UW Football
Odds don't look good for UW coach
By Les Carpenter
Seattle Times staff reporter
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The warnings are everywhere — on posters, in newsletters. The NCAA floods its member institutions with information about gambling, pleading with each school's compliance directors to let their coaches know anything that involves betting and sports is forbidden.
Some conferences, like the Ivy League, actually create Web sites with "tips" for their athletic departments. The dominant element of the Ivy League's tips page for this past March was an illustration of a basketball tournament bracket with a slash drawn through it and the screaming headline, "Don't Bet on it!"
Underneath, in big, dark letters, were listed the forms of gambling banned by the NCAA. Included was the phrase, "No sports 'pools.' "
"I think when it comes to (athletic department) staff, it's dealt with even more seriously by virtue of the fact they are the adults," said Jeff Howard, an NCAA spokesman.
In the past six years, the NCAA has investigated 17 cases in which athletic-department staff members have gambled in one form or another. Most were small-time bets, with only one in the neighborhood of the $20,000 that Washington coach Rick Neuheisel and three partners are alleged to have won on an NCAA tournament pool last year.
And in that similar case, resolved last year, a sports-marketing director at a college resigned after it was revealed that he ran a $25,000 "NFL Survivor Pool."
But the punishments were just as severe for coaches who risked far less money.
In 2000, McNeese State football coach Kirby Bruchhaus resigned after the school began investigating $200 and $300 bets he supposedly made on football. Bruchhaus denied the allegations but quit anyway.
That year, the NCAA cracked down on an unpaid volunteer assistant tennis coach at Indiana State whose $10 bets on sporting events over a five-month period totaled about $300. The NCAA suspended him for two years.
That could make Neuheisel's problems even worse. Not only might he lose his job at Washington, but he might not be allowed to find another position in college football for years.
In 13 of the 17 cases the NCAA investigated, the participants were either suspended or forced to leave their jobs. For instance, an assistant coach at a Division III school who bet $300 on professional baseball and football games was suspended for half of the next season. A women's soccer coach who made a $10 bet with a student assistant on another team was given a one-month suspension and one-year probation.
Most college employees who were reported to the NCAA for taking part in tournament pools got off lightly, usually with one- or two-day suspensions and letters of reprimand. Of course, those were pools that had $1 or $5 entry fees, not like the pool in which Neuheisel allegedly bid $5,000 for Maryland.
"We feel there isn't a need to gamble around the NCAA basketball tournament," Howard said. "It doesn't make it any more fun once you put money down on it."