Villa 7 coaches in favor of harsher penalties

Last week, NCAA president Mark Emmert -- speaking to the assembled media at the NCAA's first-ever Enforcement Experience -- made something of a proclamation: He wants cheaters to face harsh penalties, to know that any rule-bending action isn't worth the prohibitive risk that could come from being caught.

To some, that proclamation may have read like a testimony from a misguided law enforcement official on a season three episode of "The Wire." To others, it's exactly what college sports needs. Where you stand on the notion will have a lot to do with your ideas about law and order, the NCAA, its stance on�amateurism, and where the three intersect.

Interestingly enough, some of the best rising coaches in college hoops happen to agree with Emmert. Speaking at the Villa 7 conference -- the annual meet-and-greet gathering for young coaches hosted each year by Virginia Commonwealth -- VCU coach Shaka Smart put things in borderline biblical terms. From the New York Times's Pete Thamel:

Although the coaches and administrators here expressed varying degrees of optimism on the future of college basketball and athletics, the consensus was that in order to change the sport’s polluted culture, the N.C.A.A. needed to adopt stiffer penalties for its cheats.

“There’s never a simple answer,” Smart said. “To me, there’s a way to dissuade people from violating the rules.”

“It’s to penalize more,” he said. “In some cultures, if you steal, they cut your hand off. They probably have a lot less theft.”

That may or may not be true. Untangling the philosophical strands of that argument is a job for a first-year law professor, not a humble blogger.

The larger point is this: You'd expect the opposite response. Coaches are the ones with jobs and programs on the line, and the harsher the penalties, the more likely a coach who doesn't deserve a serious rebuke may find himself in hotter water than in years past. But if most coaches are like Smart -- the ones Thamel interviewed at Villa 7 seem to agree -- they're right to take this tact. If you don't cheat, you have nothing to fear.

That's the theory, anyway. We'll see if other coaches feel the same way. If Emmert has his way, they may not have a choice.

Source: http://espn.go.com/blog/collegebasketballnation/post/_/id/30950/villa-7-coaches-in-favor-of-harsher-penalties

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