In the highly structured NCAA universe, rules are outnumbered only by incidents of rulebreaking.
And a secondary violation is the most common type of broken rule.
That fact is why the University of Utah might be justified in expecting to escape serious punishment for revealing that its athletic department—primarily the men's basketball program—has committed numerous secondary violations in recent years.
The NCAA defines secondary violation as "one that provides only a limited recruiting or competitive advantage and that is isolated or inadvertent in nature."
Secondary violations typically go unpublicized, unless the school in violation chooses to disclose them. They are so common that the NCAA's website includes a searchable database, accessible by the public, of hundred. Violations are listed by date, and a typical date results in multiple infractions.
On Dec. 29, 1999, for example, nine violations are cited. They range from an assistant coach buying a $7 meal for a prospective recruit's father on their way to the airport after a recruiting visit, to a women's soccer coach loaning an athlete $100 to buy books.
The database citations also note penalties. In the examples above, the recruit's father was required to pay back the $7 and the assistant coach was reprimanded, and the book-buying athlete was required to pay back the $100.
The voluminous report the University of Utah submitted to the NCAA last week includes not only details of its violations but penalties levied by the university.
What happens next, according to NCAA spokesperson Jane Jankowski, is that the NCAA staff will study the university's report, judge if it appears complete, consider the university's self-imposed penalties and ultimately decide if further penalties are warranted.
In most cases, and as illustrated by the examples above, the penalties are tied to the violation. For instance, if a school sent three coaches on a road trip in a situation where only two were allowed by NCAA rule, the penalty might be a reduction in the number of coaches that program could send on road trips for a specified time.
While the violations cited in the university's report—most of them food related—would appear to qualify as secondary, there is a potential catch. The NCAA rule book stipulates that "Multiple secondary violations by a member institution may collectively be considered as a major violation."
If that happened, the case would be considered by the NCAA's Committee on Infractions, an independent body composed of nine individuals from NCAA member schools and the general public.
That committee considers not only a school's violations but such factors as its self-imposed penalties and how quickly the school responded to any allegations.
Jankowski said that in secondary-violation situations an NCAA investigator is rarely dispatched to a school, but an investigator already has been in Salt Lake to meet with university officials, perhaps because of the number of infractions involved.
E-mail: rich@desnews.com