The Michigan Wolverines are currently in the middle of an NCAA investigation into an alleged widespread illegal sign-stealing scheme that has already resulted in a three-game suspension for head coach Jim Harbaugh as well as the firing of a Michigan coach and a support staffer. But Iowa Hawkeyes head coach Kirk Ferentz thinks this entire situation could have been avoided.
During a press conference this week, Kirk Ferentz thinks that if the NCAA embraced technology like the in-helmet radios used in the NFL, this whole issue could have been prevented “probably a decade ago.”
“If you want a bigger picture view, this is something that probably could be corrected really easily,” Ferentz said. “Whoever’s got to get together, just have a vote. And a lot of stuff, different technology has been talked about, it seems like, for maybe not quite a decade, but close to. And it’d be a simple way to fix everything. I know baseball had some issues, I think they’ve got that fixed. We could have fixed this probably a decade ago.”
But as Ferentz points out, the NCAA is rather slow to evolve.
“So it’s like a lot of things have happened in the NCAA and college football. We’re a really slow-moving train when it comes to being progressive, trying to improve things, just improve the quality of the game. So it kind of fits in that category. … That’s really, hardly a concern of mine. But one of these days, maybe we’ll take the steps needed to be taken just to take this off of the board as a topic for anybody,“ Ferentz explained.
Now that it is a problem though, we’ll see if the NCAA makes a move to try to prevent it in the future.
