(Written by kencraw)

Now that we’re through the BCS line-up knot-hole, I’ve got another topic that’s been on my mind: Bowl Bans.

Obviously there are two main punishments that the NCAA hands out. Bowl bans, usually for 1 to 3 years, and scholarship restrictions. At first glance they both seem to be good punishments. Going to bowl games is the reward for a good season, something that both the players and the fans love. It also gives the team extra practice time they wouldn’t get otherwise. That’s the “take away the positives” side of it. The “punishment” side of it is that the team’s recruiting will take a hit because new students won’t want to go to a school that they can’t go play in bowl games.

Scholarship restrictions on the other hand is an almost entirely punishment based handout. It hurts the school’s recruiting by reducing the number of kids who can be recruited and the number of kid who can be on scholarship for 1 to 4 years.

At first glance, the heavy handed likely prefer the bowl bans. It has both a punishment and removing rewards aspect. Isn’t it better to take away both?

I say no.

First of all, for the NCAA almost all punishments come LONG after the players and frequently the coaches who committed the infractions have left the program. The result is that taking a bowl game away from a team is likely taking it away from kids who didn’t do anything wrong.

Second of all, with the exception of unusually long bowl bans, it won’t much hurt recruiting. There will usually only be one or two recruiting classes who are even aware of the sanctions while they’re being recruited and for most of them, those bowls will be in their 1st year or two in the proram, when they’re somewhat unlikely to be a starter or someone with significant playing time. That’s not all that much of a disincentive to go play for that school.

Thus I don’t think bowl bans work. That’s half the reason I don’t like them.

The other half is that it also punishes the rest of the conference for the mistakes of the team that broke the rules. This has become quite clear to me after watching USC this year.

See, when a good team is on a bowl ban, every time it beats someone in the conference, it’s reducing both the quality of the bowl the guilt-free team will go to and the number of bowl slots available to the conference. If USC hadn’t beaten Oregon, Oregon would be in the BCS championship game this year. Although it didn’t happen this year, any team that was 5-7 and lost to the team with a bowl ban, was denied a bowl game they would have been in if they could have beaten the team they would have played instead.

There’s even a long-run factor of bowls not willing to offer more compelling spots to the conference because of the weaker looking teams (due to the extra losses put on the conference by the bowl ineligible team) they had gotten in the past.

So the way I see it, the bowl bans don’t hurt the violator all that much (at least the right kids/coaches) and then hurt the rest of the teams in the conference. That’s particularly egregious because those conference teams are the teams that MOST need retribution. After all, assuming the rule breaking helped the violating team get ahead, it was the other conference teams that most directly paid for the cheating in the past.

Looking at scholarship restrictions instead, the impact is to weaken the violating team, which gives more win opportunities to the other teams in the conference (something they deserve based on the harm of past cheating) and not in other ways harming the conference.

If I were in charge of the NCAA, unless I caught and imposed sanctions right away, while the players involved were still at the school, I wouldn’t impose bowl bans. I would instead take away scholarships, and lots of them.