Where There's Syracuse Orange Basketball Violations Smoke, There's Not Always Fire

After all of the buildup, James Arthur Boeheim didn't say much of anything about the NCAA violation stew that is supposedly brewing in the dark dungeons usually reserved for Miami or Ohio State.

So the moral of the story is that we as an Orange Nation are making fun of our mothers (check comments in first post) and generally preparing for the NCAA to drop their hammer on Jim Boeheim's gold digging fingers and send us into the ACC as the long lost brothers of Miami.

Except that won't happen.

Let's go over some things I think it would be nice to be reminded of: Every athletic department has both academic and nonacademic issues with athletes. College is a place where heavy drinking and recreational drug use is more common than...well... every analogy comes back to college in some way so you see my point. I know several people who went to D-1 schools and got full scholarships because they kept athletes GPA's up...one way or another.

It is the job of the NCAA to police all of this. Therefore in the inherent nature humans have to make life as easy as possible, programs that have a past history of violations or media attention get targeted. In the case of Syracuse, 1992 and Jeremy Schaap's "reporting" have put the Orange on the NCAA shortlist.

Back to the predicting the future thing.

Like Boeheim so eloquently put, this happens every freaking year. It's a rite of passage that is utterly pointless. I'd be disappointed if the NCAA wasn't actively investigating Syracuse and other schools with prior records. That's the way it works and it generally works best that way. That doesn't mean anything will happen. How many investigations, both with the NCAA and otherwise, end with a lack of evidence to further pursue?

It's not that I'm saying that there may not be something here. This is CBS Sports and not some blog run by an OCC kid with nothing better to do. But it's the same smoke we've seen for a few years now without seeing the fire. That doesn't mean the fire is not there, it just means if it is, it isn't big enough to be worried about. Those fires can either grow or naturally die out.

By now, I think it's safe to say that something bad did happen, which we already established as a fact. The thing is, proving what the NCAA needs for meaningful violations is very difficult. As of now, the NCAA, after years of digging, still can't prove it.

Therefore, all this report shows is that someone in the NCAA offices doesn't like Syracuse, which as Boeheim already said, is perfectly okay.

Moral of all of this: Let's not lose our heads. It's not pretty but after all of this time, I don't think the sky, or anything else but snow, will be falling on Syracuse.

P.S. My email is in my profile so I'll be ready for all of the "YOU'RE WRONG" emails.