Is The NCAA Interested In Wrongdoers Or Just Wrongs?

I left that part out. Sanctions need to follow the perpetrator as well……

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

On a related note,

Yes, the main point was that stopping with the institution doesn’t get at the real culprit and only encourages a coach to push the envelope and then move on before the authorities catch up, leaving someone else to suffer the consequences.

And I’m guessing that our comfort with having a school remain culpable for a coach’s behavior while employed is founded on an underlying assumption that the school actually had some hand in the matter, probably through neglect or insufficient oversight, but perhaps even worse. Yes, those things are their own wrongs, and they are separate and distinct from the wrong committed by the coach.

The more interesting question, I think, is what level of liability a school has for the acts of its coach absent any of the above. I’d think that few people would think the school would always be responsible for whatever the coach does. For instance, taking it to its ridiculous extreme, should the school be punished if the coach murdered someone? I hope no one thinks that.

So it’s really a matter of finding the line defining the point at which the school should be held responsible for the coach’s, as opposed to its own, wrongful acts. There is an analog in the law that holds employers responsible for the wrongful acts of its employees generally called vicarious liability. Employers don’t like it much, but I think it has its basis in economics. The employee is an agent of the employer, and if he does wrong, then it makes more economic sense to have the employer pay to redress the wrong. The employer’s got more money and therefore is better able to shoulder the burden. The wronged person isn’t stuck with an uncollectible judgment against some individual with no assets. It’s a lot like product liability in that it’s a function of the employer being best able to spread the risk of things going wrong among the entire class of customers. The wronged person can sue, and the employer can recover by increasing the price of its widgets/services by a dollar. Everybody kicks in for the inevitable injury that occurs when a business is engaged in commerce on a large scale.

There are limits, though, as an employer generally won’t be held liable for an employee’s wrongful acts that are committed “outside the scope of his employment,” and, of course, that’s where all the action is.

In this circumstance, I’d be comfortable arguing that intentional cheating (assuming that’s actually the case here, and I’m not convinced that it is, btw) is outside the coach’s scope of employment and so the school shouldn’t be penalized absent some wrong of its own (failure to monitor, negligent hiring (yes, it’s an actual tort), etc.) That’s all theoretical. The counter argument to that is that recruiting is in the coach’s scope of employment and with it comes the risk of cheating. I frankly don’t know how that question would be resolved in the courts.

But again, my main point is that stopping at where you find the crap doesn’t do anything about the crapper. Until there is some negative consequence of torching and running, there’s no reason to think that coaches won’t continue to torch and run.