SMU Mustangs: Could the Postseason Ban Be Overturned?
By Reid Hanson
A petition has been filed with the White House, asking to lift the SMU postseason ban and stop punishing the innocent.
SMU Men’s Basketball has been on a tear this season. Undefeated and ranked #8 nationally, they could be a fun team to watch in the postseason. If only they were allowed to participate…
17 weeks ago, the NCAA came down on SMU Men’s Basketball, suspending head coach Larry Brown, stripping them of scholarships, and banning them from postseason play in 2016. But now that Larry Brown has served his time, the violating administrator has been let go, and the offending player has transferred. The ones left holding the bag now, are the innocent.
FoxSports.com writer Aaron Torres sees the injustice and decided to do something about it – he filed a petition on the whitehouse.gov website:
The NCAA has wrongly and unfairly barred the SMU Mustangs from the NCAA basketball tournament because of the indiscretions of one player and one former administrator.
That administrator and player are no longer with the program, and now it’s time to do what’s right. It’s time to stop punishing the innocent.
It’s time to free SMU.
And it’s time to allow the Mustangs into the 2016 NCAA Tournament.
Let’s go ahead and officially make the petition and subsequent hashtag, #FreeSMU, our “cause of the week”. The 18-0 SMU Mustangs are the last remaining undefeated team in the country. But without a ranked opponent on their schedule, it’s unlikely we will ever get to see how good SMU really is, unless they get into postseason play.
Whether they deserve the punishment or not, it’s absolutely tragic that this team will not be allowed to advance.
The crimes against the NCAA are real. The long history of NCAA violations are well-documented. Larry Brown has been in too many controversies to be given the benefit of the doubt. All of these things worked against SMU when the punishments were handed out and all are legitimate arguments for keeping the punishments intact.
But who is it really hurting?
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Basketball fans are hurt. They don’t get the chance to see a top team compete at the highest level. If SMU can somehow stay undefeated this season, the eventual national champ might as well have an asterisk by their name (OK, that may be stretching it, but you get the point).
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The unoffending players are hurt by this as well. Opportunities like this don’t come up very often and the innocent players in the program are left serving the punishment. Future players are hurts as well. The NCAA stripped SMU of nine scholarships over the next three seasons. So, the NCAA is going to take away affordable higher education for players who aren’t even in college yet, and that seems fair? Forget basketball for a minute, those are four scholarships that don’t go to students. They weren’t appropriated and given to someone else – they simply no longer exist.
Larry Brown is the hardest to defend in this all. As mentioned earlier, his history mandates he no longer be given the benefit of the doubt.
Will SMU’s punishment be overturned?
It would take a miracle, really.
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It would be nice to see a compromise in this matter that allows those innocent parties a little mercy. That could be keeping the ban in place for Coach Brown but allowing the team to compete without him. But even that is a massive stretch. The best thing SMU can do is to stay undefeated and hope for national attention/compassion.
Oh yeah, #FreeSMU