re: "Hugh Freeze Manages to Take and Shed Responsibility in One Nonapology"

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Does this clown consider this evidence? I hate what journalism has become. While I certainly think it is cause of investigation, it is not evidence, it is hearsay, and if it were admissible as evidence then all it would take

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Hearsay rules don't apply to the NCAA. Its procedures are not subject to the rules of evidence applicable in court. Moreover, there are exceptions to the rule by which any reasonably competent lawyer would be able to get this information in the record in a court. The hearsay rules are fairly complex and arcane, not nearly as simple as the general public believes.

If this appears to be too long and technical, jump to the last paragraph.

Hearsay is a rule of evidence peculiar to common law systems. It is unknown in equally sophisticated systems. It is a result of the lack of trust that judges have in the capacity of jurors to give appropriate weight to different sorts of evidence. Other systems that do not use common law style jurors do not see the need for such a rule. There is nothing sacred or particularly compelling about the rule that would mandate its application outside of a courtroom, particularly outside a common law court with a jury. In other systems what we call hearsay is routinely admitted. It is up the fact finder to guage the reliability of the evidence in light of all of the circumstances. That is exactly how most of us operate in real life when making judgments about the conduct of others when we were not eye witnesses ourselves, at least when we are not on a jury in court.

Since the NCAA does not use juries, there is no particularly compelling reason that it must or should use the hearsay rule. My point being hearsay is a technical rule, not one necessarily compelled by logic or reason. So condemning someone for relying on hearsay especially in a non-legal setting in expressing an opinion is overreaction. If the surrounding circumstances indicate that the hearsay is particularly unreliable, certainly, one should discount its value and veracity. But that is not the case here. The author of the article is not bound by the hearsay rule and is entitled to use what ever evidence is at hand in making his conclusion. It is up to the reader to determine if his conclusion is reasonable. If it isn't, the author loses the respect of his readers and damages his credibility.

In this particular case, there is no genuine dispute as to what was said in the text exchange. The veracity seems to have been admitted by Ole Miss. Millions heard Tunsil's now infamous answer In the press conference. The texts certainly allow for the drawing of an inference of improper behavior. What is not yet known is the exact context. We don't know whether this was an ongoing situation involving multiiple payments, which one may infer, or if it was part of an ongoing exchange related to a single request. Ole Miss may indeed have an explanation that will show that it did nothing improper. But the implication at this point is not favorable.

The author of the article drew inferences from information that is reliable. No one has yet disputed that the texts are genuine or the statement was not made by Tunsil. The flaw may be that the information is incomplete, not that the information we have is itself unreliable. It isn't hearsay that is the problem, but the lack of complete information. Perhaps he should have qualified his conclusion to allow for possible additional information that might affect the conclusion because the information we have so far is incomplete. That is an entirely different matter from the hearsay issue.