As I’ve watched an amazing resurgence with our Rattler Football team under the leadership of head coach Willie Simmons, I can only feel sorry for him at this point. Of course there are three games remaining in the season, but the toughest stretch of the schedule is over. The team has performed masterfully since the opening defeat against FBS opponent UCF.
The excitement is building toward the climax of the season at the Florida Blue Florida Classic…and then it ends.
It’s not supposed to end there. But, our instability and incompetence landed us here. Not mistakes of last year, but mistakes and incompetence four and five years preceding landed us at a dead end.
The university’s failure to maintain institutional control over the athletic department’s academic and compliance components resulted in the culminating one year ban for our football team and other sports within the athletics department.
I challenge the current FAMU administration to never let us return to those days. I am not into predicting games and never will. As a former player our coaches always taught us that we play the games because we never know. But, if the Rattlers win out, it will be great; but it will also be a shame.
At FAMU, we have a shield to uplift. It was built on the backs of somewhere in the neighborhood of 115 years worth of players, coaches and staffs. The tradition built was to be the best at every turn. Now, because of misguided leadership both at the athletics department level and the university level in the past, we’ve failed.
If nothing else, this year should have taught us that FAMU is better than that. FAMU must be better than that!
I challenge the institution whose colors I wear proudly to put the resources behind the academic component of our university. Think about it, Willie Simmons is a great football coach; but wouldn’t a Ph.D. in an academic field be better suited to oversee, direct and monitor the academic component than Simmons…or any athletics director for that matter.
The major factor that these failures to maintain NCAA standards were the results of deficiencies in staffing. We have over 300 student-athletes to monitor. The NCAA scoffed at us having at times one person to monitor these activities.
Conversely, one of the reasons the NCAA showed us any leniency as they handed us the postseason ban was because current athletics director, John Eason, had fully staffed both the academic advisement unit and the athletics compliance staffs. With those units staffed at acceptable levels, we operated within the academic parameters set forth by the NCAA and exceeded them with perfect scores for some teams.
This must be the norm. We can’t accept budgetary or any other constraint from allowing us to remain fully NCAA compliant. That is the very definition of “Excellence with Caring.”
Vaughn Wilson, Mega Ace Media, Inc. Tallahassee, Florida 32303 (850)694-0277
