Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks, you’re probably painfully aware of the recent NCAA violations that were leveled against our beloved Mountaineers.

While everyone seems to be in agreement that the violations are, in the grand scheme of things, relatively minor infractions, there is a bit of disagreement regarding what the violations actually mean for the program.

I posed the following open-ended question to the members of your humble PressBox staff. “What are your feelings regarding the recent NCAA violations?”

Shane

Violations, Violations, Violations!

I am completely at a loss for words with this coaching staff and the athletic department. I understand that nothing can be done about the R-Rod issues from years ago, although, compliance should have seen this before it was an issue.

However, all of the Stew defenders said, “that would NEVER happen under Stew”, “we won’t have to worry about that under Stew’s watch.” Well, guess what… it did happen! Stewart is bringing this program down and HALF of Mountaineer nation is just standing around with their blinders on because he is “a West Virginia guy.” I have heard, “he’s such a nice man”, so many times I want to puke! Not only do I feel he has underperformed as a coach, is completely lost on the sidelines, and made a complete fool out of us on National TV, but he must be an idiot to continue to have violations while he knows the NCAA is poking around.

Many will say, “well, these are all petty issues”. You might be right, but it’s still a violation! This guy needs to go! Give him a position of recruiting assistant or something and get him out of the head chair of our football program! Where would this program be right now if we would have hired someone like Tommy/Terry Bowden? What would have happened if we hired Butch Jones or Chris Peterson? Boise State, yes Boise State, is ranked 3rd in the SI poll and 5th in the Coaches Poll! It tears me up to watch half of you guys stand there and just wait until it’s bad enough before kicking this guy to the curb! Do we need to hit rock bottom before a change is made?

Ern

Nobody likes to see their program in the news connected with NCAA violations and we are no different. The good news is that most of this crap occurred under Rod who, as we all know, has since moved on and is successfully infecting another program. The bad news, and what is most baffling to me, is that the practice continued after Rod was gone. Where was the breakdown and who is to blame? We have a compliance officer whose sole job is to look over the program. Should this person be replaced? We have a coaching staff that should know and understand the rules. Should there be a change made there? Should the onus fall solely on the Athletic Directors shoulders? I don’t have the answers, but I’m confident Luck will handle it in a professional & expedient manner – one that we will all be happy with.

My bigger concern is what will come of all of this. Extra practice time, graduate assistants coaching players & wearing some extra padding is basically the extent of the violations. We can debate all day why trivial stuff like this matters so much to the NCAA (especially when you have programs like USC running amuck for all of these years when it was obvious to everyone what was going on there). But that’s not really the spirit of today’s debate.

When it’s all said and done I believe that nothing major will come of the infractions. We have a long history of running a clean program and that has to stand for something. There are also no violations that I would consider too major (i.e. paying recruits or other blatant cheating). I believe that we’ll probably get probation and loss of some extra practice time or something along those lines.

In the short term, though, our reputation will be damaged. This will almost certainly be used against us on the recruiting trail, but in the end I don’t believe it will hurt us that much. Once the football season begins and we start winning games this will be long forgotten by the media.

John

I wish I could say that I was completely surprised by the recent NCAA violations. But, anyone looking at the program, as a whole, could’ve seen something like this coming. Perhaps not these exact violations, or maybe not even violations at all, but something bad was in the cards. Why? Well, I’m glad you asked…

Nothing – absolutely nothing – about coach Stew makes me think he has any true control over his program. Attention to detail is crucial and, let’s face it, Stew seems to pay attention to very little.

Just do a little thought experiment with me. Think back over the last two years and come up with a single instance, a single example, of a time when Stew appeared to be in complete control of his program. Give me just one illustration of Stewart exercising authoritative control of the program and showing attention to detail. Hell, for that matter, give me a time over the last two years that you actually felt confident in the man’s abilities to truly lead the Mountaineer football program.

Like other folks have stated, in this age of USCs and Alabamas, the WVU violations are relatively minor. But that’s beside the point. One of the standard lines used when defending Stew over the last couple of years has been “He’s a man of integrity.” Well, the recent violations would seem to indicate otherwise.

Either that or he’s a man that lacks any real control over his program. Take your pick, Stew supporters.

Kevin

OK, While I for one am embarrassed as a Mountaineer fan for all the recent violations I don’t think the entire Athletic Department should be fired for this or some other crazy reaction from current AD Luck and I know he won’t do anything foolish. I also don’t see any major sanctions coming from this, but I do have some real concerns. My biggest one is the perception from two major groups of folks. 1. The recruits and 2. The other conferences (particularly the ACC).

Starting with the recruits: It’s not like we have an easy time anyway landing big name recruits like the USCs and Texas of the world and there are multiple reasons for this that I won’t get into. The fact is, however, that under Coach Stewart our recruiting has been at a level never seen before and these violations will likely hurt that in a big way at least in the short term. In the past we would go up against a Pitt or a VT and the recruit would be leaning one way or another and we could use our squeaky clean image and our “Father Figure” coach to turn the recruit our way. Now we have lost that, so the recruit that is down the road from VT or down the road from Pitt will just stay home and not have to worry that his school may be banned from post-season or some other type of sanction. You also know every other coach is telling these kids that there will be major sanctions and the football program is out of control, etc.

The other conferences: We all know that at some point in the near future the Big East football conference is going away and WVU is going to be selling itself most likely to the ACC. Before these infractions the ACC taking WVU was a slam dunk, bet the farm on it type of situation for the ACC. WVU is the only team that is going to both raise the ACC’s level of football and b-ball and again come in with the squeaky clean image the ACC tries to portray (at least compared to the other conferences). Now with all this happening the ACC may shy away from WVU and leave WVU competing in Conference USA or some other non-BCS conference.

Either way the fact is this, our coaching staffs both current and past should know the rules and should enforce the rules so what we get is our own fault and we have to deal with it, let’s just all hope and pray it has a much smaller impact that it possibly could.