Florida State claims that it did not find any Academic Misconduct in a recent investigation of its athletic programs. You do not investigate yourself, but you can pretend to do so. The school has been caught at the refrigerator drinking from the milk carton. "Honey, were you drinking from the carton," the NCAA asks. "No, of course not," Florida State says with the carton in-hand and a milk mustache. I cannot say what exactly happened, but I find it hard to believe that any school is going to come and say that they were doing wrong.
So what happened?
The New York Times says that six players from the 2013 national title team, were given preferential treatment in Online Courses. Florida State disputes these claims. We have to be honest with ourselves that all athletes are receiving some kind of preferential treatment when they play a hot button sport at a school. If you play hockey and your school loves hockey, someone is giving you a wink and a nudge. It does not matter where it happens. Florida State simply said that they could not find any evidence of that, and they can say that because these were online courses.
Balancing honor and current events
People are dying in Houston from a hurricane. We had the KKK and nazis march through Charlottesville, Virginia, and we have a President who likes to threaten countries that have nuclear weapons.
Uncovering this online class scandal seems to be fairly low down the totem pole. I know regular journalists like to get scoops, but I kind of do not see the point. Yes, they were probably technically ineligible, but you realize that literally every college in America could have something like this unearthed at any time? Did they create a whole department to cheat the system like at North Carolina?
No? Ok, then we can let it go.
You still do not investigate yourself
No school can investigate itself and be credible at all. You have to have someone from the outside walk in and tell you what they see. You may have some very benign things going on that you can correct, or they may uncover something much more sinister. Maybe no one but a few people knew about this.
Maybe Jimbo Fisher was in his office the whole time thinking everything was fine? We have no idea. All I know is that FSU cannot tell me they did nothing wrong. I would like to see someone who does not want a scoop, someone who does not work for the school, and someone who is impartial tell us what the truth is. 2013 was weird enough as it was.
