Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Busy day.

I'll be busy today personally (not to mention the biggest home game of the year so far tonight, maybe I'll even find time to write about basketball), so for breaking news on when IU will hold its press conference (if that's how it's done, I suppose it could be by news release) concerning the NCAA's report, check the Hoosier Scoop, which has guys who are paid to follow these things. I'm not going to have much to say about it right now. The AP report generally says that the NCAA has issued its report to IU, but IU has 90 days to respond, which would push any sort of determination by the NCAA into the summer at least. In sum, we won't know any final disposition for a long time, but today we should find out the results of the NCAA's investigation.
I'm not defending Sampson in the least. I think my posts on this from back in the fall make clear that I'm not defending him. But my goodness, can't the Associated Press at least get the basic facts of the story correct?
It comes in response to October's announcement that a university investigation found Sampson made more than 100 impermissible phone calls while still on NCAA probation for infractions he committed during his tenure at Oklahoma.
That's plainly untrue. According to IU's report, Sampson personally made two impermissible phone calls, one of which was rendered impermissible (i.e., he had no way of knowing it was impermissible because Senderoff wasn't logging his home phone calls) and one of which was truly impermissible (and Sampson made no recruiting calls during the period when he was prohibited from calling recruits--the two impermissible calls came during the "probation" but not during Sampson's one-year "blackout"). Also, he was the recipient of about 10 three way calls that are the crux of the problem. Again, the truth is bad enough. Even if everything Sampson says is true, he did a remarkably bad job impressing upon his staff the significance of the sanctions. Nevertheless, is it asking too much for the media to report the basic findings, which were established months ago? The Associated Press? ESPN's report is more troubling. Andy Katz reports that the NCAA has characterized the violations as major. Whether that means the NCAA found something new, or whether they characterized the actions described in IU's report as major, is something we will find out today.

1 comment:

boilerdowd said...

An IU fan who's a friend of mine says there's new dirt in the report. Granted, his story is completely unsubstantiated at this point, but we'll all know more very soon.