Pubdate: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 Source: Wall Street Journal (US) Copyright: 2014 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Contact: http://www.wsj.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487 Author: Ben Cohen HOW THE NCAA'S POT RULE LEFT MITCH MCGARY'S CAREER UP IN SMOKE The Michigan Star Is Entering the NBA Draft After Failing a Drug Test One thing you learn from visiting lots of college campuses is that they're all pretty much the same. The party scene runs through beautiful rows of fraternity houses in which unimaginable things happen. Every main quadrangle is noisy with incomprehensible conversations between philosophy majors who are busy contemplating the physics of Frisbee. And there is always, always, a dilapidated burrito shop where students wait in line at 2 a.m. because nothing they eat in their entire lives will taste better. But here's another way of thinking about the entire ecosystem of college. Some fairly large percentage of it--the socializing, all that academic enlightenment and the Mexican restaurants serving up Michelin-quality grease--is constructed around the time-tested fact that college students smoke a lot of marijuana. That's one reason why a recent development from Ann Arbor, Mich., an archetypal college town where cannabis violations are treated like traffic tickets, has a lot of people dazed and confused. On Friday morning, Mitch McGary, a star center for Michigan's basketball team, said he was leaving school after his sophomore season for the NBA draft. This wasn't a huge surprise. At this point, college basketball's top players are incentivized to ditch school as soon as they can, since they can't make any money as amateurs, and McGary was a preseason All-American whose breakout performance in the 2013 NCAA tournament put Michigan in the national-title game. Yet the next bit of news came as a shock. Even if McGary wanted to come back to play at Michigan next season--which he might have, since he spent most of this year nursing a back injury--actually playing would have been impossible. He would've been suspended for one full season by the NCAA after testing positive for the first time for marijuana during this year's tournament. McGary told Yahoo YHOO -2.16% he smoked pot one night in March at a campus party before March Madness. He said he'd been chosen for a random drug test after Michigan's win over Tennessee some days later on March 28. "It is important to let everyone know of a poor decision I recently made," McGary said in a Michigan news release. Not long ago, a situation like McGary's and a sentence like the NCAA's might have prompted the usual tsk-tsking, something about entitled college athletes lacking discipline. But the popular reaction to the news on Friday showed how much things have changed, how sympathetic the public has become to the plight of college athletes, and how serious the NCAA's existential crisis really is. Let's set aside the fact that marijuana is a widely available recreational drug with no clear athletic performance benefits, and that 21 states and the District of Columbia allow its use for some medical purposes--as does Michigan, though only for "debilitating" conditions. There were plenty of other reasons to be outraged by the NCAA's sanction. McGary didn't play on the night of March 28. In fact, he hadn't played since Dec. 14 due to a back injury. He'd never failed a drug test and had passed five tests administered at the school level during the season, according to Yahoo. When it comes to pot, professional sports leagues and their players associations are hippies compared to the NCAA. In the NFL, a player's first positive test for pot results in drug counseling, and it takes a third positive before a player is suspended for all of four games. The NBA's rule is similar, except it suspends third-strike offenders for five games, or 6% of its regular season, the equivalent of two games in college basketball. Major League Baseball treats marijuana as a drug of abuse, rather than performance-enhancing, and typically calls for treatment of players suspected or caught using it rather than punishment. In the NHL, which doesn't even test for marijuana, a similar scenario "would be treated on a case-by-case basis depending on the circumstances," a league spokesman said. Because McGary failed a drug test during an NCAA championship, though, he was subject to a sentence decided by that governing body. The NCAA's punishment for failing a test for "street drugs" is nothing less than a one-year-suspension. So for smoking weed at a college party, a player who wasn't even playing at the time faced a punishment similar to the one MLB gave Alex Rodriguez for allegedly obstructing its doping investigation. It's also equal to the penalty the NFL levied against New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton for his involvement in a team-wide bounty program. And it's stricter than Manny Ramirez's sentence for violating baseball's performance-enhancing drug policy--twice. McGary suffered from a case of lousy timing, too. On April 15, a few weeks after McGary failed his drug test and around the time NCAA officials approved legislation allowing schools to feed their athletes as much and whenever they wanted, the NCAA delighted burrito joints everywhere by voting to reduce the penalty for smoking pot to half a year. Since the policies don't take effect until Aug. 1, though, McGary still would've received the older punishment. At a time when mass outrage is building about the NCAA's rules on amateurism, which prohibit athletes from making money off their athletic abilities, the institution would've held an athlete who didn't even play and had no apparent history of trouble to one of the harshest punishments in sports. It's also one that the NCAA later moved to reduce. And it was all for the sin of smoking pot at a college party. Meanwhile, the story broke on a day otherwise dominated by news from Evanston, Ill., another leafy college town, where Northwestern's scholarship football players were lining up to vote on whether to form the first union in college sports. They had been granted that right last month by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, who ruled that these players were employees first and students second. It was the latest reminder of the NCAA's uncertain future. The industry of college sports is on a long trip. It's only going to get stranger. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom