It was a bad day to be an athletic director (current or former) in Florida yesterday, as two prominent Division I-A school administrations laid some smack down on their athletics programs.

First up was the University of South Florida — darling of TMC and little-guy advocates everywhere — which saw its administration wrest control of academic progress and monitoring of school athletes away from the AD’s office.

That in and of itself wasn’t too remarkable, but what was remarkable was some of the things that the school promised to start doing. Included among those things were:

- Discussing whether USF football recruits were going to be academically eligible BEFORE they signed today

-  Keeping athletic department staff from teaching classes that included student athletes

- Assuming control of the academic support network for students

Alright, I can sorta understand the last one — having the academic support network in the AD’s office is a time-honored tradition. But good lord…was the administration of USF that asleep at the switch that they hadn’t even checked whether AD staff members were teaching students? Have we learned nothing from Jim Harrick Jr., people?

As for the discussions about academic eligibility, I’ll refer to a segment from the article itself:

Eleven of 18 new football players at USF last summer and fall, or 61 percent, were admitted as an exception to the state university system’s admission standards, according to university records. About 26 percent of all new student-athletes, including football players, got an exception for last summer and fall.

By comparison, 49 nonathletes - less than 1 percent of the more than 12,000 accepted to USF last summer and fall - received an exception to state standards.

I realize this goes on everywhere, but I do wonder whether we’ll now see head coach Jim Leavitt start looking for greener pastures, now that the admission mill he’s been running at USF could dry up.

As for USF’s more famous cousin to the north, the Seminoles got the crap kicked out of them in the press by Florida State’s president today:

Wetherell criticized his athletic department, called the university’s Athletic Academic Support Services a “paper tiger” and described an environment early in the investigation in which “everybody was pointing fingers at everybody.”

“One of the things that was frustrating about this whole process,” Wetherell said, “was that as we began to unravel this thing in athletics, their solution was circle the wagons, don’t tell [the president's office] what’s going on.”

The president goes on to say:

FSU determined the misconduct occurred when athletes, athletic tutors and other students gathered for tests. The most egregious abuse, Wetherell confirmed, came when an athletic tutor “started hollering” answers during examinations.

“That’s a violation of NCAA rules right there,” Wetherell said. “Then they even got sloppier when [a tutor] actually took some tests for [athletes] because they were too … lazy to study. That’s what happened. Plain and simple.”

Granted, none of this stings quite as badly for FSU now as it did before the Music City Bowl — after all, the future of Florida State football is now Jimbo Fisher, the old athletic director was unceremoniously shown the door, and the new guy says nothing like this will ever happen again. Cause, you know, nothing’s ever happened at Florida State that could be seen as embarrassing or contrary to the rules, right?

Despite all this, there’s a bigger issue . Where the hell have these administrations been before now? I always find it hilarious when a university president or administrator comes riding in on some high horse and takes control away from the AD in an effort to “put the focus back on academics”. Where the hell was that focus before there was trouble, dipshit? (Or in some cases, Mrs. Dipshit)
Like most other things  that we see come out of college administrations, these moves are  simply cop-outs — ways to make the president and/or trustees look good, while burning the people that were doing what the president’s office had agreed to (either explicitly through words or implicitly through non-action).