Educating The U About Institutional Control

The University of Miami will try to make a case that it exercised institutional control. Top administrators will try to convince the NCAA that they had no clue that Nevin Shapiro was engaged in illegal activities or providing extra benefits to several dozen players and recruits. They will point out that former coach Randy Shannon constantly warned his players and coaches about agents and boosters. And other boosters will testify that the athletic department took extraordinary steps to assure compliance.

There is only one problem with this argument: The U clearly did have a clue that Shapiro was bad news, long before he was implicated in a $930m Ponzi scheme—but it appears that they did little or nothing to curtail his involvement with their football program.

According to CaneSport, it was “shortly after he was named to replace Larry Coker in 2007 that Shannon threatened his coaching staff with firings if they ever dealt with Shapiro and warned his players about him multiple times in team meetings during his four-year coaching tenure.”

What’s more, “Shannon had ‘spies’ around town who warned him that Shapiro was getting into problems throughout South Florida and was a booster that he needed to keep away from his players’."

The head coach even refused to meet with Shapiro, despite the fact that he contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Miami’s AD.

This clearly bothered Shapiro. According to CaneSport, he “would constantly call anybody in the athletic department that would listen and launch into blistering, profanity-laced and racially-charged tirades at the perceived lack of respect he was being shown by the head coach.”

Finally, multiple sources confirm that during a humiliating 48-0 home loss to Virginia at the Orange Bowl in 2007, Shapiro confronted David Reed, the school’s associate athletic director for compliance, about ‘implementing rules that were too stringent, trying to keep boosters and players apart’.

“I tried to kick his ass,” the 5-foot-5 Shapiro told Yahoo! Sports. “I was screaming at him, calling him a sissy over and over, at least five times. I shouted, “these guys are a bunch of [expletives] playing for a real [expletive] [head coach Randy Shannon] and, by the way, you’re a (expletive) too.”

“I had to be held back from hitting him. I wanted to punch him in the face.”

Shapiro claims that this incident prompted Reed to investigate him. What did Reed discover? According to Shapiro, Reed ‘discovered his troubling ties to athletes, coaches and his part ownership in a professional sports agency’.

Despite all these signs, Shapiro claims he was never questioned by Miami and that his activities were not limited until April 2010, when he was criminally charged.

So was there a Lack of Institutional Control? Miami appears to have had adequate policies and procedures in place to comply with NCAA rules, but the way officials handled what they learned about Shapiro appears to have been quite lax.

Did Shannon share his skepticism about Shapiro, and the evidence it was based on, with the rest of the AD or members of the university’s administration? Did he turn over the information his ‘spies’ discovered? Did any university officials ask him why he refused to meet with such a prominent donor?

Did the athletic officials he allegedly called report the contents of those calls to superiors or university administrators? If the argument with Reed occurred as reported, why didn’t the AD and the university cut their ties with him? Did Reed investigate him, as Shapiro claims? Were there ever any meeting held to discuss all the signs and evidence that he was, to put it mildly, problematic?

No one should accept what Shapiro claims at face value, but a lot of what is being claimed, by people trying to defend integrity of Miami’s football program, suggests that there was a in fact lack of institutional control.