O.J. Mayo received cash, gifts while at USC

As Noah already pointed out in the comments, ESPN came out with a report today showing O.J. Mayo received cash and gifts while he was at USC, which is obviously against NCAA rules about amateurism.

From ESPN.com:

Louis Johnson, who was a part of Mayo’s inner circle until recently, said Mayo accepted around $30,000 in cash and gifts during the past four years from Rodney Guillory, a 43-year-old Los Angeles event promoter. In addition to cash, the gifts included a flat-screen television for Mayo’s dorm room, cell phone service, a hotel room, clothes, meals and airline tickets for Mayo’s friends and a relative, according to Johnson, others with knowledge of the gifts and store receipts.

And what could be the most important part of the story:

Johnson provided “Outside the Lines” with receipts and invoices for many of the purchases, including the cell phone service.

They have proof. USC either knowingly or unknowingly broke the rules by playing someone who wasn’t an amateur.

With USC having two star players in recent years receive cash and gifts while they were at USC (O.J. Mayo and Reggie Bush), isn’t that by definition a lack of institutional control? One of the following has to be true:

1) USC was involved and knew their players were receiving all of the cash and breaking NCAA rules, or
2) USC wasn’t active enough to have any idea what was going on with their players, and didn’t learn from the Reggie Bush scandal.

Both are very bad, and as ESPN’s Pat Forde points out, should be grounds for the death penalty-type penalty that SMU famously received (ellipsis mine):

In a just world, USC basketball would have something in common with SMU football in the near future.

The death penalty.

…

You can plead ignorance once — and even that was almost impossible to believe, in the case of Bush. Plead it twice? Um, no. USC should be crushed by the NCAA, the Pacific-10 and its own administration.

Forde has it right. It probably won’t happen, but USC deserves major punishment for not having control of its program while players are breaking major NCAA rules.

The Mayo and Bush scandals aren’t even the only times USC has broken the rules in recent years — East Coast Bias has more, and Bruins Nation has had a long list somewhere I can’t seem to find. (UPDATE: Menelaus posted the link in the comments.) And even not including the money O.J. Mayo got, WILLisms.com figured out that the money Reggie Bush got was worse than what the SMU players got, even when adjusted for inflation.

It looks more and more like the problem at USC is truly a lack of institutional control.