GUEST POST: What Miami's NCAA infractions mean for college athletes

Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.

I am still out of the country, and am not scheduled to return until Friday AM. Taking the wheels today is another regular Extra Points contributor, Katie Lever.

Lever is a former Division 1 athlete and current doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin where she studies NCAA discourse and policy and completing her dissertation. She is also a freelance sportswriter and creative writer on the side. She is the author of Surviving the Second Tier, a dystopian novel about college sports, available on AMAZON. Follow Katie on Twitter and Instagram: @leverfever.

Lever asked if she could share her thoughts on the NCAA’s recent decision to impose a penalty on Miami’s Women’s Basketball team in the organization’s first NIL-adjacent infractions case. Katie’s thoughts are below:

It’s a new day in the NIL era…and that might not be a good thing for college athletes.

Last month, the NCAA handed down its first NIL-related sanction against the University of Miami. The case centers on infamous Miami booster John Ruiz, who has provided cash benefits to over 100 Miami athletes, for hosting a dinner with basketball stars Haley and Hanna Cavinder before they transferred to Miami in 2022.

Thankfully for the Cavinder twins, the NCAA’s punishments won't directly affect them—instead, the NCAA issued a three-game suspension for Hurricanes head coach Katie Meier, living up to its current standard of not punishing college athletes for booster-adjacent NIL related cases. Ruiz went unpunished by the NCAA, a decision that left the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions split. It’s safe to say that Haley and Hanna Cavinder aren’t impressed with the NCAA’s ruling either—just after the ruling, they posted a clapback TikTok video on Sunday with the caption: “Dear NCAA...scared that female athletes have value?”

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