On October 9, Georgia running back Todd Gurley was suspended indefinitely amid allegations he sold his autograph to memorabilia dealers. Gurley, who at that time was the clear Heisman Trophy front-runner, has missed Georgia's last two games and is almost certainly out of the running for any national awards. And at this point, Georgia has shown no indication that Gurley's return is imminent.
Georgia's decision to suspend Gurley is common practice at this point. Faced with the looming shadow of harsh NCAA sanctions for schools that fail to act on evidence of impropriety or potential ineligibility, the university simply banished the potential source of the problem. The governing body's recent use of bowl bans, victory forfeits, and massive scholarship revocations is that big of a threat.
While the NCAA is far from a legal entity, that distinction fails to excuse the organization's disregard for one of America's principle tenets: innocence until proven guilt.
Consider the course of events in Gurley's case. By most accounts, the source of the accusations is Bryan Allen, an autograph dealer who felt scorned by the running back signing too many items, thus diluting the value of his signed pieces. For the sake of this argument, let's even remove Gurley's benefit of the doubt. Most rational people have to believe this kind of transaction happens regularly. It seems likely Georgia has strong evidence Gurley was a willing participant.
Putting aside the NCAA lunacy that a college athlete cannot benefit from his likeness, Gurley is essentially being punished because a third party is miffed that his ROI on Gurley's autograph isn't high enough. In effect, the NCAA is enforcing price controls on the signature of a college student while also prohibiting that student from seeing a dime from it himself.
And yet, the process is completely opaque. On Friday, the NCAA referred the matter to Georgia, and the university, in turn, simply denied there was anything new to report. NCAA enforcement makes Guantanamo Bay look like a public forum.
We will continue to debate the merits of the amateur system, but this is a different issue. Gurley, and many others like him, are held out until the system can determine to what extent they have broken the rules. How stupid is that?
In a fair system, evidence would be evaluated and a swift process would determine whether a player should face discontinuity in his eligibility. Instead, the NCAA and the universities pretend the plausibility of allegations ties their hands and they have no choice but to hold out a player who might have committed a violation. Sure, they would love to protect the privileges of the athletes they supposedly serve in the event they are innocent, but not at the risk of violating the sacred integrity of their dying feudal (futile) system.
Like a good little member institution, Georgia has performed impressively without its star back by winning a pair of road SEC games. In Saturday's win at Arkansas, Gurley's replacement, freshman Nick Chubb, rushed for more than 200 yards. In what the NCAA and Georgia have to consider a best case scenario, Gurley's absence has hardly impacted the broader SEC landscape. As long as the Dawgs keep winning, fewer people will notice Gurley's indefinite absence for indefinite violations while the media's old guard will call Gurley selfish and feign disappointment at his transgression.
In fact, as new of the Gurley story broke, obvious comparisons to Johnny Manziel's supposed 2012 autograph warehouse were made. Like Gurley, Manziel faced allegations of signing memorabilia for cash from a dealer with some form of evidence attached. Unlike Gurley, however, l'affair Manziel occurred during the offseason. During that period, Texas A&M and the NCAA brokered an agreement to sit Manziel for a half in the absence of any real smoking gun evidence. We can probably assume Georgia has more on Gurley, but at this point nobody really knows.
It's worth wondering what would have happened to Manziel had the video of his signing session the night before his coming out party at Alabama been leaked during his late bullrush of the 2012 season. Texas A&M almost certainly would have been forced to react like Georgia has and suspended Manziel until the nebulous investigation reached its conclusion. And if the true penalty of Manziel's offense was half a game, how much additional time would he have served while the process played out behind the scenes?
Georgia is off this week and the university says it hopes Gurley's limbo is resolved before its November 1 game against Florida. Until that decision comes, we will likely be treated to more denials that the ruling parties have anything new to report.
Meanwhile, Gurley will be remain isolated from the program he came to represent. From his perspective atop the college football world just a few weeks earlier, this has to feel quite far from nothing.
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