BAMA COULD HAVE MAJOR VIOLATION IN TEXTBOOK SCANDAL

It turns out all those Alabama football players actually carrying textbooks WAS actually too good to be true.The NCAA has decided (only two years later!) and the school has agreed that the University of Alabama committed violations by not properly monitoring how the the university’s bookstore distributed textbooks and supplies.The violations took place during the 2005-2006 school year and continued through the fall of 2007 until five players were suspended for four games during the 2007 season. While the names were blacked out from the documents made public because of federal privacy laws, Antoine Caldwell, Glen Coffee, Marlon Davis, Marquis Johnson and Chris Rogers were the suspended players.The university submitted a 67-page response to the NCAA and in that response wrote, “These intentional wrongdoers knew that they were taking advantage of the university and its Supply Store, however these student-athletes believed that because the textbooks were either returned to the Supply Store or charged to them if not returned, no NCAA rules were implicated by their conduct."Not that I’m trying to rail on Bama or its in-depth 67 page response, but I’ve got to sound the B.S. horn here.If I’m a scholarship athlete and I’m taking free books and “giving” them to my friends (by giving, I really mean, “pay me twenty bucks and I’ll go get that $80 sociology textbook for you”), and then at the end of the semester having them sell the book back for forty bucks and taking half, I don’t quite consider that “returning” the book to the Supply Store.(Maybe it’s just me...)That said, I don’t think the SEC or the NCAA actually has anything written in the rulebook to deal with a scandal concerning things like academic materials. What next, prosecuting Auburn for skimming extra print jobs in the computer lab by the defensive linemen? This is a slippery slope.