August 22, 2008
Albuquerque Journal
NCAA Penalties Give UNM a Wake-Up Call
It doesn’t disconnect his new $310,000-a-year pay raise, but this week’s NCAA penalties should serve as a wake-up call to University of New Mexico football coach Rocky Long .
A coach who will be making at least $750,000 a year — more if his Lobos beat top-ranked teams and go to a big bowl game — can afford to be alert.
Alert to things like assistant coaches who help prospective players commit academic fraud, who enroll students in violation of the rules, who set up correspondence credits that require no work. Those assistants may be “two great guys that made some serious mistakes,” but they made those mistakes on Long’s watch.
While the penalties come four years after the violations, Josephine Potuto, chairwoman of the NCAA Committee on Infractions, says, “The committee doesn’t think there’s anything more serious than academic fraud.”
UNM lowballed the severity and initiated two years of probation and the suspension of one scholarship offer. This week the NCAA raised UNM’s ante to three years probation and five scholarships.
“When this (investigation) started over two years ago, we determined mistakes were made and there were problems in our program,” Long says. “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.”
It shouldn’t — UNM just gave Long more than 750,000 reasons why.