Probe, Sidney’s eligibility stalled

Renardo Sidney and his family have refused the NCAA’s request for personal bank statements, leading to a standoff in the NCAA’s investigation into whether the high-profile basketball recruit will be eligible to play for Mississippi State in 2009-10.

Attorney Donald Jackson, who is representing Sidney’s family, issued a press release this week calling for congressional intervention into the matter because of what he described as “racially selective conduct.” Jackson shed more light on the situation during interviews with Yahoo! Sports.

The NCAA first requested the bank statements in May, according to an email provided by Jackson. In July, the NCAA interviewed Sidney and his parents without the requested bank documents.

Jackson said the family has turned over more than 1,500 pages of documents but will not give the NCAA bank statements because the request is unprecedented and is unreasonable. In a decade of representing student-athletes in similar cases, Jackson said, the NCAA has never requested bank statements and this is further evidence of the organization’s tactics.

But Steve Morgan, a former NCAA enforcement chief who now works for a firm representing Mississippi State in the Sidney investigation, said the request for bank statements is routine.

“Whenever there’s a transaction or concern about a transaction, whether it be a car purchase or payment of rent for housing or employment compensation … it’s a fairly routine matter to seek bank records to try to see if there’s any documentation that affirms or rebuts what the individual is saying or the circumstances of that payment,” Morgan said. Morgan added that the practice has been routine during the 30 years he’s been involved in NCAA investigative matters.

The investigation into Sidney – a 6-foot-11 high school All-American considered one of the country’s top prospects – has focused in part on the family’s standard of living after they moved in the summer of 2006 from Jackson, Miss., to Los Angeles. In Southern California they lived in a rented $1.2 million house. At issue is whether the Sidneys violated NCAA amateurism rules.

The NCAA, responding to Jackson’s call for congressional intervention into “a pattern of racially selective conduct by the NCAA Enforcement Staff and Eligibility Center,” issued a press release that read:

“Mr. Jackson continues to try to purposely confuse the matter at hand. The real issue is his failure to provide the requested documentation to the NCAA Eligibility Center on behalf of his client.”

Jackson said the request for the family’s bank records from the past four years underscored the NCAA’s “increasingly hostile and intrusive” investigative tactics that disproportionately affect African-American athletes. But the NCAA in its statement said:

“There is case precedent for requests of specific information, and the Eligibility Center’s requests for information from Mr. Jackson’s client is consistent with the established, standard process and previous requests for other prospective student-athletes.”

In a letter dated July 28, the NCAA specified its bank statement request, asking for “all bank deposits and monthly account balances for all accounts associated with [Sidney and Sidney’s parents] as well as any account held for the use by any of [Sidney’s AAU teams] that are or have been in the control of any member of the Sidney family since Jan. 1, 2006.”

Reebok hired Sidney’s father as a paid consultant before the family moved to Los Angeles and Sidney’s father ran a Reebok-sponsored summer team for which his son played. Jackson said the family has provided all financial records related to the Reebok consultant contract and the summer-league basketball team.

In an email dated Sept. 11 and sent to Jackson, an NCAA representative wrote, “Any administrative remedies have not begun because as a threshold matter we have not been able to make an eligibility determination due to not having access to the necessary information.”