NCAA penalizes Oklahoma State for violating drug testing policy
The NCAA on Friday announced that Oklahoma State did violate some of its rules, but the penalties levied against the Cowboys are relatively minor.
By
Jon Solomon
•
4 min read
Oklahoma State has been forced to close its hostess program for a span of four years, fined $8,500 and penalized in the form of recruiting restrictions due to NCAA violations stemming from a 2013 series of articles published by Sports Illustrated.
The NCAA announced Friday that Oklahoma State did not follow its drug testing policy and the athletics department let the Orange Pride student group host recruits in violation of NCAA bylaws. The Cowboys were put on one-year probation.
Oklahoma State initially received an allegation of failing to monitor its football program from the NCAA enforcement staff last year, but the infractions panel did not find that to be the case.
The biggest penalty has been levied to the Orange Pride program, an all-female group directed by the football program to host players during recruiting events. Oklahoma State is not permitted to organize another student group to assist in recruiting for four years.
“NCAA rules do not allow the use of student hosts in a way that is inconsistent with the university’s policies on providing campus tours or visits to all prospective students,” the NCAA said in a news release. “The panel was concerned with the university’s continued use of the group despite information distributed by the NCAA specifying that groups like Orange Pride for athletics recruiting was impermissible.”
The Oklahoma State case sheds more light on whether athletic departments actually follow their own drug testing policies, and how much these policies vary around the country. The NCAA found that five Oklahoma State football players participated in a total of seven games from 2008-12 when they should have otherwise been withheld due to Oklahoma State’s drug-testing policy.
The NCAA requires that if a school has a policy, it must include substances on the banned list and schools must follow its policy. From 2007 to 2011, Oklahoma State’s drug testing policy stated counseling would occur for a player after the first positive test, a 10-percent suspension of the season after the second positive, and a 50-percent suspension of the season after the third positive.
Oklahoma State athletic director Mike Holder told the infractions panel “there is no question” he should have abided by “the letter of the law." Holder said that he “mistakenly” thought he had “latitude” to make exceptions. Holder revised the policy in 2011 to suspend a player “up to” 10 percent and “up to” 50 percent on the second and third positive drug tests, respectively.
Oklahoma State still had a former football player permitted to play in the first four games of the 2013 season in violation of the school’s revised drug-testing policy. The player was later dismissed from the team.
Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy “admitted he was ‘guilty’ of making decisions that contravened the institution’s initial drug testing policy,” the NCAA report said. “Yet the director of athletics was designated by the institution as the safeguard and drug testing plan administrator for the institution's drug testing policy. It was his responsibility to monitor the drug testing program and its implementation.”
This marks the second recent NCAA case, along with Syracuse's, in which an athletic director claimed he didn't understand his athletic department's drug testing policy. Xavier athletic director Greg Christopher, the chief hearing officer on the panel for Oklahoma State, said the committee didn't apply failure to monitor because the athletic department had a compliance program and drug-testing procedures in place and the scope of failed drug tests was small.
"This was one of the most cooperative investigations in recent history," Christopher said.
According to the infractions report, the NCAA enforcement staff admitted at the hearing it did not review any of Oklahoma State's other sport programs’ compliance with the drug-testing policy. "We asked that question (why other teams weren't investigated) and it was simply from a collection of facts standpoint, the allegations were tied specifically to the football program," Christopher said.
Oklahoma State told the NCAA that from fall 2007 to spring 2013 the university conducted approximately 1,572 drug tests. Among those, 94 were positive tests and 67 involved college athletes.
Through the years, some conferences have periodically discussed having league-wide drug testing policies without taking action. When one player sits for a drug suspension, a player at another school can still play. The NCAA has standard drug-testing procedures and penalties for NCAA championships, leaving all other testing up to the discretion of schools.
"I think the NCAA's role as a membership association ... is probably not in a place of dictating to individual institutions HR policies or specific drug testing policies," Christopher said, adding that school policies are largely in place for athlete welfare.
Other NCAA penalties against Oklahoma State and corrective actions were previously self-imposed by the school, including limiting the program to 30 official recruiting visits, taking one coach each semester off the road during evaluation periods and reducing evaluation days by 10 in both the fall and spring.
Because the allegations “straddled” the implementation of the NCAA’s new penalty structure, the NCAA said the infractions panel analyzed which penalty structure was more lenient and made it a Level II Mitigated case under the current penalty structure.
Sports Illustrated wrote a series in September 2013 alleging several potential NCAA violations were committed by Oklahoma State. Last October, Oklahoma State and the NCAA issued a joint statement that said the media’s reporting on alleged violations was “fundamentally unfounded.”
