The athletic scandal at the University of Southern California athletic scandal was an incident in which the University of Southern California was investigated and punished for serious NCAA rules violations in the Trojan football and men's basketball programs.
Contents |
Probes by both USC and the NCAA found that football star Reggie Bush, the 2005 Heisman Trophy winner, and basketball star O. J. Mayo had effectively forfeited their amateur status (in Mayo's case, before he ever played a game for USC) by accepting gifts from agents. As a result of the ongoing sanction, which progressed well into the 2010-11 seasons for both USC and Reggie Bush's New Orleans Saints, Bush voluntarily gave up his 2005 Heisman Trophy, which the Heisman Trust decided to leave vacant[1] [2] [3].
As a result of sanctions issued by both USC and the NCAA, the Trojan athletic program received some of the harshest penalties ever meted out to a Division 1 program. The football team was stripped of the final two wins of its 2004 national championship season, making it a near-certainty that it will be the first team in modern college football history to be stripped of a national championship. University of Southern California was also stripped of the Grantland Rice Trophy in which they were awarded in 2004 for being involved in the Reggie Bush scandal.[4]
The Trojan football team also lost all of itswins in 2005, as well as what would have been their fourth straight Pacific-10 Conference title. It was also banned from bowl games in both 2010 and 2011 and was docked 30 scholarships over three years.
The basketball team gave up all of its wins from the 2007-08 season.
Bush is the first person in the Heisman Trophy's history to give his trophy back to the Heisman Trust, as the 2005 Trophy is the first to be left vacated as well.
These sanctions have been criticized by some NCAA football writers,[5][6][7][8][9] including ESPN’s Ted Miller, who wrote, “It's become an accepted fact among informed college football observers that the NCAA sanctions against USC were a travesty of justice, and the NCAA’s refusal to revisit that travesty are a massive act of cowardice on the part of the organization.”[10]
ESPN's Ted Miller also suggested that the sanctions had more to do with objections to the football culture at USC than its alleged noncompliance with NCAA rules:
During a flight delay last year, I was cornered at an airport by an administrator from a major program outside the Pac-12. He made fun of me as a "USC fanboy" because of my rants against the NCAA ruling against the Trojans. But we started talking. Turned out he agreed with just about all my points. (He just didn't like USC.)
He told me, after some small talk and off-the-record, that "everybody" thought USC got screwed. He said that he thought the NCAA was trying to scare everyone with the ruling, but subsequent major violations cases put it in a pickle.
Then he told me that USC was punished for its "USC-ness," that while many teams had closed down access — to media, to fans, etc. — USC under Pete Carroll was completely open, and that was widely resented. There was a widespread belief the national media fawned on USC because of this. Further, more than a few schools thought that the presence of big-time celebrities, such as Snoop Dogg and Will Ferrell, at practices and at games constituted an unfair recruiting advantage for the Trojans.
It wasn't against the rules, but everyone hated it. This, as he assessed his own smell test, was a subtext of the so-called atmosphere of noncompliance that the NCAA referred to — an atmosphere that oddly yielded very few instances of noncompliance around the football program even after a four-year NCAA investigation.[11]