Feinstein: Feinstein: ACC fluffs its past on a bad week for its present

The ACC put out a news release Friday announcing that the league has been awarded the 2015 Naismith Legacy Award. According to the release, the award is given each year to individuals and organizations in basketball to honor their roles in furthering the values of honor, respect and integrity on and off the court.

The timing of the announcement was fascinating. On the same day, the NCAA came about as close to throwing the book at Syracuse now an ACC member as it ever comes when a big-time program is accused of breaking the rules.

Orange Coach Jim Boeheim woke up Friday morning second on the all-time Division I coaching list with 966 wins. By lunchtime, he was down to sixth after the NCAA stripped him of 108 wins, some of them dating from the 2004-05 season. (Of course, the NCAA has been known to loudly announce that it is vacating coaching wins and then quietly announce never mind a few years later. See Paterno, Joe.) And with or without those wins, Boeheim will have to sit out Syracuses first nine ACC games next season.

The school also will lose three scholarships per year through 2019 a fairly minor hit since most schools dont need more than 10 scholarship players and it will lose money from postseason play and be fined $500 for every game in which an ineligible player was on the court.

Syracuse already had announced last month that it was voluntarily banning itself from all postseason play this year, meaning it wont be around next weekend at the ACC tournament in Greensboro, N.C., when Commissioner John Swofford will accept the Naismith award.

When Syracuse announced its self-imposed ban, there were skeptics who saw the move as a preemptory move designed to bring the investigation to an end during a down year for the Orange. At best, Syracuse was an NCAA bubble team. More likely, it would have played in the NIT, which would have excited coaches, players and fans in Central New York almost as much as the prospect of a March snowstorm.

The move worked: The penalties are more embarrassing than substantive. Syracuse wont miss any TV time and will be eligible to play in next seasons NCAA tournament. And then again, it didnt work: The NCAA pompously concluded the school had to be penalized because it had failed to monitor its athletics program and its head basketball coach failed to monitor his program. In English, this means there were academic issues, drug-testing issues and an issue involving a booster who was passing out money he shouldnt have been passing out.

The real question is whether Boeheim, who turned 70 in November, wants to deal with all of this going forward. In recent years, he has finally been recognized as one of the deans of the sport. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2005 and has been Mike Krzyzewskis most trusted assistant with the U.S. national team for the past 10 years.

This certainly isnt the way he wants to go out. But the large blemishes of the recent past certainly have to blur his vision of the future.

But Syracuse isnt the only ACC team making news that might not quite live up to the Naismith Legacy Award. North Carolina is being investigated by the NCAA after an independent investigator hired by the school concluded there had been academic fraud involving athletes many of them basketball players from 1993 to 2011.

Original post:
Feinstein: Feinstein: ACC fluffs its past on a bad week for its present