Jones was in 10th grade when he supposedly broke the N.C.A.A.’s rules. (That’s right. You can break N.C.A.A. rules years before you become part of the N.C.A.A.) His mother, a cafeteria worker, has a heart condition so serious that she will likely need a transplant. Sometimes she’s confined to a wheelchair, causing her to miss work. During one such period, she got behind on her rent. Three times, she asked Jones’s A.A.U. coach, whom she’d known for years, to lend her $1,200 to pay the rent. Each time, she repaid the loan as soon as she got her paycheck. That, believe it or not, is Jones’s transgression.
Jones says he had no idea his mother was borrowing money to pay the rent, which is completely believable. If you needed a short-term loan to keep from getting evicted, would you tell your teenage son? Yet the N.C.A.A. says that because she got the money from the coach, Jones was getting a benefit not available to nonathletes.
(Jones’s second transgression was going to a preseason Dallas Cowboys game with that same coach. The N.C.A.A. declared this a $500 benefit and has demanded that he donate $500 to charity to make amends. It does not say where he is supposed to find the money.)
I asked Stacey Osburn, an N.C.A.A. spokeswoman, how a player could be held responsible for something done without his knowledge. I asked her why Jones had to sit while Cam Newton, the star quarterback at highly ranked Auburn, was allowed to continue playing after it was discovered that his father had tried to auction off his son’s talents to the highest bidder. I asked her why five players from Ohio State were allowed to play in the lucrative Sugar Bowl this year after they had been caught selling O.S.U. paraphernalia and pocketing the money — and why their coach got only a two-game suspension, even though he knew what they had done and said nothing.
She wouldn’t give me a straight answer. “Every situation is different” is the best she could do.
