CECIL HURT: Disappointing is all you can say about this case

As the story of the University of Alabama’s textbook case with the NCAA finally came creeping into (almost) full daylight on Thursday, it wasn’t easy to know exactly how to describe it — until Dr. Robert Witt summed it up perfectly in a single word.

“Disappointed.”

The president of the University of Alabama was speaking specifically about being “disappointed” in the NCAA Committee on Infractions’ ruling that vacated 21 football wins — three full seasons of hard work tossed out the window — and put Alabama back on three years of probation. Looking at it through Witt’s eyes, and his knowledge of UA’s efforts at self-policing and self-correction, it is understandable that a harsh rebuke didn’t sit well. But that was hardly the day’s only disappointment and that disappointment didn’t flow only in the Tuscaloosa-to-Indianapolis direction.

This case never stirred the kind of deep emotions that Alabama’s last dramatic Infractions confrontation generated. None of the fierce passion and outrage that marked that case was present this time. There was none of the savage rhetoric, none of the acrimony that, in the end, damaged everyone and did little, if any, good at all, leaving reputations shattered and lives upturned. No matter where you stood on the issues of Alabama’s 2002 case, you felt a lot more than mere “disappointment” as it unfolded.

This case was different. This case wasn’t a raging flood that roared out of Memphis with the might of the Mississippi River behind it. This case didn’t roar. It crept. It started small and slow, the kind of flood that builds up gradually, like melting snow, and leaves behind damage without anyone ever noticing it happened until the waters recede. And what it left behind was plenty of disappointment, all around.

Before a quick survey of that damage, let’s take a quick look at what was untouched. First and foremost, as Witt, Mal Moore and others took pains to point out, was the future of the football team. That outcome, for Alabama fans, was anything but disappointing, with no scholarships lost. Nick Saban surely wasn’t pleased with having to “vacate” five wins from 2007, but it’s not easy to picture Saban, rolling inexorably forward like the Juggernaut on the streets of Puri, turning around to look back as long as there are obstacles ahead just waiting to be crushed. As long as the ruling didn’t put anything else in his way, Saban is probably fine.

Second, it was suddenly clear why UA went to such pains to keep the scope of this case under a cloak of secrecy for as long as it did. The journalist in me can never respect that decision, but the pragmatist in me does see why it was made. There was some speculation in the last few months but, had the bare headline grabbing facts — “200 athletes involved!” or “16 sports affected!” — been grist for this state’s rumor mill over 12 months or so, the doom-saying would have run rampant. Frankly, if I had been handed the bare facts of the case earlier this month — even knowing the extensive after-the-fact efforts by UA to clean up the mess — I would have guessed the penalties would be worse. The Committee on Infractions, it seems to me, did a thorough job in its thankless task.

It is still disappointing, as Witt said, to see 21 victories vacated. But I am not sure an appeal is in order. Witt said that he “owed it to the student-athletes” to consider an appeal, but even he will spend a few days weighing the benefits against the cost. Regardless, no one who was present at the Florida or Tennessee games in 2005, or that year’s Cotton Bowl, or the overtime win against Arkansas in 2007, can ever have the emotions of those games “vacated.”

But the NCAA’s ruling wasn’t just so much paperwork. It implied, according to NCAA Committee on Infractions chairman Paul Dee, that there was a “competitive advantage” gained by playing players that Alabama should have known not to play. It hints at something not quite on the up-and-up about the wins. Alabama fans will never accept that. Rival fans will never accept that it is otherwise. An appeal probably won’t change that, on either side.

It is disappointing, if the 2005 Cotton Bowl “vacation” stands, that Alabama is not, for the time being, the winningest bowl team in college football history. That’s for the time being because the current tie is with Southern Cal. And, while being ineligible is like being pregnant — you either are or you aren’t — one can still say that, compared to the Alabama players, Reggie Bush is the Octo-mom of Ineligibles. So, by the time (if ever) that the NCAA is through at USC, the tie might be broken once more.

But what is most disappointing, perhaps, is the core of the “failure to monitor” violation. There was nothing evil at work, or at least nothing more evil than bureaucratic myopia and, perhaps, a little laziness on the part of UA athletic administrators who are, by the way, still UA athletic administrators. Every month, data came in from the Supply Store. Every month, it went from an administrative assistant (who was only looking for “correct code”) to an assistant athletic director to an associate athletic director, up the chain and out the door, rubber-stamped with no evidence of close scrutiny. Is that the ultimate crime? Not at all. But banality can be just as deadly as villainy. Is that the way to operate when you are (and everyone knows how I hate this phrase) “looking down the barrel of a gun.” Not by a long shot.

So a gap was created. Student-athletes found the hole in the fence and — not surprisingly — clambered through it. That’s not the 80 percent or so of the involved student-athletes who inadvertently accepted supplemental materials. They weren’t trying to scam the system. But the 22 athletes who knew what they were doing was wrong, and did it anyway, bear some responsibility, too. But the hole in the fence should not have been there, not for nearly three years.

Alabama’s compliance efforts in reaction to the situation were praised on all sides. “A tremendous job,” Dee called it. It was not too little, just too late.

It was a day that could have been better. It was a day that could have been worse — a lot worse. But, ultimately, it looks like a day that didn’t have to be — and that, more than anything else, was what was disappointing.