Every year, construction begins on a new LSU athletic building to draw in recruits. Every LSU sporting event contains one, typically multiple, employees of the athletic department recording stats. Every season of every sport will get more than enough attention for fans and the NCAA.
Only 11 miles north, it’s a complete reversal. In the same city as the Tigers, Southern University shows the other side of college athletics.
The one-year ban on Southern athletics from the NCAA expired Tuesday, with a group of NCAA officials re-evaluating the school’s progress on Thursday. The ban was for inadequate reporting of student-athletes’ Academic Progress Rates.
The Jaguars were essentially banned from postseason NCAA play because they could not finish and turn in paperwork on time. It’s not a sign of laziness or incompetence, but a lack of manpower behind the unfinished work.
Southern athletics is not the Mecca that LSU is. It doesn’t have a worker available for every possible task the NCAA demands. It doesn’t have the ability to throw money at a problem until it goes away.
Last season, the Jaguars’ basketball team received the ban during the middle of one of its best seasons in a decade. The team went 15-3 in the Southwestern Athletic Conference, but the ban suddenly gave them nothing to play for.
The Jags were blown out in their first SWAC tournament game against Prairie View, a team they defeated twice in the regular season. It’s an example of how quickly the wheels come off when the team’s ultimate goal is stripped away.
Imagine the LSU basketball team stringing together a possible tournament-worthy season, and the athletic department suddenly being at risk to receive a ban for unfinished work. Think of the outpour of volunteers the school would receive just to give its basketball team a chance.
The 2014-2015 Southern team got started in mid-November, with two of its five leading scorers returning. The team was picked to finish second in the SWAC before the season, and star point guard Trelun Banks returns after a stellar freshman season.
But if the NCAA officials are not satisfied with the school’s progress Thursday, the ban may continue. The Jaguars could lose their dream of a postseason again, falling back into the hole they found last March. The same vicious cycle repeating for a terribly unfortunate program.
Situations like this make it difficult to believe Southern and LSU athletics belong in the same universe. While one department is building an exclusive facility for gymnastics, the other can barely finish paperwork to get everything in order.
The solution is some kind of split for the top athletic schools, particularly the ones successful at football. The money disparity between programs has become too large, and schools with everything to spend like LSU need their own league.
This theory has been discussed heavily in college football, where the disparity is largest and big conferences want to break away. Detractors of the idea claim the split could hurt more evenly competitive sports like basketball and baseball.
But the truth is Southern’s case is no anomaly. There are more teams in the country failing to meet the NCAA’s constant requests, which larger teams like LSU can answer in an instant. This, more than anything, is why a split needs to occur.
Southern’s one-year ban dissolved Tuesday, if only with the chance it returns by the end of this week. Jaguars fans can only wait, hoping a long-term change can save them from this absurdity.
Tommy Romanach is a 22-year-old mass communication senior from Dallas, Texas.