OPINION

By Mike DeCourcy

updated 8:49 p.m. ET Nov. 25, 2008

Mike DeCourcy

While the NCAA was preparing Tuesday afternoon to conduct a teleconference regarding the resolution of the Indiana three-way scandal, what is left of the Hoosiers basketball program was getting hammered by Saint Joseph's — on television, for all the world to see.

There was no hiding the damage done to one of the college game's proudest programs. For the Hoosiers to fall by 26 in the Maui Invitational loser's bracket is a profound warning to potential scoundrels about what can become of your program and your career if you are perceived to have colored outside the NCAA's lines.

As the start of preseason practice approached in October 2007, a glorious season loomed for Indiana basketball, which owned a full roster of talented players and a coach, Kelvin Sampson, with national awards and a Final Four on his resume.

Within days, charges were made public that Sampson had violated a ban on recruiting calls that resulted from a previous NCAA case at Oklahoma. Four months later, Sampson was gone. Before another month passed, the Hoosiers had closed out their season with a series of embarrassing losses and first-round tournament eliminations. Three months after that, every scholarship player who'd competed during that season was gone.

The destruction couldn't have been more complete if they'd taken the basketballs from the gym.

And yet there are some within the NCAA infractions committee who believe they're not mean enough.

There hasn't been a program hit with a ban on television appearances since 1996. Most basketball postseason bans this decade have been self-imposed. Those are the two penalties all coaches fear the most when the NCAA's cops conduct a raid.

Josephine Potuto, the Nebraska law professor who chaired Indiana's infractions hearings, met with the NCAA board of directors last month to discuss the committee becoming more aggressive with its penalties against major violators.

"We have to be sure that what the committee does reflects the seriousness of the violations and the nature of the violations — and is fair to other institutions that have not committed violations," Potuto said Tuesday.

The notion that a program must be prohibited from appearing on TV or ruled out of the NCAA Tournament to have been effectively punished is a relic of the 1970s.

A program that faces allegations now must ring up a law firm with a history of dealing with the NCAA and conduct one of these million-dollar self-investigations. That's a pretty significant fine, right there.

Being on TV is part of the punishment now. After a high-profile program gets fed into the NCAA's investigative process, the news of allegations becomes a constant topic on ESPN's SportsCenter and its various debate shows. When the NCAA was chasing around Jerry Tarkanian, there was no Internet. There were few national radio sports shows.

The amplified destructive power of the media in these cases can take care of the postseason ban, as well. A team in Indiana's circumstance is not going to be successful enough to make it to the tournament. The committee could have slapped IU with a postseason ban. "It's obviously one of the penalties that is there," Potuto said. But there was no real need to make it official. IU is not going to be in the 2009 tournament. The departure of the entire roster assured that.

Indiana had been clean for 50 years before all of this occurred. Potuto said that was among the reasons the committee accepted the penalties the school had self-imposed and did not hit the Hoosiers with much more. A three-year probationary period is mere decoration. It says, simply: Get in trouble again, and you're really in for it. As if everybody at IU didn't know that already.

Hoosiers basketball has suffered plenty as the result of its involvement in this case. It has been penalized plenty. The process is the punishment now. Ask IU fans if they don't feel the pain.

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