HOOVER, Ala. - Expecting 12 Southeastern Conference schools to stay clean is something akin to asking the Three Stooges to kick clumsiness.
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Yet SEC Commissioner Mike Slive says he is convinced that it's possible for every SEC school to be probation-free in five years.
"We will have no schools on probation in five years," Slive, who is beginning his second year at the SEC, said Tuesday at the start of the SEC Media Days. "We cannot afford not to achieve this goal. We have made some progress, but we still have a lot more to do."
Shortly after replacing longtime Commissioner Roy Kramer this time last year, Slive said all the right things about the SEC's putting scandal in its rear-view mirror. A year later, however, the league is still reeling.
Three of the SEC's 12 schools (Kentucky, Alabama and Arkansas) have football teams on probation, and six have had their football or men's basketball teams under NCAA investigation in the past two years.
Alabama was embarrassed after football coach Mike Price was fired in the wake of a night of partying at a strip club in Pensacola, Fla., and more controversy erupted after his replacement was not black.
The SEC has gone 70 years without having a black head football coach. Slive seems committed to ending that tradition.
"It's an issue that we have been talking about," he said. "We will have a minority football coach in this league, and probably during my tenure."
Closer to home, Georgia's men's basketball program contributed to the scrutiny in an academic fraud scandal that led to the firing of assistant coach Jim Harrick Jr. and the eventual resignation of his father, head coach Jim Harrick.
The SEC also has to deal with the presence of the ACC, which recently expanded to 11 teams. Traditionally known as a basketball power, the ACC is expected to be a serious threat to the SEC's football superiority when Miami and Virginia Tech begin play in the 2004 season.
There are positives, and Slive is more than eager to point them out. The league generated more than $100 million in revenue last year that will be split among its 12 teams. That's $15 million more than any other conference, and $94 million more than the SEC distributed in 1990.
Football drew more than 6 million fans to games last fall, and stadiums were filled to 97 percent of capacity. The December league championship game, a major reason conferences such as the ACC are aspiring to be like the SEC, is already sold out.
"The uniqueness of the league and the importance of football in this league makes it very special, and very hard to emulate," said Slive, formerly the commissioner of Conference USA. "I mean, you can try a whole lot of things, but it's very hard to emulate it."
No one is trying to emulate the SEC's penchant for attracting NCAA investigators, who have been on campuses at South Carolina, Mississippi State and Mississippi in the past year.
There has been talk of implementing an SEC oversight committee that would have the ability to hand down sanctions, but Slive has opposed the measure - mainly because it would put schools at the mercy of penalties from both the NCAA and SEC.
According to Slive, a committee put in place last fall has been investigating compliance matters and will release its findings in a few months.
"There's no doubt in my mind our folks understand the significance of these issues," Slive said.
No doubt one of those folks is Slive. In five years, he wants those issues to be permanently resolved - however impossible doing so might appear now.
"It's possible, and I expect it to happen," he said. "It's not going to be easy, but it's important to me. It's the area we need to get rid of. It's an area we just don't need these kinds of issues."
Reach Larry Williams at (706) 823-3645 or larry.williams@augustachronicle.com.
