Making sense of the NCAA, COI, IARP and other acronyms after the Arizona Wildcats received notice of allegations

After receiving an NOA from the NCAA last month, Arizona requested a transfer from the COI track to the IARP, where the CCU would be awaiting.

Got all that? If not, that’s OK.

Strip out all those sleep-inducing acronyms, and the translation is simple: Arizona is asking for an independent body to take its infractions case over from the NCAA and, by doing so, the Wildcats are rolling the dice.

Under the standard NCAA resolution track, the enforcement staff issues schools a Notice of Allegations (NOA) at the end of its investigation, then the school replies, followed by an enforcement reply.

Then, everybody sits down for a Committee of Infractions (COI) hearing that can result in penalties levied, with appeals permitted afterward. The whole deal takes somewhere between four and 12 months after an NOA is issued.

All of that is under the peer-reviewed world of the NCAA umbrella. But the Independent Accountability Resolutions Process (IARP) is just that — a bunch of lawyers, investigators and other folks outside of Division I sports who take over the work of the NCAA enforcement staff and the infractions committee, then do their own thing.

Only they haven’t done it all yet. So nobody knows how they’ll handle Arizona, because IARP has yet to settle any of the four cases it currently has: N.C. State, Kansas, LSU and Memphis. All of those cases have been accepted by the IARP Infractions Referral Committee, which then transferred them to the IARP’s Complex Case Unit (CCU) to review the enforcement staff’s finding.

The IARP has the same tools to use and penalties to levy that the NCAA resolution track has — but no burden to follow precedents, so there’s no telling if the IARP will be tougher on schools. Or easier.

Slower. Or faster.

But we do know this: The IARP was a product of the many, often-stern recommendations by the Commission on College Basketball, which was created shortly after federal investigation into college basketball became public in September 2017.

Informally known as the Rice Commission because of chair Condoleezza Rice, the group pushed to allow penalties that include postseason bans for up to five years, head coach suspensions that can last more than one season and increased recruiting restrictions.

It also came up with the multi-tiered IARP to handle complex cases that could include alleged academic violations, the possibility of major penalties or adversarial behavior, among other things.

“Our traditional peer-review infractions process is perfectly positioned to deal with the overwhelming majority of cases that come in every year,” said Naima Stevenson Starks, the NCAA’s VP for hearing operations.

“But there’s a handful of cases — and I think these are the ones that the commission may have been thinking of — that just are not really well-situated to be handled by a process that is predicated on a collaborative, self-governing, self-regulating model. That is really what the independent structure was designed to address.”

Arizona’s case appears to be both complex and, according to a report in The Athletic, aggravated.

The university has declined to release the contents of its Notice of Allegations proactively, and so far also has declined to return it despite repeated requests from the Star under Arizona public records law.

But The Athletic reported that the NCAA accused Arizona of five Level I violations and said the school “compromised the integrity of the investigation and failed to cooperate,” with former assistant coaches Book Richardson and Mark Phelps not talking to enforcement staff.

Paul Kelly, a Boston-based outside attorney Arizona hired to oversee its NCAA issues, did not respond to a request for comment from the Star. But The Athletic reported that Kelly asked for a referral to the IARP by stating that Arizona wanted “a neutral and unbiased tribunal to hear the evidence, consider the legal and factual arguments, and issue a decision that is fair and just.”

Will UA get one?

Again, nobody knows yet. But Indianapolis Star columnist Gregg Doyel, located in the NCAA’s home city, suggested the IARP will at least be looking at things with a pretty critical eye.

In a column entitled “NCAA’s new independent infractions structure is complicated and terrifying,” Doyel noted that IARP investigators are from one of three firms: Freeh Group International Solutions, operated by former FBI director Louis Freeh; Kroll, a firm that the New York Times called “Wall Street’s private eye;” and Berryman Prime LLC, founded by a former U.S. Department of Treasury special agent who worked in the IRS Criminal Investigation Division.

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“You want those folks searching your closets?” Doyel wrote.

Here’s what also might be scary for schools: When those guys are done, the case moves over to the IARP Independent Resolution Panel, which makes a decision that cannot be appealed.

Or can it? N.C. State might have been pushing back on that possibility in April, when it accepted a recommendation its case head to the IARP but noted that it “does not concede its substantive right to appeal” and suggested it will seek remedies “within and outside of the NCAA structure.”

Since then, cases involving LSU and Kansas have been accepted into the IARP. The NCAA has confirmed the four cases have all entered the IARP but otherwise does not comment on any ongoing infractions process until it is completed, so its unknown where any of them stands.

Or how long any of them will take.

The NCAA hearing track can take between four to 12 months from the time an NOA is delivered. The IARP track can take more time, the same amount of time or maybe even less time.

The only thing for certain is that there are a lot of steps.

“Once a case goes to the IARP, all the parties are supposed to get together and come up with a scheduling plan,” said Stu Brown, an Atlanta-based attorney who works with schools who have NCAA issues. “The parties have to schedule a time to schedule a scheduling plan.”

There’s also the fact that it is 2020.

“Obviously, we’re all impacted by a global health pandemic,” Stevenson Starks said. “It has had an impact on the way we’ve had to address issues, institutions have been impacted, and counsel who support institutions are being impacted in a variety of ways. But from our end, we’re continuing to move.”

Here’s how the process is meant to move:

An IARP Infractions Referral Committee decides whether a case should be transferred in from the NCAA hearing track. That’s where Arizona’s case is now. From the time the request is made, all parties involved have 20 days to respond and the referral committee then has an

• undetermined amount of time to make a decision.

If the case is accepted into the IARP, the NCAA will briefly acknowledge the move. If it is not accepted, no acknowledgment is made and the process continues behind the scenes on the standard NCAA track.

The NCAA will not say if any cases have been referred and then rejected by the referral committee.

• Once a case is accepted, the Complex Case Unit takes over the enforcement staff’s work. It can accept the NCAA’s findings in a matter of weeks and send it on for a hearing; it can amend the Notice of Allegations somewhat; or it can rip up the whole thing and start the investigation over.

A key difference between the CCU and the NCAA enforcement staff is that while the enforcement staff essentially acts as investigator and prosecutor, the CCU has two groups within it — one with three investigators and one with three attorneys acting separately as advocates.

There is no time limit for the CCU’s work, other than the rough “case management plan” that is agreed on at the outset — which could ensure the outside investigators and attorneys keep some priority on their casework.

Once the CCU is done, the case moves to the IARP Independent Resolution Panel and a hearing is set. The resolution panel is made up of 15 people with legal, higher education and/or sports backgrounds, with five of them assigned to any one case.

Since there are four confirmed cases already in the IARP, that suggests each five-member group is already handling at least one case — and that Arizona’s case, if accepted, could face another delay.

“Every case is going to be different,” Stevenson Starks said. “Having that case management plan as opposed to boxing anything into legislative timelines is a real reflection that this process is different.”