NCAA president Emmert: 'With many people we may have lost the benefit of the doubt'

Here's my story, just posted to Macon.com, on the issues affecting the NCAA, amid its recent scandals.

Some key passages:

NCAA president Mark Emmert was up front when asked if the NCAA has an image problem:

“Of course it does. I don’t think there’s any question about it. And we can’t pretend otherwise,” Emmert said, sitting in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel as he attended the SEC meetings. ...

“We’ve had a number of very high-profile cases that are very disturbing coming out, and they put us in a position where with many people we may have lost the benefit of the doubt,” said Emmert, the president of the NCAA since last year. “We have to address those issues, the real ones and the perceived ones and make sure that we restore people’s confidence in the integrity of intercollegiate athletics. That’s essential.”

And Mark Richt says you can still win in college football without competing in the so-called gray area.

“I think you can win without ...,” Richt started to say, appearing to choose his words carefully, “without you know, feeling you’ve gotta cheat. That you’ve gotta break the rules or bend the rules.

“Everybody’s human. Everybody’s gonna make mistakes. The rule book is sometimes very specific, and sometimes it’s very vague. It’s hard to sit there and never have a secondary violation. But from a gut level philosophical point of view do I think you can win by doing things right and doing things within the rules, yeah.”

Again, you can read the full story here.