By Grant Abston, Sports Editor
Nearly two weeks after the NCAA penalized the ACU football and track and field programs for several violations, the university has weighed its options and decided to appeal the ruling that would vacate the football program’s wins and records from the 2007 season.
ACU was penalized Feb. 2 and had 15 days to decide if it would appeal the violations. After making the decision to appeal, the university will have a 30-day window to submit an appeal to a sub-committee of the NCAA Division II Management Council.
Dr. Royce Money, president of the university, said the decision to appeal was his alone, and he made the decision after seeking the advice of other ACU executive officers as well as director of athletics and compliance director Jared Mosley and ACU’s own legal council.
“We had a window of opportunity that we had to declare our intent to appeal, and we wanted to take the last couple of weeks to thoroughly look at the case and go back and look at other cases that were similar in nature at other universities and see if there was anything to move forward with in the appeal process,” Mosley said. “After looking at all that, we determined there was enough to go in and appeal the football-vacationed wins and associated records in the 2007 season.”
The NCAA penalized the university after two prospective student-athletes received academic assistance by members of the football coaching staff to help them attain academic eligibility at the university. Mosley said the university agreed they broke the rules, but thought the penalty to vacate the wins and records, which is only a part of the penalty, were harsher than necessary.
The football program also is limited to no more than 60 official paid visits during the 2009-10 and 2010-11 academic years, and members of the football coaching staff will be required to attend a NCAA Regional Rules Seminar within the first year of probation. ACU will not appeal those punishments, Money said.
“We had stated from the beginning that we thought the football penalties were excessive and that the evidence we presented did not match the severity of the penalty,” Money said. “Our main concern is that the 2007 season was vacated, and we think that is an excessive penalty.”
The university will work the next 30 days to put its case together and pull the information required to submit to the NCAA sub-committee. After filing an appeal, ACU will have another 30-day window for the NCAA Division II Committee on Infraction to review the case, the same committee that heard the initial case. That committee will have 30 days to respond, but Mosley said he believes the process could take up to 90 days, assuming no delays occur due to other windows built into the process for rebuttals.
Due to confidentiality, Mosley would not elaborate on other cases the university reviewed in making its decision to appeal, but the decision was made after looking at very specific cases and researching databases it had access to, he said.
“We feel it’s definitely worth our time and effort to see the process through,” Mosley said.
If the university’s appeal is successful, the football program would not vacate all its wins in the 2007 season, and statistics and records set during that season would be counted.
“We will work with our own legal council on campus and an outside legal campus that has been working with us throughout the process,” Mosley said. “They will advise us on the format and how to go about putting this together, and I’m sure the extent of having been through this process should take a better part of 30 days before having the final report to submit.”
