation, stemming from rules violations that occurred in 2004 and 2005
It reduced the number of scholarships the school can offer by five per year during that span and will limit the Lobos to 80 total scholarships per year from 2008-10, down from the NCAA allowable 85 per year.
UNM President David Schmidly, athletics director Paul Krebs and coach Rocky Long put on brave faces and accepted their punishment during a news conference.
“When this (investigation) started over two years ago, we determined mistakes were made and there were problems in our program,” Long said. “We knew that something was going to come down from the NCAA, so it's old news to us, and we made plans from day one on how we would handle those sanctions. We will put this behind us and make sure it never happens again, live with it as long as it lasts and still have a good football team.”
In its 25-page report, the NCAA reviewed its findings from an investigation involving three major rules violations that occurred between 2004 and 2005. Two former assistant coaches, identified by the Associated Press in April as Lenny Rodriguez and Grady Stretz, engaged in academic fraud concerning three former prospective student-athletes and gave impermissible inducements to those athletes and extra benefits to one then-current UNM student-athlete.
“The committee doesn't think there's anything more serious than academic fraud, when you're talking about college and college athletics,” said NCAA Committee on Infractions Chairwoman Josephine Potuto during a teleconference. Potuto is a law professor at the University of Nebraska.
“The committee believed the types of violations here committed by two separate coaches at the time were sufficiently serious that the penalties needed to reflect that.”
UNM admitted to the violations in February and had self-imposed a two-year probationary period and a reduction of one scholarship offer for each of the next two years and a total of 83 scholarships for 2008 and 2009.
School officials at the time were hoping those penalties would satisfy the NCAA.
“We self-imposed penalties that we thought were within the framework of what we believed to be the severity of the violations,” Krebs said Wednesday. “But the bottom line is we did agree the charges were accurate. We need to be and are being held accountable for some very, very poor decisions by two former coaches.”
The report refers to the assistants as “former assistant coach A” and “former assistant coach B,” and says that assistant A engaged in unethical conduct regarding all four students in the case. Assistant B was involved with only two of the prospects.
The Journal ascertained former assistant coach A to be Rodriguez from a paragraph in page 11 of the report that said, “Because he had spent many years working in the California Junior College system, former assistant coach A was considered the most knowledgeable member of the New Mexico football coaching staff regarding correspondence courses.”
According to old Lobo football media guides, Rodriguez worked at three junior colleges in California from 1981-1997. He's currently an assistant at Mount San Antonio College, in Walnut, Calif., where he spent 10 years before coming to UNM in 1998.
Stretz's résumé consisted of two years as a UCLA graduate assistant before Long hired him on his initial staff.
Rodriguez did not return a phone call to his office Wednesday seeking comment.
Stretz currently is the defensive line coach at Arizona State. He didn't return a phone call to his office. His lawyer, Jim Zeszutek, called the report extremely disappointing.
“Some of the issues that exonerate (Stretz) are not reflected in the report,” Zeszutek said in a telephone interview. “I think it's a situation where it's an assistant coach being a scapegoat for the university.”
The report outlined some dubious actions by both coaches in getting the student- and prospective student-athletes credit for a correspondence course at Fresno Pacific University.
It said that both former assistants enrolled prospective student-athletes in correspondence courses at Fresno Pacific through an independent instructor, identified in the initial notice of allegations as Fern Zahlen. The athletes gave the coaches a credit-card number to enroll them, but coaches are not allowed to enroll students in classes under the impermissible-inducements clause.
Each of the prospects told the NCAA they never received any of the materials from the instructor and did not complete any course work. Records at Fresno Pacific showed they received credit for those courses.
The report said that the two coaches listed their own UNM-issued cell phones as the prospective student-athletes phone numbers. The instructor then sent course materials for all three to an address that turned out to be the California residence of Rodriguez's brother.
Rodriguez also enrolled a then-current Lobo in a correspondence course with Zahlen through Fresno Pacific, which is classified as an extra benefit.
The instructor faxed the materials to the UNM football office. According to Potuto, the NCAA verified that the player did the work and received credit.
None of the three prospective student-athletes played for the Lobos. One prospect simply never enrolled at UNM. A second prospect tried to enroll, but because he had received a grade of “pass” rather than a letter grade, he could not use the credit to graduate from his junior college or to enroll at UNM.
The third did enroll at UNM but did not use the correspondence course to gain admission to UNM or eligibility on the football team.
Long said he felt neither betrayed by the assistants, whom he said were “two great guys that made some serious mistakes,” nor angry by the fact that the violations did not benefit UNM in any way.
“I think the penalties are severe,” he said, “but I don't think they're going to hurt our program.”