Since the NCAA says case closed, where does Auburn go to get its reputation back?

http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2011/10/after_the_ncaas_all-clear_wher.html

Published: Friday, October 14, 2011, 5:00 AM

By Kevin Scarbinsky, Birmingham News

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama - Now that it's over, as Julie Roe Lach might say, now that Auburn has a letter from the NCAA that isn't a notice of inquiry or allegations, now that the official asterisk has been removed from the 2010 Heisman Trophy and BCS Championship, one question.

Where does Auburn go to get its reputation back?

It's a famous question once asked by a former U.S. Labor Secretary who was charged with corruption, then was tried and acquitted on all counts.

It's a trick question, of course, with a cruel answer.

Once you've been convicted in the small minds of people hoping beyond hope that your success has been a sham, it doesn't matter how many formal letters you receive from the proper officials saying you're free to go. Some people won't believe you got cleared.

They'll believe you got off.

Cam Newton gets to keep his Heisman Trophy, but he'll forever be the first and probably last Heisman winner to finish runner-up for SEC male athlete of the year. To a tennis player.

Gene Chizik gets to say that he was the national coach of the year in 2010 but not the conference coach of the year, not in a vote of his peers.

Auburn will always have Jan. 22, 2011, the day 78,000 family members gathered in Jordan-Hare Stadium to cherish the memory of Jan. 10, 2011, in Glendale, Ariz., but two days of basking in the sun hardly compares to nine months of staring at a crystal football covered in shadow.

The shadow was real, but not because a rag-tag militia of bloggers, posters and callers rose up to take aim at the Tigers. The one true fact that became their cause was a form of friendly fire.

If Cam Newton was guilty of anything, as far as you and I and the NCAA know, it was being born to Cecil Newton. As close as father and son may be, it was the father who put his son and his son's school in this predicament in the first place.

Cecil Newton talking to former Mississippi State player Kenny Rogers about getting money to send the quarterback to State was the spark that set off a wildfire of unsubstantiated allegations captured most fancifully in the Internet fable "As the Plains Burn," which really should've won a Pulitzer Prize.

For fiction.

The unhealthy alliance between the elder Newton and Rogers, for all practical purposes, put Auburn on a form of probation from the day it was revealed last November until Wednesday, when the NCAA classified it as the only violation it could pin down against the Newton family.

Fortunately for anyone who cares about the truth, as the NCAA pointed out in the bureaucratic smack-down portion of its official statement, the association operates under a slightly higher burden of proof than bloggers, posters and callers, and even some members of the media.

Here's looking at you, Danny Sheridan and friends.

Instead of being swayed by public misinformation, the NCAA did what the NCAA is supposed to do. It assigned to the Newton case a bulldog of a lead investigator, Jackie Thurnes, whose previous work included the Derrick Rose-Memphis basketball case that cost the Tigers 38 victories and a national runner-up finish, and turned her loose.

Consider a list of states where the NCAA put actual boots on the ground to sniff around on Newton, the HBO 4 and beyond: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas.

Now contemplate the multiple fronts covered by a wide-ranging investigation that, according to Thurnes' "It's over" letter to Auburn AD Jay Jacobs, "was not limited to" Newton and the HBO 4.

According to people who were interviewed by the NCAA, the probe looked into everything from the repairs that were done on Cecil Newton's church to the suits that Cam Newton wore in New York during Heisman week. They asked questions about everyone from an alleged street agent in Louisiana to an alleged street agent in Arkansas.

They combed through bank, tax and phone records of Auburn players, coaches, officials and trustees. They requested and were provided some records that went back almost two years.

Did I say requested? Demanded is more like it. The NCAA made it clear that, if those records weren't turned over, the NCAA would consider that suspicious and might find Auburn guilty of failure to cooperate.

What did the NCAA find after 13 months of that kind of determined digging? Not enough to substantiate any of the potential violations it examined. Auburn's unofficial probation ended, not only without sanctions, but without a single formal charge brought against the school.

It's extraordinary for the NCAA not to find something somewhere to charge a school with when it invests this kind of time and money. People who've been involved in infractions cases will tell you. When the enforcement staff turns over this many rocks, it expects to find some serious dirt.

Auburn expected to come out clean, but it didn't expect to get the detailed letter it received that was signed by Thurnes. There probably isn't a more rare and valuable document in the possession of any athletic department in the country today.

It became clear on opening day of the 2011 football season, when Auburn was forced to come from behind to beat Utah State, that the Tigers were not going to defend their 2010 national championship.

Something even more important became clear Wednesday.

They no longer have to defend it. Not to the people that matter, the ones with the power to take it away.