Domestic Violence And The NCAA

Over the last several weeks, a few high profile FBS programs have found their names in the news. Unfortunately for those prominent programs the news has not been good. Recently Mississippi’s Laremy Tunsil and Florida State’s De’Andre Johnson arrested on domestic violence charges and earlier this summer LSU’s Trey Lealaimatafao was dismissed after his battery arrest. In Tunsil’s case, it has been learned that he was defending his mother from his stepfather. Johnson however was arrest after he punched a woman in the face at Tallahassee nightclub.The incident took place in June, but Johnson was not kicked off the team by head coach Jimbo Fisher until a video of the ordeal came to light on Monday.

Each of these situations were handled individually, by each university as there is no current NCAA policy regarding domestic violence. But is it time for the NCAA to step in and impose a uniform policy?

Well as of September of 2014, right around the time of the Ray Rice fiasco, Mark Emmert didn’t think so. Emmert told reporters “If a student-athlete engages in bad behavior, they have to be subject to the same standards of conduct as everyone else.” He would go on to say “The most important thing to the NCAA membership has always been that students aren’t treated in any privileged or disproportionate fashion.”



The NCAA’s refusal to hold student-athletes to a higher standard than an average public citizen, taken at face value, seems like a logical and sensible approach. The problem however is that student-athletes, as much as the NCAA would like them to be aren’t average at all. The NCAA holds student-athletes to higher standards all the time. Whether it’s making student-athletes pay for eating more pasta than is allowed by NCAA rules or considering a team outing for an afternoon of laser tag as impermissible entertainment, the NCAA has always made student-athletes play by a different set of rules. For the NCAA to suddenly decide it doesn’t want to get involved in a matter as serious as domestic violence, simply because it wants student-athletes to be treated like every average citizen  is not right.

The NCAA, to its credit, has taken several steps to raise awareness about domestic violence.  The NCAA partnered with the White House on the President’s “It’s On Us” campaign, the program, which was initiated in the fall of 2014 aims to get young people, both men and women to take responsibility for themselves and their actions. As part of the “It’s On Us” campaign, the NCAA put out a PSA and even distributed a 56 page handbook designed to help universities address domestic violence and sexual assault.

While the PSA, handbook and commitment to the “It’s On Us” program are all important, the time has come for Mark Emmert and the NCAA to stop hiding and address the problem of sexual and physical violence with rules and penalties. Should any student-athlete be charged with domestic or sexual violence. As long as we leave the decision of if and or when to suspend a student-athlete who has been arrested or charged with domestic or sexual violence up to a coach or athletic director,  we sadly run the chance of winning on the field getting in the way.

For the NCAA, which pulled in $989 million in revenue during the 2014 fiscal year, there is no excuse for not coming up with a solution. It has all the resources any organization could ever need to study the issue and create a set of rules that can properly govern the issue of domestic violence. After all, it seems the NCAA has a rule for just about everything else.

If the NCAA truly believes in the “It’s On Us” program that it supports, then there is no reason for the association not find a way to step in and create and implement a set of rules or guidelines regarding this all too important real life problem.

You can view the NCAA’s PSA here and read the handbook here.