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In case you missed it, and if you live in Tennessee Vols country or follow the Vols it was impossible to avoid, but the NCAA flexed its oh-so-mighty muscle as a disciplinary force earlier this week at the expense of Tennessee linebacker Arion Carter. The NCAA suspended Carter for the first two games of the 2026 season – at home against Furman and at Georgia Tech – because Carter took a flight paid for by an agent before he withdrew from the NFL Draft.
Never mind that we’re talking about $427 and change. Or that Carter, once he withdrew from the Draft and decided to come back to Tennessee, repaid his agent for the full cost of the ticket. Or that, in this era of NIL, nearly every top-flight player has an agent, except for some reason the NCAA differentiates between NIL agents (acceptable) and NFL agents (anathema).
Not much you can do but shake your head at the lack of logic.
To be fair, the NCAA probably is feeling pretty toothless these days, after nearly all of the governing body’s enforcement power has been defanged through rule changes and court decisions.
Carter, a third-team preseason All-Southeastern Conference selection at linebacker, still will be in the lineup for the Kennesaw State game and whatever awaits during SEC play. And, if we’re judging this disciplinary move by the public response, people seem to be savaging the NCAA for making a mountain out of a molehill more than taking Carter to task, especially considering that he already had repaid the full cost of the ticket.
In the NCAA’s defense, this isn’t the dumbest, strangest, or most ridiculous disciplinary move by the governing body.
In 2013, an unnamed women’s golfer for a West Coast Conference school got self-reported by her institution for washing her car on campus. The hose and water were deemed university property and therefore “extra benefits.”
Phone calls are a complicated labyrinth of potential malfeasance, in the NCAA’s eyes. Geno Auriemma got slapped with a secondary violation for making a congratulatory call to 2014 Little League World Series star Mo’ne Davis because, at 13 years old, Davis was too young to take a “recruiting call” from a college coach. Never mind that Davis plays a totally different sport than the one Geno coaches.
You don’t even have to intend to make the call. Through the years, several coaches have gotten in hot water for accidentally butt-dialing or pocket-dialing recruits, including former Georgia and Miami football coach Mark Richt.
My favorite example of NCAA hypocrisy remains when A.J. Green got slapped with a multiple game suspension as a senior at Georgia for selling a game-worn jersey – his own personal property – while you could buy that same jersey on the Georgia website for several hundred dollars. Or Johnny Manziel being investigated for months for getting paid for an autograph signing while Texas A&M hawked tickets to a booster banquet where you could sit at Manziel’s table … If you were willing to pay the four-figure price tag. Oh, and after all of the Manziel drama, let’s not forget he was suspended for all of one half of one game.
Up until 2014, when unlimited meal service was approved, the NCAA maintained some bizarre regulations about the food scholarship athletes could receive. In hindsight, these rules seem draconian, and borderline insane. To be fair, they seemed just as silly in real time. That same year, Shabazz Napier, the MVP of the Final Four for Connecticut, talked about going to bed hungry on multiple occasions. Former Tennessee running back Arian Foster said in a 2013 documentary called “Schooled: The Price of College Sports” that, at one point, had no money or food late one night so his position coach Trooper Taylor bought about 50 tacos for Foster and a few of his teammates. Foster also admitted to taking money in that documentary, which, of course, by current standards, is just NIL compensation. And, in February of 2014, Oklahoma self-reported a secondary violation because three athletes had been deemed to consume too much pasta during a team banquet. Each player had to donate $3.83 – the estimated cost of the forbidden extra helping of noodles – to a charity as restitution.
As silly as “Pastagate” was, the most ridiculous part of the food-related rules mandated by the NCAA revolved around – get this – peanut butter and cream cheese. In 2009, the governing body allowed universities to supply snacks to their players: fruit, nuts, and plain bagels. But if you offered peanut butter or cream cheese with those bagels? Pump the brakes, coach, you just committed a secondary violation.
With the unlimited meal ruling mentioned above, and NIL money flowing through the college sports world like a rapid river that cannot be contained, athletes aren’t going hungry anymore.