Note that this post is not called The Schottenheimer Effect. If you have been reading this blog on a regular basis, then you know what I’m talking about. If not then… shame on you.
I do apologize, however, for my recent lack of posts. I swear I have a valid alibi, but if I told you about it, you wouldn’t believe me. There’s no way one person can be so technologically unlucky. Let’s just say I’m tempted to take a sledgehammer to this accursed laptop.
I know this will come as a shock to you, but I have never had a girlfriend. In fact, I’ve never really been close. No dates, no phone numbers, nothing. At 23 years old, I’m still so clueless when it comes to the beautiful denizens of that exotic land known as Women that when I come into contact with one of reasonably corresponding age I lock up like a manual transmission accidently thrust into reverse instead of fourth gear while driving at 50 miles an hour.1 I stutter, I laugh nervously, but most of all, I just have no idea what to say. I feel totally lost in situations that seem natural to ordinary humans.
Silas Nacita is a walk-on running back for college football’s Baylor Bears.2 At least he was until a couple of weeks ago. On February 25, he announced that the NCAA had declared him ineligible to play and that he was therefore dismissed from the team. Nacita elaborated that the ineligibility allegedly3 was a result of benefits he had received that the NCAA deemed to be in violation of its rules. What were these egregious violations, you ask? What was so heinous that the powers that be of college athletics ended this young man’s dream?
When Nacita walked on at Baylor after working his way through community college with partial academic scholarships, he was without a place to live. Rather than see him spend the next several months homeless, a concerned acquaintance let him crash at their apartment. Which, as has been covered before in the bizarre case of Boise State’s Antoine Turner, is illegal. No matter who is offering the assistance or how pure their motives, student athletes are not permitted to receive any help, financial or otherwise, outside of the NCAA’s very strict guidelines for the use of a special fund doled out to each school. Because Nacita didn’t have an athletic scholarship, the university couldn’t offer him any housing, which meant no one else could, either.
Now, the NCAA has categorically denied Nacita’s claim, and the statements from Baylor staff have been a bit ambiguous as to the true source of the declaration of ineligibility. But even if the school itself determined that Nacita couldn’t play, it did so using the NCAA’s own rules and track record regarding benefits infractions, preempting an expected ruling that would have probably had the same effect. Regardless, Silas Nacita has suffered by a strange, austere interpretation of rules meant to preserve amateurism, not prevent common decency.
The point is that the National Collegiate Athletic Association, like me around girls,4 has no clue what to do with itself, saying and doing all the wrong things with more tone-deafness than me in the shower. The inconsistent enforcement of the rulebook has the NCAA awkwardly shuffling its feet like a teenaged boy standing alone at a school dance – taking away Reggie Bush’s Heisman Trophy for having the audacity to talk to an agent one moment, for years turning a blind eye to multiple allegations about a host of violations by North Carolina basketball the next; first turning Penn State upside-down and yanking several years of wins for the actions (or inaction) of some disgraced former school officials and a deceased coach, then abruptly giving back all the wins and scaling back almost all of the sanctions a couple of years later.
To the casual observer, the inconsistency and convoluted rules lack the appearance of common sense and smack of, at best, total incompetence or, at worst, widespread corruption. Whatever the case, the governing body needs to get its act together, or risk sinking from a laughingstock to an afterthought.
And, for the sake of all things good, give Silas Nacita back his spot on the team, and let the poor kid stay wherever the heck he wants.
1 If you’re lucky enough never to have committed this particular driving infraction, I’ll explain that it causes a horrid grinding sound reminiscent of Steve Buscemi’s bones getting crushed by the wood chipper at the end of Fargo and simultaneously making you feel like you just caused several hundred dollars’ worth of damage and compelling you to look around you in red-faced shame to make sure no other drivers noticed.
2 This will tie together with the previous paragraph. I promise. Have some faith.
3 Now say that 5 times fast: Ineligibility allegedly, ineligibility allegedly, ineligibility allegedly, ineligibility allegedly, ineligibility allegedly.
4 That’s right, another terrible attempt at a humorous analogy by me. And you wondered why I don’t have a girlfriend.
Useless Sports 