The fun didn't stop there for North Carolina, however, which threw itself at the mercy of the NCAA and self-imposed penalties that included a $50,000 fine, a loss of nine football scholarships, and two years of probation.
The NCAA looked it over and wasn't satisfied, citing Carolina for a "failure to monitor social media." The additional punishment hasn't yet been announced, but all over the country that case, and a few others, made university athletic directors shiver behind their desks.
"The NCAA basically said, 'You guys should have known what was happening,' " Villanova athletic director Vince Nicastro said. "And that case, and the Ohio State case, too, was the trigger for a lot of us. We had to become more organized and more aggressive in our monitoring."
Last fall, Villanova contracted with Varsity Monitor, a firm that uses computer software to screen the social-media accounts of university student-athletes, looking for all manner of potential trouble. The athletes must sign consent forms and list all their accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Many schools are employing similar services, while others have beefed up the scrutiny of social media by their compliance departments, and others merely keep their fingers crossed that they don't have a Marvin Austin-type of problem in the making.
It raises some privacy questions, naturally, although Varsity Monitor has no access to direct or private messages on those sites, only the ones that are already viewable by the entire world. And the systematic monitoring could be said to have a chilling effect on freedom of speech. But when universities weigh that against the stern hand of potential NCAA sanctions, it's an easy call.
