When in doubt, we must assume NCAA rules are dumb, awful and insane. Syracuse did, and so a planned fundraiser for a cancer-stricken child never happened.
Zack Mahoney, a QB for the Orange, was set to auction off his hair to the highest bidder — if you ever wanted to shave "BOEHEIM SUCKS" into the side of someone's head, this was your shot — to raise money for 7-year old Lillian Belfield (via Syracuse.com). The idea was for all this to go down at Syracuse's Uplifting Athletes fundraiser this summer.
Mahoney planned to put on a show at Syracuse's "Lift for Life event," getting a haircut on a tarp in the middle of Manley Field House. The football team and a handful of fans would get some laughs. The Belfields would get some support. It's easy to imagine the video going viral and drawing national attention to a good cause.
Colleges, however, have set up a web of rules to protect their financial well-being and retain the idea of amateurism, often at the expense of common sense and being able to act normally. Somewhere in the Syracuse football team's efforts to make sure they remained within NCAA rules, Mahoney's plan got nixed.
Even Mahoney is fuzzy on which rule he'd have violated. The head of Syracuse's compliance department, Dan French, blamed an internal miscommunication about the haircut itself, whatever that means.
"The plans for (the haircut) didn't make it to us in the paperwork," French said. "If we'd have known earlier we would have likely approved it."
Better safe than sorry, though; you can't really blame the school here, because the NCAA has shown a terminal lack of common sense, if not a flagrant disregard for the well-being of individuals in favor of bureacratic madness. Trust, if they could've dinged Mahoney for it, they would've.
And that's the problem; the rules are often too complicated to parse, yes, but the fact that there was a fraction of a kernel of an ounce of possibility that Mahoney donating money to a sick child, while getting nothing in return, would violate NCAA rules is sad and not surprising.
Bright side: Lillian got to keep her hair — the treatment she wound up undergoing didn't affect that — and Mahoney is going to try again next summer.
