Being a sane Missouri Tigers supporter traditionally has meant accepting the things you cannot change and shrugging at life’s little disappointments and screw jobs.
The last football conference championship was in 1969. The last men’s basketball regular-season league title was 1994. Determining the last national title in those sports is a trick question, like a fraction with the denominator of zero, the kind that caused your calculator to say ERROR, which you would do intentionally sometimes when you got bored of telling your least mature friends to punch in an equation with a sum of 7734, which, when you turned the calculator upside down, revealed h-E-double hockey sticks, and, as an inevitable encore, led you to punch in 5318008, which, as every seventh-grader knew, turned into an upside down BOOBIES.
These are the things students did in math class before they had ready access to pornography on their phones.
If only Mizzou’s academically uninterested Generation Z athletes had been raised on those old calculators, perhaps they would have developed just enough enthusiasm for algebra that they wouldn’t have needed Yolanda Kumar to drag their flabby brains over the finish line.
But whaddya gonna do? That phrase has helped generations of Missouri fans cope with the darkness … the inevitable darkness.
I am sensing a change, though. Not in the inevitable darkness — that is always in the forecast — but rather in the reaction.
I’ve enjoyed following Jon Sundvold’s media blitz in response to the NCAA sanctions levied after Kumar and the school admitted she cheated for 12 athletes. As the chair of the University of Missouri Board of Curators, Sundvold has a megaphone. He has used it to send this message: Stop playing the victim.
In Sundvold’s official statement, he noted, with language more aggressive than we’ve come to expect in a press release, that the tutor in question committed extortion and shopped the list of cheating players to the highest online bidder. He spoke openly about Power 5 conference schools staging a coup of the NCAA.
And he finished with this: “As our appeal moves forward, I appreciate the support of the SEC and Commissioner Greg Sankey. When Mizzou wins the SEC East next year, he should do the right thing and invite one of its good standing members to play in the SEC Championship game.”
It was a pre-emptive nudge to the commish — the same guy who served as the chief hearing officer of the NCAA infractions committee that didn’t punish North Carolina for its institutionally sanctioned academic fraud — to throw his weight around in support of one of his schools. It was a bold and calculated use of “when” and not “if” in the way-too-early 2019 SEC football prediction, which was essentially a call to action for his alma mater to stop accepting good and calling it great.
In a radio interview with 810 WHB, Sundvold called out the SEC schools that had contacted Missouri with the intent of poaching its rising senior football players. Auburn, Mississippi State, Tennessee and Texas A&M — the Donner Party branch of the SEC family tree — apparently figured that as long as Missouri’s 2019 postseason dreams were dead, no sense letting the meat go to waste.
Sundvold wasn’t the only one fed up and not going to take it anymore. Athletic director Jim Sterk, who is low-key sassy, didn’t rest on his record as a defamer of character. He went on his own speaking tour about the infractions committee that determined Missouri’s fate.
“At no time did they even talk about penalties with us,” he said. “As far as the conversation with me, they never asked me a single question.” He said the committee “abused its discretion” and the appropriate punishment would have been “maybe vacating wins or a year of probation.”
Football coach Barry Odom summed up the new movement with this quote: “Things are handed to you that aren’t fair. That’s the way life is. What are you going to do about it? There’s nobody sitting around saying, ‘Poor, pitiful Missouri,’ I guarantee you. Bring it on.”
Missouri state Sen. Caleb Rowden took his complaints to the Senate floor in Jefferson City. If nothing else, he was able to finish a four-minute speech supporting the University of Missouri without being pelted with tomatoes by his peers, which wouldn’t have been possible three years ago.
“The NCAA has lost its moral authority,” Rowden said. “They lack the strength and the ability to stand for the principles that college sports teach students. I believe that the NCAA is either glaringly disengaged or utterly incompetent.”
Does the NCAA deserve this public drubbing? Yeah, it does. For as long as I can remember, the NCAA has punished a school’s current players for the sins of their predecessors. If the NCAA’s version of justice were applied to the legal system, Thurman Thomas would have gone to prison for O.J. Simpson’s double homicide.
Missouri received postseason bans in football, baseball and softball for cheating done by one tutor and 12 athletes. None of those involved is still around, nor is the athletic director, football coach, baseball coach or softball coach from 2015-16. There is no evidence this brand of punishment serves as a deterrent. Why would somebody else getting punished for your cheating be a deterrent to a cheater?
There has to be a better way.
Sterk has said that a lost bowl appearance would cost Missouri $8 or $9 million because MU would forfeit its share of the SEC’s bowl payout. Why not just fine Missouri $8 million and let the football, baseball and softball teams go to the postseason if they qualify? Have the money deposited in an account that allows the NCAA to fund more postgraduate scholarships, so it can save face and brag that something good came out of the sordid behavior that led to Missouri’s punishment.
Clearly, Sterk would rather not pay a fine, either, but in the spirit of compromise, I’ve generously offered $8 million of the athletic department’s money to solve this problem.
Whether the loud outcry from officials and media about Missouri’s punishment makes any difference in the outcome of the appeal, I have my doubts. But there really is no downside to MU publicly airing its grievances. It has tried to play nice. There is no profit in it. The appeals committee — which is a different group of people from the committee on infractions — will at least know the official mood of the university is not: “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”
