The fact it’s being alleged that a former Miami booster spent “millions and millions of dollars” lavishing cash, gifts and “services” on current and former Hurricane football players is mind-boggling in and of itself.
The fact that Paul Dee was the athletic director at The U through the majority of Nevin Shapiro‘s eight-year makin’-it-rain run through South Beach — allegedly — takes the situation from the mind-boggling to the patently absurd.
Dee, of course, was the chair of the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions that handed down sanctions on the USC football program for the Reggie Bush imbroglio, sanctions that were some of the stiffest, if not the stiffest, leveled by The Association in Div. 1-A football since SMU in the mid-eighties. In comments that are, in hindsight, downright hilarious while at the same time utterly sanctimonious, Dee chastised USC’s enforcement staff for failing to monitor its star player in an aggressive enough manner.
The real issue here is if you have high‑profile players, your enforcement staff has to monitor those students at a higher level. It’s extraordinarily important that the people that are likely to be receiving these kinds of interactions from people outside the institution are also those same people who are going to provide a reward somewhere down the road. So high‑profile players demand high‑profile compliance.
Those words — along with his playing of the “we didn’t know” card earlier this week — have been coming back to bite Dee squarely in his ample buttocks since the story broke earlier this week that significant amounts of impermissible benefits happened right underneath the noses of a Dee-controlled athletic department. Those words are particularly harsh when viewed in the light of the USC case involving just one player, while the Miami’s death penalty-esque allegations involve more than seventy football and basketball players.
As if there were a shred of doubt it’d be any other way, Larry Scott, commissioner of Trojans’ conference, was more than willing to sink his teeth into the fray when asked about Dee’s involvement with the USC sanctions and an under-fire Miami athletic department.
“If the allegations prove true,” the Pac-12 commish told the Los Angeles Times, “the words irony and hypocrisy don’t seem to go far enough.”
[/slams microphone down in the ring]
[/shoots two beers simultaneously]
[/gives McMahon a stinger]
Trojans head coach Lane Kiffin, who took over at USC shortly before the sanctions were handed down and is now dealing with the aftermath, was also asked for a short response to the Miami mess and Dee’s connection to it.
“It would take me a lot more than one or two words,” Kiffin said.
