EDITORIAL: Football scandal ends too quietly

Unanswered questions may lead to speculation about Penn's adherence to academic ideals. The circumstances surrounding all-Ivy defensive tackle Mitch Marrow's academic ineligibility brought into question Penn's stance on balancing academics and athletics. After realizing late in the season that Marrow wasn't carrying a full load of classes and that his part-time student status made him ineligible to play, Athletic Department officials tried to set him up with an independent study course -- founded on shaky ground -- to put him over the part-time limit. This attempt was a clear transgression of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules, under which only the NCAA can reinstate ineligible athletes. But in the subsequent internal investigation, the University did a good job of covering its tracks, managing to completely skirt the balance issue. Instead of answering why officials went through hoops in their attempts to secure Marrow's eligibility after-the-fact, the investigative committee handed the football team a slap on the wrist, forcing forfeiture of a season which offered no hope for an Ivy title. And despite an obvious breakdown in the Athletic Department's system for monitoring athletes' academic status -- a system that is supposed to withstand misunderstandings on the part of students -- blame was placed, in large part, on Marrow. Meanwhile, Associate Athletic Director Denis Elton Cochran-Fikes and Legal Studies Professor Kenneth Shropshire came out relatively clean. By not discovering Marrow's ineligibility sooner, there is no doubt that Cochran-Fikes failed to fulfill his responsibilities as NCAA compliance officer, yet he escaped any sort of disciplinary action. And Shropshire, who by approving an independent study course with little academic merit indicated a questionable philosophy about the prioritization of academics and athletics, nonetheless remains the University's representative to the NCAA. The article quotes Princeton Coach Steve Tosches as saying, "I've been in the league since '85, and I've seen a great change in what some schools are willing to do to help their athletic teams. They're not breaking policies, they're just stretching them as if they're plastic. When does the plastic break?" Since then, Penn has relinquished its status as the athletic powerhouse of the Ivy League. But it seems that the accusations today are the same. It's a shame the University has to make headlines by bending the rules.