NCAA Combines Impotent Investigations Into USC

It's been a year since the allegations broke of former USC basketball star O.J. Mayo getting a little something on the side from runners for an agent. And it has been over three years since the allegations against former USC football star Reggie Bush regarding some incompetent wannabe marketing agents fronting a lot of money and a house to Bush and his family.

Neither investigation has gone anywhere with respect to USC. Yet both are still open investigations by the NCAA. So for whatever reason, the NCAA is combining the investigations into one single investigation into USC's athletic department.

Both Bush and Mayo have denied any of the allegations and claimed innocence. At the same time, neither has been willing to speak to NCAA investigators. Both had already left USC for professional leagues, so the NCAA has had no authority to compel them to cooperate with the investigation.

Bush is accused of accepting thousands in cash and his family for failing to pay rent on a home owned by a fledgling marketer while he was playing for USC in 2004 and 2005. Mayo is accused of accepting cash and other benefits from a middleman representing a sports agency before and during the one season he played for the Trojans in 2007-08.

The allegations against Mayo were made by Louis Johnson, a former associate of Mayo and Rodney Guillory, who Johnson says received more than $200,000 in cash and gifts from a representative of the Northern California-based BDA Sports Management agency, funneling some of it -- including a flat-screen television, meals, clothes and other gifts -- to the player.

Despite the documentation supplied by Johnson in the Mayo matter and the court case filed by the marketers against Bush, the NCAA has been unable to do much. They have not been able to show any link to the USC football or basketball program.

Both programs have denied any wrongdoing and responsibility. USC athletic director Mike Garrett, football coach Pete Carroll, and basketball coach Tim Floyd have all claimed to have known nothing about what happened or how.

Presumably the combined investigations would be into whether the USC athletic department lacks institutional control. That these were not isolated incidents of rouge players, but that the USC athletic program turns a willful blind-eye and at least passively permits the access and violations.

Proving it in separate cases has been fruitless. Other than saving some costs in a combined investigation, it does not seem like the NCAA will get much further.