NCAA kicks Dawgs
No fruit baskets this time
By: Richard Linde, Posted 12 October 2002

No more wind sprints through airports this winter. No more mind-boggling check-in lines. Rick Neuheisel can stay at home, catch up on the family, and practice walking across the lake to work like Jim Owens. When the weather is bad and Neu can’t skipper his boat to work, that’s another way to avoid all the Montlake traffic.

However, a head coach at Washington needs to be “tenured” to accomplish that feat, according to those who were around the Big Fella.

Neuheisel is not yet established at Washington. He needs to create an aura about himself by winning the Rose Bowl again or by making a BCS appearance at another bowl.

But losing has its appeal for the controversial coach, who some have called the heir apparent to Steve Spurrier as college football’s next lightning rod. Just after losing to Michigan this season, he got a whopping big raise from Barbara Hedges, the Huskies’ Athletic Director. After losing to California, the NCAA placed him on a low-Cal recruiting diet, telling him he had to stay at home during the period beginning in October of this year and ending May 31, 2003.

The NCAA wasn’t satisfied with Rick Neuheisel's self-imposed sanction, which left Neuheisel on-campus during the evaluation periods occurring in May 2002 and May 2003. Instead, it left the Huskies’ best closer at home during the critical recruiting months, when head coaches need to visit a prospective recruit’s family and high school.

That’s how Bobbie Bowden closed the deal on Lorenzo Booker, the number one prospect in the nation last season. To seal the deal, he gave Booker’s mother a last minute hug as he walked into her Port Heuneme home, making Ty Willingham feel like he’d just kissed his mother-in-law.

Neuheisel should never sanctioned himself and given the NCAA a chance to kick the Dawgs. As the Huskies found out in 1993, the NCAA has a habit of adding additional penalties to the ones already meted out. In that case, in addition to overly severe Pac-10 sanctions, the NCAA cheap-shoted Washington for its fruit-basket scandal by restricting its football telecasts over the 1994 and 1995 seasons, when it placed it on probation.

But, in this case, why punish Washington by taking its best recruiter off the road when his secondary rules violations occurred at Colorado? Give this a Dawg a break. He got caught talking within earshot of one prospect and used a cell phone to talk to another, who might have seen him in the darkness outside his home?

As Neil Woelk (Scripps-McClatchy Western Service) wrote, “Fact is, Neuheisel actually broke very few rules. Rather, he was punished by the NCAA for pushing the envelope, for being creative, for breaking the "spirit" of the rules. In other words, Neuheisel is being punished for being smarter than the sanctimonious frauds who sit on the NCAA committees, those people who refuse to take reality into consideration.”

The worst case for the Huskies would be for Neuheisel to leave the program, especially if he fails to land a top 20 recruiting class this season. He might just say to himself I’ve had a gutful of college football and the hypocritical NCAA, which seems to look the other way when it comes to infractions committed by other schools, especially bumping. Why make an example out of me? Anyway, the pros pay bigger bucks.

Actually, the NCAA didn’t make a living-working example out of Neuheisel, and their committee members know it. Instead, Neuheisel and his assistants will be forced to abide by their picayunish rules on bumping, while other coaches will adopt the Neuhseisel approach and be creative.

Meanwhile it’s the Washington program that gets hurt. Not Neuheisel, as an individual, not Colorado, as a school, which loses five scholarships for either its 2003-04 or 2004-05 recruiting classes. Coach Barnett of the Buffs called the damage “very, very minimal…it doesn't impact us in the least."

As for Washington he said, "Parents and high school coaches want to see the head coach come to the school. For whatever reason, and you can pick about 10, it's important. Will it damage (Washington) severely? No, I don't think it will damage severely. But I do think it will impact it."