Tennessee investigation raises questions, but don’t ask if it’s a big deal — it is
University of Tennessee chancellor Donde Plowman is the most popular figure in Tennessee Volunteers sports this week. She vaulted past most of the football team’s 21st century quarterbacks with one scathing letter.
It was addressed Monday to NCAA president Charlie Baker in regard to an investigation that is focused in part on the Vols’ current starting quarterback, and it is more than 1,100 words of controlled fury. Plowman writes that the NCAA is “failing” in managing the chaos of college athletes earning money from their names, images and likenesses, and “morally wrong” in alleging wrongdoing on the part of UT in this space.
It’s hard to argue, absent much detail on the allegations, with Plowman’s points. Also, it should be impossible to read her letter and come away thinking this is no big deal for Tennessee. Don’t make that mistake.
“It is inconceivable that our institution’s leadership would be cited as an example of exemplary leadership in July 2023,” she writes, referring to the prior NCAA investigation into former UT football coach Jeremy Pruitt, “then as a cautionary example of a lack of institutional control only six months later.”
Check those four key words again. “Lack of institutional control.” That’s the most serious charge a university can face in such matters, and this university just managed to dodge a postseason ban for its football team despite 18 Level I violations under Pruitt — in one of the most egregious and sloppy cheating scandals on record, carried out from 2018 to 2021, before NIL. Back when some in the general public still cared about improper inducements in college athletics.
