I"m so tired of the Gene Smith apologists

I'm talking about the people that say if we self accessed a bowl ban last year we would have gotten another year.  Here's an argument I've fought repeatedly:

I stipulate that Gene Smith is an idiot & should be fired. However, there was always going to be a 2012 bowl ban...There is nothing Smith could have done to prevent it...with the possible exception of banning Bobby Di from the program the day he (Smith) was hired.

My response:

You don't know this and it is most likely it would have been 1 yr. Why? USC got 2 years for LOIC. We were barely FtM.  The NCAA doesn't go against precedent and while Gene Smith thought there was no precedent for a 1 year ban there definitely wasn't precedent for a 2 year ban. They'd need a LOIC charge and that didn't happen.

His response:

You (and a lot of others don't get it). Ohio State was a REPEAT OFFENDER w/that FTM. The hammer was coming down. 

I clarified my statement as I hate getting into specifics with the NCAA as it always takes paragraphs and still isn't enough because all of their cases are messy.

The only case where a school got a two year ban without a LOIC was the Alabama Albert Means case in 2002.  If you don't remember that's where it was proven that multiple Alabama boosters were giving money to Alabama recruits a few years after they'd been caught doing the same thing in the mid 90s.  The only thing that saved the school was the NCAA couldn't prove a direct link to the school in directing the payments.  That saved them from a LOIC but the NCAA charged them similarly.

 Ohio State's football program was only repeat offender because an individual football case that was promptly dealt with (Troy Smith's $500 payout) was included with the O'Brien's scandal.  The Compliance Group felt the football program would be exempt from repeat violator penalties because cases against players are handled differently than cases against programs.   

Even though BobbyD gave us a FtM the two combined pale in comparison to Alabama's situation that was lucky to not get a LOIC.  You can look at the penalties to see how the NCAA viewed the severity.

• Alabama lost 21 scholarships and a two year bowl ban
• OSU lost 9 scholarships and a one year bowl ban. 

Are we to believe that because we self imposed a bowl ban last season that the NCAA would have upped the bowl ban out of spite?  The scholarships give a clue about how the NCAA felt about the severity of the two cases and they just don't arbitrarily give longer sentences because we proactively gave ourselves a bowl ban during a bad season and they didn't feel it was harsh enough.  It would create precedent they'd need to live with forever.

A good example is the USC situation.  They took 2 years pre-emptively while protesting the scholarship reduction.  This season they are bowling while the scholarship reductions started this year.

I understand people wanting to believe this as they want to see the NCAA as an arbitrary monster that needs to be struck down. It is really a bunch of lawyers using a set of overly complex rules to govern something that is impossible to govern.  They have little authority to actively police the schools and I'm sure they feel helpless at times.  College sports is tailor made for abuse and while the penalties can seem arbitrary when you look at case law there is precedent and a methodology for every thing they do. That leaves little room to give Ohio State another year 'just cause they felt like it'.