Former USC football coach Pete Carroll shows his game face in denouncing the NCAA's penalties against the school, contending they are too harsh because he and other administrators never knew that star athletes such as Reggie Bush had violated the rules.
But Carroll has been shy about mentioning that the NCAA found his quiet hiring of an extra coach, a big name from the NFL, was a major violation. The association also said that Carroll did not clear the hire with USC's compliance office, a finding that contradicts what he told The Times last year.
Now, as USC presses an appeal of the heavy sanctions the association imposed, Carroll's culpability could diminish the school's prospects of persuading the NCAA to ease the punishment, experts say.
"That's going to hurt USC on its appeal," said Michael Buckner, a Florida attorney and Trojan alumnus who specializes in sports law. "There are major rule violations found against not only his student athletes but against his coaching staff and a decision he made."
The decision, as The Times reported last July, was to hire Pete Rodriguez, a former NFL special teams guru, in violation of the association's cap on coaches. It gave USC "more than a limited competitive advantage" over other schools, the NCAA found. Carroll did not list Rodriguez on the coaches roster while he served as a "consultant" for the Trojan kicking squads during the entire 2008 regular season.
In its June report on the violations, the NCAA says USC's compliance office learned of Carroll's arrangement with Rodriguez only when an unidentified school complained about it in February 2009.
Carroll
said last year that he could not give a "chronology" of his dealings with the compliance office, but "whenever we do anything, we go through all of the channels to figure out whether we can do it ? whether it's OK, and we did that...."
"We've tried to do this exactly the right way ? compliance, all of that stuff, to the letter."
The decision on the Rodriguez matter reinforced the NCAA's broader conclusion that USC demonstrated a "lack of institutional control" over its athletics department.
Among the most serious violations the NCAA found were payments of thousands of dollars in cash and other benefits to Bush and his family by would-be sports marketers. In addition, the NCAA said that former running backs coach Todd McNair knew or should have known about the violations involving Bush and that he misled the association's enforcement staff.
