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By Bill Altreuter

I don't know what it is about college basketball. College football is obviously every bit as corrupt, but hoops seems more exploitive to me somehow. Sure, there are "clean" programs-- I hate to admit it, but Duke seems like one-- but the whole set-up looks kinda dodgy to me. When Indiana hired Kelvin Sampson it looked like a 'lie down with dogs, get up with fleas' sort of proposition, and what do you know? That's just how it seems to have turned out. Pity, since IU is also a school that has had a reputation over the years of playing fair. Hoosier Hoops had devolved into such a circus during Bobby Knight's last days in the bunker that they must have figured a fast'n'dirty fix was called for, and that's the ride they got. Indiana looked pretty good when they finally called it a day with Knight-- and I say this as a Knight fan, albeit one with reservations. The Bloomington powers-that-be decided that Knight was not bigger than the university, and called him on his bullshit. There have been few finer hours in college sports administration in the past ten years, and then they went and screwed it up. It's a big arena to fill, after all, and people in Indiana are pretty serious about b-ball.

It comes down to a problem of emphasis. Big-time college sport seems to swallow up the mission of too many schools-- basically any school that refers to its sports as a "program", I'd say. The NCAA is ineffective because it is built to be ineffective, with the end result being that American universities, which should be regarded as being bastions of integrity, end up looking like cheats. Sampson's sin was making phone calls to prospective "recruits"-- ostensibly a technical violation of a nit-picky rule, except that there were a ton of them, he knew he wasn't allowed to, and then he lied about it. And then there's that word, "recruits". Not "prospective students". Has it really been seven years since the Knight Commission report? And why is this happening now, when I have an excuse to be following college basketball?

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on February 20, 2008 (boomark / email).