Amid a river of red tape and a bevy of undisclosed information, several details have emerged from Billy Edelin’s most recent suspension.

At least this much is known: Edelin, a freshman point guard on the Syracuse men’s basketball team, will sit out until Jan. 18 with an NCAA-imposed, 12-game suspension for playing a dozen games in three recreational leagues last winter.

“I guess it was the worst-case scenario,” Edelin said Monday. “I know I didn’t do anything wrong in this whole situation.”

And in this whole complicated situation, this information has recently surfaced:

—Edelin never told Syracuse assistant coach Troy Weaver that he was playing in the recreational leagues, Weaver said yesterday.

—Weaver also said he didn’t meet with Edelin immediately after the player was suspended indefinitely from SU last October. (Edelin went home to Silver Spring, Md., after being suspended.) Syracuse Director of Compliance Rob Mathner discovered in the spring through a local newspaper article that Edelin had played in the leagues. Weaver found out after talking with Mathner.

—The NCAA originally handed down Edelin’s 12-game suspension last month but did not make the decision public.

—SU officials based their appeal to the NCAA Subcommittee on Student-Athlete Reinstatement in a conference call last Thursday around a competition argument. They noted that Edelin likely didn’t gain a competitive edge by playing in rec games.

—Though SU officials and the NCAA, citing privacy laws, are not making public the details of Edelin’s case nor what specifically transpired during the conference call, Weaver responded thusly when asked how the subcommittee refuted SU’s competition argument: “They really didn’t. They said it was a league. They said it was a game. It was all considered outside competition. That’s the whole problem.”

Though Edelin participated in three separate recreational leagues while serving a university-imposed, indefinite suspension after two girls accused him of sexual misconduct, he played nine of those games — in 4-on-4 format on elementary-school courts against middle-aged men — in a Monday night league in DeWitt.

Still, questions abound.

Shouldn’t Weaver have assumed that Edelin would’ve tried to brush up on his game while out of school?

Weaver said he talked to Edelin about once a week during the player’s hiatus. During his suspension, Edelin could not step on the SU campus, but he lived in an apartment — and later, a hotel — in Syracuse.

Weaver said the shock of the situation contributed to him not meeting with Edelin before Edelin went home.

“This was a very stressful situation,” Weaver said. “He had just been dismissed from school (late last October). He went home until late November or early December and came back. We were just concerned for the kid’s well-being.”

Weaver said that, at first, SU coaches didn’t think Edelin was breaking NCAA rules by playing in the leagues because “we didn’t think the rules applied because he was suspended from school.”

But the NCAA outside-competition rule (Bylaw 14.7.2) that brought Edelin’s current suspension states that an athlete is subject to the rule once he “has reported for the squad,” which Edelin did. The rule also prohibits outside competition even when “the student is officially withdrawn from college,” as Edelin was.

While at SU in September 2001, Edelin had participated in a compliance meeting required of all Syracuse athletes. Those meetings typically address regulations regarding playing in summer leagues and not the rule for which he was suspended, Edelin said.

Mathner added that the meetings typically cover issues relevant to when athletes are enrolled, not suspended.

“How many cases are you going to have,” Mathner said, “where you’ve got a kid who has been suspended, and (the rules are) going to be impacting them?”

Said Edelin: “(The NCAA Subcommittee) felt that somebody should’ve told me (the rule). That’s what they kept harping on. That shouldn’t make me culpable for what somebody else should’ve done or something that wasn’t stated clearly in the rules meeting.”

Since Edelin said he didn’t know the rule, who should be held responsible?

Syracuse Director of Athletics Jake Crouthamel called the situation “a miscommunication or lack of communication.”

Said Weaver: “It was all of our responsibility — the compliance and coaching staff’s.”

Mathner was hesitant to blame a particular person.

“Any time anybody points fingers, you’ve got three coming right back at you,” he said. “As an institution, we didn’t do our job. I’m not going to get caught in that web of pointing fingers or getting fingers pointed at me.”

Mathner launched an investigation into Edelin playing in recreational leagues when he read about it in a newspaper.

“A big flag went up,” he said.

Mathner conducted interviews throughout the summer and decided in August or September that he should submit the case to the NCAA, since there may have been a violation.

Following NCAA process, Mathner submitted a report to the NCAA’s Student-Athlete Reinstatement staff. The report included conditions proposed by SU for Edelin’s reinstatement. Last month, the NCAA responded with its own set of conditions — the 12-game suspension, based on a one-for-one precedent which states an athlete should sit out one regular-season game for every outside game played.

SU presented an appeal, which was denied in the conference call last Thursday. Edelin, Weaver, Mathner and Crouthamel were on the call, as was the five-member NCAA Subcommittee on Student-Athlete Reinstatement.

The NCAA remains tight-lipped on Edelin’s case, citing a federal amendment which protects student-athletes’ records.

Jennifer Strawley, the NCAA’s assistant director of student-athlete reinstatement said the subcommittee consists of five volunteer committee members who serve three-year terms. When a vacancy occurs, conferences recommend candidates.

The five current members are: Carolayne Henry, the Mountain West Conference’s chairwoman of the reinstatement committee and associate commissioner for compliance; David O’Connor, the University of New Hampshire’s senior associate athletics director; Cecil Huey, Jr., a Clemson professor and NCAA faculty representative; Carol Iwaoka, the Big Ten Conference’s assistant commissioner; and Carolyn O’Connell, who supervises all women’s sports at Loyola University in Chicago.

The committee is responsible for putting an athlete back in the position he would’ve been in had the violation not occurred.

Said Mathner: “That’s one of the many arguments we used to say, ‘Look, if you’re going to put the kid back (in that position), great, he didn’t gain a competitive advantage, so there’s no need for the one-for-one (penalty here).”

Said Strawley: “The committee relies heavily on case precedent. They have an entire database of cases. For every case, (the committee performs) an objective analysis of the circumstances.”

But are there mitigating circumstances, like the competition argument SU made in Edelin’s case, the one which Mathner said “held the most water”?

“That’s why there are human beings on campuses,” Strawley said, “to examine those (circumstances).”

Of the five committee members, only O’Connor could be reached. He immediately refused to comment about the Edelin case.

Jerome Rodgers, the Big East’s assistant commissioner for compliance, also declined comment.

Mathner would not comment when asked perhaps the most obvious question in this whole mess — How did Edelin’s case slip through the cracks? — saying, “Internally, folks know what transpired, and that’s what counts.”

Still, Mathner said SU would examine its current policies for educating athletes about NCAA rules.

“Do we want to make sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that the student has been given this information?” Mathner asked rhetorically. “If that means our office is going to hand-deliver something to his home in Maryland because he can’t come on campus (pause) — that’s obviously the extreme, but you learn your lessons.”

When it was pointed out to Mathner that the NCAA seems to not be rewarding SU for governing itself, the compliance director paused.

“For the general public, you’d think, ‘Well, gosh, we’re just gonna sweep it under the rug, we’re not going to self-report it.’ I know Syracuse is not ever going to do that.

“There shouldn’t be a reward for self-reporting, except for the fact that your penalty (from the NCAA) would be greater if you don’t.”

Perhaps Mathner’s already endured a greater penalty. He’s heard numerous complaints from fans that SU failed to protect Edelin. Mathner’s received so many e-mails that he “stopped counting.”

“(Edelin’s suspension is) a hit,” Mathner said. “But you live and learn. What else can you do? Move on.”

Published on November 20, 2002 at 12:00 pm