I recently sent up a Big List post with one of the items being a link to the NCAA’s case summary for the school’s hearing over the Kelvin Sampson brouhaha, and I noted that I thought there was a book that could be written about the whole mess - about how a once-proud school had been brought so low by a recruiting scandal they might well have seen coming when they hired the man who perpetrated it. I think that it would be a fascinating read, if written well and painstakingly researched by someone such as John Feinstein, who has written gobs of really fine sports books (three of which I have read: A Season On The Brink, The Last Amateurs, and The Majors).
A lot of people would prefer just to blame Kelvin Sampson, but that’s the simplistic way to go; it takes into account none of the other context of the story, including - especially - why Indiana would have hired Sampson in the first place, knowing as they did that he came with some fairly heavy recruiting violation baggage from his time at Oklahoma. To be sure, Sampson deserves plenty of blame here for the things that he did at Indiana - but why was he given the chance to do those things in the first place?
Who were the ones who enabled Sampson to bring about this dark cloud that now hangs over Indiana University? You might be quick to say that athletic director Rick Greenspan comes in for the lion’s share of the blame here, but consider this blog post from Hoosiers Insider, an Indiana sports blog run by Terry Hutchens at the Indianapolis Star. In the post, Hutchens makes references to no less than eleven other people that Greenspan hired since he took the AD job at Indiana. Hutchens notes - and I’ll have to take his word on this for most of these people, as I don’t know much about them, other than the late, great Terry Hoeppner - that they are all high-quality people in terms of character. The only person of questionable character - and we’re NOT talking about ability or track record of success here, only character - that Greenspan hired since taking over at Indiana was Kelvin Sampson. Hutchens questions whether Greenspan was completely on board with the hiring of Sampson, or if there might have been...pressure...from higher up the food chain than Greenspan.
Now, just what kind of pressure are we talking about? What kind of pressure might there have been in 2006, when Sampson was hired? You might be thinking that there was pressure to hire a black coach, but that would be wrong because Sampson isn’t black - he is of Native American descent. Also, Mike Davis, who is black, had been the head coach at Indiana for the six years prior to the hiring of Sampson. This was no feel-good race thing - the pressure was on the Hoosiers to win, and to win NOW!
And that leads to the question of who exerted the most pressure - and why that pressure was exerted. These questions are especially relevant if it is true, as Hutchens suggests, that the hiring of Sampson might have been an anomaly for someone like Rick Greenspan. (He is also spoken well of in his capacity as AD at Army in John Feinstein’s The Last Amateurs.) I don’t imagine there are many people at a school who can overrule the AD with respect to matters related directly to the athletic department.
The university President and the Board of Trustees come to mind here. It’s no secret that the athletic department at Indiana has been in the red for a number of years. It’s also no secret that football and men’s basketball bring in the lion’s share of revenue for the athletic department, especially the television dollars. In Indiana’s case, the football team has been so bad for so long that it has fallen on men’s basketball to provide a disproportionately high percentage of revenue for the athletic department. For over fifteen years, from the mid-1970s all the way through to 1993, that was no problem. They won three national championships in that span, along with a slew of Big Ten titles (at one point during Bob Knight’s tenure, Indiana was winning the Big Ten, on average, once every two years), and were - I think - the top program in the country.
Thing is, the basketball team has fallen on hard times, too. They made it to the Sweet Sixteen in the 1994 NCAA tournament before being felled by Boston College. They have been back to the Sweet Sixteen exactly one time in the fourteen years since. They have not won the Big Ten title since 1993. When the basketball team suffers, the university suffers. That may not be an ideal situation, but that’s the way it is for Indiana - such is the symbiotic relationship between big schools and their super-successful sports programs.
The temptation of hiring Kelvin Sampson, then, must have been, for some, overwhelming. He left Oklahoma as the winningest coach in that school’s history, having taken the Sooners to the NCAAs ten times in eleven seasons and collecting three consecutive Big 12 titles (2001-2003). He even got his team to the Final Four once in that span, where they lost, in 2002, to - wait for it - Indiana. The recruiting phone call mess that brought Sampson down at Indiana was already with him when he left Oklahoma - and it must have been appealing for Sampson to think about going to a place where the program was clean and there was the distinct possibility that he could slip back under the NCAA’s radar.
We know how it turned out. Sampson, now coaching in the NBA (and no doubt helping the image of that troubled organization), is likely to receive a “show cause” order when the NCAA rules on the Indiana allegations - which means that his college coaching career is effectively over. Indiana has one scholarship player returning from last season - Kyle Taber - and a postseason penalty is not out of the question.
What disastrous set of circumstances would have forced Indiana to the point even of considering a coach like Kelvin Sampson? I think the answer is pretty clear, and can be summed up in a phrase from Scott Adams, the cartoonist who gave the world Dilbert: “A paradigm shifting without a clutch.” Indiana seemed to take for granted that its basketball team would always be there for the school, would always have the kind of success that it had under Bob Knight. And there’s the rub - you take Bob Knight out of that equation, and all of that success becomes a memory. The slide began before he was actually fired, of course - as any Indiana hoops fan who witnessed the 50-point drubbing the Hoosiers were subjected to at Minnesota in the 1994-95 season, and the string of first- and second-round exits in the NCAAs that started in 1997, will attest to - but that slide did not begin until Myles Brand was installed as president of Indiana University in 1995.
So everything that’s wrong with Indiana basketball now is because of the shameful way that Myles Brand fired Bob Knight in 2000? Well...not just because of that. See, Brand fired head football coach Bill Mallory, too. With those two terminations, Brand effectively pulled the financial legs out from under the Indiana athletic department. (Both were extremely popular coaches - and while Mallory’s success was not as spectacular as Knight’s, it should be noted that Mallory took a football program that was dismal, worse than it is even now, and made it a bowl contender pretty much every year.) And while the football team was never exactly great, the basketball team was - but they struggled to find leadership and identity under Mike Davis after Knight’s dismissal, and the record suffered. The low point came when they missed the NCAA tournament in consecutive years, 2004 and 2005 - and that meant even more missed revenue for the athletic department.
By the time Sampson was hired in mid-2006, Adam Herbert, the embattled then-president of Indiana University, had already announced that he would resign at the end of his contract term, facing strong criticism from faculty and students for communicating poorly and too often not being available to the needs of the university community. Hutchens seems to point the finger of blame - without actually doing so explicitly - in the Sampson mess on Herbert, who may have bent to the will of the trustees, who may themselves have felt the pressure to stanch the financial bleeding of the athletic department, which was losing money because of the lack of success in the football and men’s basketball programs and not making much back in the way of donations from alumni who had tightened their purse strings in the aftermath of the callow firings of Mallory and Knight.
Indiana gambled on Sampson and lost - making a bad decision for a bad reason. And while it is not directly the fault of Myles Brand, he did - by firing Knight - set in motion the chain of events that led to this mess. Like him or not, Bob Knight ran a clean program at Indiana. His players went to class, and the vast majority of them graduated. Brand’s point has always been that the academic side of college suffers because of the financial importance that schools place on athletics. Indiana never felt the pressure to put success in sports ahead of success in academics during Knight’s tenure as head coach; that pressure formed in the void left by the removal of Knight. Brand did not expose a problem that already existed - instead, his actions created an example of the very problem he was trying to stop.
Sampson’s actions have forever sullied the good name of Indiana University. I am confident at this point that Tom Crean will do his very best to rebuild the basketball program that Sampson very nearly destroyed. Sampson was willing to piss on the rules - and lie about having done so - in order to be successful as a basketball coach, and it was in part due to Myles Brand’s crusade to change the face of college sports that Sampson had the opportunity to do those things at Indiana University.
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