Oregon's credibility takes direct hit.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

I was on vacation in California when I heard, over the phone, that the NCAA had found Oregon guilty of a major recruiting violation in football.

At first, I thought the caller was pulling my leg. He wasn't.

I've had two weeks to think about this, and I've thought about it a lot, through a variety of emotions:

Anger, sadness, surprise - and the grim realization that you can never be surprised, not anywhere, when it comes to rules violations in college athletics.

A major NCAA violation was committed by someone I've long considered to be one of the good guys in college athletics. Still do, which makes this awkward.

You know the story now. In January 2003, Oregon assistant football coach Gary Campbell presided over a situation in which JC running back J.J. Arrington both falsified the time he signed a letter of intent with Oregon and forged his father's signature on the document.

Welcome to Oregon, kid. We're beginning your Oregon experience with a lie. Two lies, in fact. And, just remember, we coaches like to think of ourselves as teachers.

Arrington didn't come to Oregon, but went to Cal, after the Cal coach, former UO assistant Jeff Tedford, called Oregon coach Mike Bellotti to question the validity of the letter. By the way, you wonder how many other Pac-10 coaches would have given the Ducks that courtesy.

Oregon seems to make a point that it "self-reported" this conduct to the Pac-10 and the NCAA. True enough, though Oregon knew that Cal knew. It had no choice but to self-report.

And it was quickly evident, in January 2003, that something was fishy about the Arrington situation. This newspaper reported that he'd signed a letter of intent with Oregon, then reported there were questions about the validity of that letter and that Arrington had committed verbally to Cal, with Oregon asking the Pac-10 to investigate.

The last quote in that story, from one of Arrington's JC coaches on Jan. 18, 2003, spoke volumes: "You wouldn't give up on a kid if he had signed at your place legitimately."

Without question, it was a case that we should have investigated more, rather than let fall through the cracks; had we done so, the recent announcement wouldn't have been such a shock.

Now, the Ducks are under some pressure. While they're on probation for the next two years, a secondary violation of similar nature could become major in the eyes of the NCAA; another major, in the next five years, could be very bad.

Unthinkable? I would have thought it unthinkable that Gary Campbell would have committed such a violation to begin with.

In hindsight, 2003 was the Recruiting Year from Hell for Oregon. Before signing day, there was the controversy over the recruitment of cornerback Rodney Woods, and after signing day came headlines about the Lynell Hamilton visit, which had gone infamously wrong the previous October.

And now, resurfacing, is the climax of Campbell's recruitment of Arrington, in which the assistant coach made an unallowable visit, was improperly present when a letter was signed, and turned in that letter knowing that that signing time was false - at his suggestion - and that Arrington had forged his father's signature.

The context for all that isn't irrelevant. The 2002 season had ended in shambles. The defense had no cornerbacks, the offense was losing star running back Onterrio Smith a year early to the NFL. There was an expanded Autzen Stadium to keep full, expectations to satisfy, pressure to win.

In a column, at that time, The Oregonian's John Canzano used the word "desperate" to describe Oregon during that recruiting season. I didn't agree then, but here's the case of a veteran coach turning in an improper letter of intent for a running back that Oregon needed, and "desperate" was the right word after all.

Or, straight from the NCAA release, "unethical."

From the beginning, Oregon considered this to be only a "secondary violation." The Pac-10 agreed, though clearly elements of the case went beyond a typical "secondary violation." (According to NCAA rules, a secondary violation is "isolated or inadvertent in nature, provides or is intended to provide minimal recruiting, competitive or other advantage, and does not include any significant recruiting inducement or extra benefit.')

Oregon implemented a self-imposed penalty last summer - it suspended Campbell for a week without pay, it cut back his on-the-road recruiting, and it recruited short-handed earlier this year.

And it kept it all very quiet. A football player on the wrong side of "team rules" gets suspended for a game, or a week of spring drills, and every Oregon fan knows about it.

But Campbell took his Seattle Bowl bonus money and went on an extra week of summer vacation, in essence, and nobody outside the program knew. Nor would there have been an announcement if the case had been ultimately deemed a secondary violation by the NCAA.

However, the NCAA, focusing on the unethical conduct of the coach, termed it a major violation.

Yet in the eyes of the NCAA, Oregon's self-penalty - based, the Ducks contend, on penalties in similar cases - was sufficient. The Ducks don't face a bowl ban. Hard to believe, they don't even have to forfeit a single scholarship for a year or two. Call this Penalty-lite.

Because a more appropriate and logical penalty - if the NCAA and Oregon really wanted to make a point about unethical behavior - would have been the forfeiture of a scholarship for the football program and, for Campbell, a month's suspension during the middle of football season, when the spotlight is the brightest.

To be blunt, termination wouldn't have been out of the question here.

Severe? Sure, in light of Campbell's performance over 20-plus seasons, and in deference to the difference he's made in the lives of young athletes. Indeed, if Bellotti had fired Campbell, he would have been criticized by columnists, including this one, for offering second chances to any number of athletes but not to a loyal assistant on his own staff.

But consider an analogous situation in my profession. A year ago, the Sacramento Bee fired a reporter after he turned in a story, factual in the basic details, about a San Francisco Giants game that he allegedly hadn't attended.

(In May, the reporter, who had worked at the Bee for 34 years, filed a federal lawsuit against the newspaper's parent company, and his union local, claiming wrongful termination. The case was settled out of court this week, with the reporter receiving six months of severance pay, which the company said had been offered at the time of termination.)

Campbell didn't get just a slap on the wrist; he got barely a tap.

And what are we to believe? Was this simply a one-time error in judgment, by a coach with a spotless record, as Oregon affirms, or did Campbell just never get caught before?

He isn't, after all, a young coach unfamiliar with the rules, and, good grief, he's recruited running backs with far more talent than J.J. Arrington. Despite the heat of the moment, he knew what he was doing was wrong. You have to wonder what he was thinking; he declined, beyond a written statement of apology, to meet with reporters when the announcement was made two weeks ago, and declined again to discuss the case this week.

Three speculative scenarios:

Campbell was shocked and angry that Arrington, having promised to sign the letter after a perfectly legal visit to Arrington's home in North Carolina on the evening in question, didn't keep his promise.

Perhaps Campbell, after all the years of recruiting, couldn't take being lied to one more time by an athlete he thought he'd developed a relationship with. Perhaps, after midnight, he genuinely thought he'd won Arrington back, and that bending some of a zillion NCAA rules didn't seem that bad compared with the stuff he's seen over the years by coaches from other schools.

Perhaps he even rationalized, as he helped Arrington circumvent the deadline for signing the JC letter, that it was still before midnight on the West Coast. Which doesn't rationalize that he knew it was an NCAA violation for him to be there when the letter was signed, knew that the second meeting itself constituted an illegal contact, knew that the father's signature was a forgery.

Campbell panicked under pressure. The Ducks were losing Onterrio Smith, and the lurid Hamilton visit had already happened. The running backs coach needed a running back. Arrington was Campbell's guy to win or lose; in recruiting, there's stature given to coaches who know how to "close," and Campbell, despite his personal charm, has never been mentioned at the top of the list among Oregon's best recruiters.

So, sure, there was pressure, and, on the face of it, Campbell gave in to that. If Arrington hadn't signed that letter that night, there still would have been two weeks to recruit him prior to the general signing day. Yet Campbell was so determined, in recruiting parlance, to "lock up" Arrington that night that he did something that, according to Oregon, he'd never done before - broke the rules.

As it was, the Ducks came out of that recruiting year without signing a running back.

Oregon's premise is that Campbell knew this was a violation of the principles of Oregon football and Oregon athletics.

The most significant question is whether this was truly the aberration the Ducks want us to believe that it is. What would possess Gary Campbell to break the rules, at that moment? Did he think other Oregon coaches operated that way? Had he done so himself?

Which brings us to all those storied last-minute Oregon recruiting victories, from Haloti Ngata to Cameron Colvin to any number of other remarkable triumphs over the years, the ones that left rival coaches fuming from one end of the Pac-10 to the other. You'd be more than naive not to wonder.

Which, for Campbell and Oregon, becomes the most severe penalty here. That loss of belief and trust, that damage to the credibility of a person and a program. That forfeiture of the benefit of the doubt.

Nobody wins here, except the cynics, greater in number now than two weeks ago.