CECIL HURT: Exactly who was minding the UA store?

“In short, it is a case about a semester’s use of Norton Anthologies, “Wuthering Heights”, math answer keys and other materials of an academic nature.”

— University of Alabama response to NCAA allegations of major violations

If only it was as easy as throwing Emily Bronte under the bus.

On Thursday, the University of Alabama released its response to allegations that the NCAA made nearly 10 months ago now regarding two potentially major violations in its monitoring of the textbooks disbursed to its student-athletes in sports that include football, track, cross-country and soccer.

As it is in all NCAA cases, speculation on the outcome is risky at best and futile at worst. And, as it is in all NCAA cases, there has been an frenzy of speculation. It probably wasn’t helped much by a curious coincidence of timing, with the announcement of a major decision in Florida State’s academic fraud case coming just 24 hours after UA opened up its documents.

Guesswork, hysteria, the reading of tea leaves and an understandable dose of downright frustration are all a part of the current atmosphere. It is too early to know anything regarding outcomes, but here are a few impressions.

First, it is fair to say no column in mainstream media has been more adversarial to the NCAA over the past decade than this one. But, up to this point in the proceedings, I don’t see any particular reason to criticize the NCAA. An institution that was on probation until Feb. 2, 2007, filed a report in late 2007 that included what are, beyond reasonable dispute, violations. Alabama doesn’t dispute that.

One can argue the “semester’s use” of supplemental academic materials is a piddling, silly rule, but it is a rule. And the athletes did not just obtain these materials for themselves but — and, again, UA acknowledges this fact — for boyfriends, girlfriends and former teammates. That is not a gray area. It is outside the rules. Such a transgression required an appearance before the Committee on Infractions.

Perhaps the COI will go overboard in the penalty phase. Perhaps they will be incensed that Alabama had to make a fourth appearance in 14 years and will invoke the “repeat violator” clause (sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t). Perhaps at that time, there will be reason for criticism aimed at the NCAA side of this thing. But not yet.

In terms of Alabama’s response, I will say this: I was joking about Emily Bronte going under the bus, but it wasn’t far off. Alabama laid the brunt of the blame on “a gap” in a system that let bad things happen. Individual responsibility was doled out with an eyedropper: the hourly employees and student workers at the University Supply Store, the Supply Store supervisor and Jon Dever, the assistant athletic director for academic affairs, took the brunt of it.

It is worth wondering just how the NCAA Committee felt about that. Here is an institution that had just been through the most devastating collision with NCAA Enforcement since SMU was sent to the gas chamber, and it puts all the blame for another screw-up on hourly employees and a couple of mid-level administrators.

It begs the question — at an institution that had no greater mission, after Feb. 2, 2002, than to be compliant with NCAA rules, how was it that an ongoing two-year problem was detected by an hourly worker at the Supply Store? Who was minding the Athletic Department Store?

That doesn’t mean Mal Moore needs to be over at Ferguson Center handing out textbooks.

But it does mean that someone with a pretty big title and a pretty hefty salary should have detected a problem with exorbitant ($1,600) book charges long before a supply-store worker did. And, one can just hear the NCAA thinking, if no one above the lower levels of the command chain at Alabama bears any responsibility for this, what exactly are they responsible for?

Aside from that, people can’t help wanting to know about end results.

That is thin ice and one can only venture out so far. The ice will probably support this: saying that Alabama will wind up on some sort of probation for this thing is like saying Florida will be the preseason favorite to win the SEC East in football in 2009. The appearance before the COI doesn’t guarantee probation, but it would be hard to imagine another result. And when people ask if this is “serious,” that, to me, is serious.

Probation isn’t the end of the world for a program. Oklahoma appeared in the BCS championship game last year, and, as far as I know, no one ever mentioned that the Sooners were on probation. But it does lead to five years in the repeat violator window.

Sanctions are a different proposition. Without reading too much into the Florida State case, or the recent Ball State case that involved textbooks, those cases hit those football programs with what could be called “minimal” scholarship sanctions. Even the loss of one scholarship is “significant” — suddenly, you are competing in a cut-throat world with 84 scholarships, when other teams have 85.

But scholarship sanctions, as Alabama has learned, punish by geometrical progression, not arithmetic progression. In simpler terms, losing 20 football scholarships isn’t just 10 times as bad as losing two. It is 100 times as bad.

It turns an unpleasant but manageable situation into a disaster of program-shaking proportions. So the scholarship losses at FSU or Ball State are serious, but not “devastating.” Alabama could get something similar. It could get more, as a repeat violator. It could less — after all, the academic violations at FSU were far more likely to lead to a “competitive advantage” than the extra texts at Alabama. It all depends on how the Committee on Infractions views things. No one will know that for the next several weeks, at least.

Until then, Alabama fans can fret or not. And if it gets to be too much, they can always blame Emily Bronte.