A phone call?

Thanks to the tip from Jared from Midwest Sports Fans, and also discussed on Inside the Hall, the Indianapolis Star is reporting that IU self-reported an impermissible phone call. Here's the NCAA self-report form. I tend to agree with ITH, that this isn't a big deal, but the very nature of the violation causes some heartburn. The report provides a bit more detail than the Star article. The report indicates that on October 25, Roshown McLeod made what was the third call of the week to Bawa Muniru. Tom Crean had made a call on that Sunday, and again on Wednedsay. Because of IU's practice schedule, he thought the Sunday call had been made the previous day. IU found the violation on November 21, reported it on December 10, and imposed a sanction of no calls for a week in December. It sounds as if the staff has a good system for preventing these sorts of issues--the head coach and the responsible assistant each make no more than one call a week to a recruit--but it failed in this instance because of a misrecollection by Crean as to the date of the first call. McLeod made what he thought was his one call of the week, but he didn't have it. Expect howling from the usual quarters, but I don 't think this is a major concern, just a major annoyance.

Also, if self-reports of these sorts of violations are front page news, perhaps the Star should recall that the open records statute applies to all publicly supported institutions, and most states have similar laws. The Star says that these things are commonplace, and IU's critics will try to turn this into a big deal. Perhaps the Star should find out what Purdue, Ball State, Indiana State, IUPUI and others are reporting on a regular basis, if anything, or even other Big Ten schools in neighboring states.

The Wetzel column.

Since everyone is discussing this column, I suppose I should weigh in a few days after the fact. The long and short is that Dan Wetzel thinks that IU got off easy because of its power, Myles Brand’s position with the NCAA, and the NCAA’s improper consideration of the current condition of IU’s program. It’s fashionable, when responding to such a column, to say how much I ordinarily like Dan Wetzel’s work. I don’t. I used to like him, but now find him to be a pompous scold, a “look at the silly sports fans” sportswriter in the mold of Mitch Albom and Christine Brennan. I haven’t read any of his work in months, so there’s my bias. Here are the major problems with his column:

First, Wetzel latches on to a single line from the chairman of the infractions committee: “The committee did note the current condition of the program.” From that, single statement, Wetzel whips himself into a lather, noting that no NCAA bylaws “state ‘Indiana must field a winning basketball team.’” He notes that IU has nice facilities, a big name, a top flight coach, and so on. Frankly, I think Wetzel assigns the statement too much significance. If he wants to make an argument that IU’s sanctions were not sufficient in light of the facts and in comparison to other similar infractions case, he should make that argument (I suppose he tried with the Texas Southern stuff, which I will discuss below). But does he really believe that if Armon Bassett, Jamarcus Ellis, Eli Holman, and Deandre Thomas were still on the team, and IU were good enough for an NCAA bid, that the NCAA would have given IU a postseason ban or stripped more scholarships or something of the sort? I certainly don’t think so. Wetzel doesn't think the current roster deficit is related to any decision by IU to blow things up. I think he's wrong. The departures of Bassett, Ellis, Thomas, and McGee almost certainly were directly caused by IU's decision to fire the coach in the midst of the best season IU has had in 15 years. It was the right decision, and doesn't make up for the bad decision to hire Sampson. But I think many schools would have let it ride and tried to wring a long tournament run out of the team. IU didn't do that, and I'm glad IU didn't do that. But the team's academic and discipline problems resulted from IU's decision to can Sampson in mid-season and well before the NCAA's report came out. I don't know how Wetzel can escape that obvious fact.

Again, if Wetzel wanted to prove favoritism in favor of IU, he should undertake a detailed review of NCAA infractions cases. Instead, he latches on to a silly comparison to a case involving Texas Southern.

What about that Texas Southern case? Here’s the link to the Texas Southern report. The highlights:

This case involved the head coaches of the softball program ("former head softball coach") and the men's and women's tennis programs ("former head tennis coach") committing violations that went undetected by the institution. In the spring of 2004 the former head softball coach knowingly allowed an ineligible student-athlete ("student-athlete 1") to participate in 47 practice sessions and nine games. Student-athlete 1 also received almost $1,500 in impermissible benefits when she traveled with the team and received textbooks at no cost. She was ineligible for the benefits.
The former head tennis coach was in charge of two squads that were non-competitive until he began recruiting international student-athletes. In particular, with the large influx of international student-athletes during the 2005-06 academic year, the team improved markedly. However, the former head tennis coach enticed many of the international student-athletes with promises of full grants-in-aid, which he was unable to deliver once the prospects arrived on campus. To fund their costs of attendance, the former head tennis coach concocted a scheme in which he used legitimate institutional scholarship money, scholarship funds redirected from their intended recipients, personal funds and funds obtained from sponsors to pay the costs incurred. Inevitably, the funds ran short and serious student-athlete welfare issues arose, as some of the international student-athletes had no money for even basic human necessities. For example, during the fall of 2006 three of the international student-athletes faced eviction from their apartments and were reduced to subsisting on bread and water because they had no money for rent or food.

The violations went undetected because the institution's compliance system was inadequate, resulting in a lack of institutional control over the athletics program. The system relied upon coaches to supply accurate information to the athletics and institutional administrations, particularly in the areas of participation records, financial aid distribution and tracking travel expenses. No follow-up was done to confirm the information was accurate and the coaches were operating within the rules. Because of the lack of supervision, the violations came to light only when they were reported to the institution by an anonymous source (softball) and a tennis student-athlete.

Emphasis is mine. Texas Southern's self-imposed sanctions included the "death penalty" for the tennis program. The NCAA added four years of probation (just one year longer than IU) and a 2009 postseason ban for softball.

It seems to me that the NCAA always has been more harsh about paying players than about non-tangible recruiting advantages such as phone calls. Also, Texas Southern didn't self-report, and was found guilty of lack of institutional control. Finally, unlike most NCAA case, this one seems to have involved violations that literally threatened the health and welfare of student-athletes. It seems to me that the TSU case is distinguishable from the IU case in many ways other than the Big Ten/SWAC distinction. Indeed, except that both are cases involving "NCAA violations," I fail to see any way in which they are similar. Again, if there is a case in which a minor program was hammered harder than IU for violating the same bylaws, then find it, Dan? But the TSU case is not analogous.

So, neither his emphasis on the "condition of the program" statement nor the spurious comparison to a completely dissimilar case at Texas Southern are at all convincing. Wetzel also argues: "Its former campus leader is current NCAA president Myles Brand. Maybe that’s why the NCAA feels bad for Indiana’s current condition." Now, I've long detailed just how little I think of Myles Brand, how his post-Knight-firing speaking tour and short-notice resignation showed a disregard for IU's interests. But even if he were a beloved former leader who loved Indiana University, I would hope Wetzel would recognize the gravity of what he writes. This a very serious allegation, and Wetzel has no evidence to support the notion that Myles Brand influenced the process. In his column, Wetzel notes that IU is the only program from a major conference to have been found guilty of major violations in the last two years. While I make no excuses for what happened at IU, does anyone believe that IU is the only major conference school to have committed major violations in the last two years? If Wetzel wanted to write good column, he might wonder whether IU's phone call issues were really the worst thing that has happened in the BCS conferences in the last two years. Instead, he considers IU's status as the only sanctioned BCS school as evidence that...the NCAA is biased in favor of IU! This is some serious through-the-looking-glass bullshit, Dan.

My guess is that Wetzel has wanted to write this column for a long time. He's sure that BCS conference programs are favored by the NCAA and that minor programs are hammered. And he may be right. Unfortunately for Dan, IU is the only BCS level program that has been found guilty of major violations in the last 25 months, and so rather than keep the column in the can for a few more months, he decided to force a square peg into a round hole. It doesn't fit. If Wetzel wants to craft a case, based on NCAA precedent, establishing that IU deserved more than it got or that Texas Southern more than it deserved, I would gladly read it and respond to it. But this lazy and dishonest column doesn't come close.

The NCAA report.

Here's a link to the .pdf of the NCAA's report. It's much longer than most of the reports I have read of this nature--about 60 pages. Ultimately, the NCAA seems to have split the difference. The NCAA stood firm on its 11th hour addition of the "failure to monitor" charge, concluding: "

Its monitoring of the former head coach and the men's basketball program proved both untimely in execution and inadequate to fulfill the requirements of heightened scrutiny.

Nevertheless, the NCAA added no additional penalties. Ultimately, the NCAA decided that hiring Sampson was such a gamble that IU was obligated to review by hand every single telephone record as it came in the door. Factors in IU's favor on this count were IU's nearly 50 years without a major violation, the significance of the self-imposed sanctions (including lost scholarships, significant recruiting restrictions on Crean, Dakich, Sampson, and one of the assistant coaches, the slot then filled by Dakich and now filled by one of Crean's assistants), and the way that IU dealt with Sampson and the remaining players.

So, that's that. IU kept its nose clean for 50 years beforehand, so doing so for the next three years (and hopefully for long after that) shouldn't be a problem. If anyone wants to argue that IU didn't pay a price, I would direct you to IU's results after mid-February of last year through this season, and to a comparison of last season's roster to this season's.

Probation.

According to the Hoosier Scoop, IU will be on probation for three years, but will receive no additional sanctions other than what IU self-imposed. It will be interesting to read the report, of course, but my guess is that the outcome will satisfy everyone who matters (the definition "everyone who matters" does not include Purdue and Illinois fans or their douchebag coaches, of course).

The Hoosier Scoop doesn't say what happened to Sampson and Senderoff. That will be interesting.

NCAA to announce decision at 4 p.m.

This will be an unusually eventful afternoon for the IU basketball program. Per the Indianapolis Star, the NCAA will announce its disposition of IU's case in a 4 p.m. conference call today. That call will commence shortly after the conclusion of IU's game against St. Joseph's in Maui.

Wertheim SI article about IU basketball.

Jon Wertheim, the primary tennis writer for Sports Illustrated but also a Bloomington native who sometimes delves into basketball, wrote a lengthy article about IU basketball for this week's edition of SI. It's definitely worth a read. Also, Inside the Hall landed a quick interview with Wertheim that details the story behind the story. You should read the whole thing, but some of the highlights:

• Wertheim provides more detail on the hiring process that we have seen before. (certainly more than local reporters have provided). Adam Herbert, the former IU president, who reportedly spearheaded the decision to hire Sampson, did not respond to Wertheim's inquiries. Mr. Herbert, Indiana taxpayers and IU students paid you a lot of money. Man up and publicly discuss your role in one of the most sordid episodes in IU's athletic history.
  
• Wertheim is, to my knowledge, the first to actually discuss the issue with Sampson (by discuss, I mean something beyond reading a pre-prepared statement).
• More detail on the in-season suspensions and the dismissal of Armon Bassett and Jamarcus Ellis from the team.

Some disagreements.

• The usual (paraphrase) "Mike Davis was a good man who wasn't accepted by IU fans because he isn't a Midwesterner or a former Hoosier. " Bunk. Mike Davis wasn't accepted because he was a bad coach, a coach whose one great tournament run bore no resemblance to any other part of his career, an excuse-making crybaby, and a poor recruiter. Wertheim's own words contradict this claim. Kelvin Sampson, who is neither a Midwesterner nor a former IU player, was instantly accepted and was well-liked by most until he committed NCAA violations at IU. While ultimately vindicated, the likes of Ted Kitchel's comments were few and far between.
• Again, whiole I'm glad Sampson is gone, I don't think there was anything wrong with hiring Jeff Meyer, an experienced Division I head coach with time as an assistant at Missouri and Purdue. Wertheim describes the hiring of Roshown McLeod by Crean as a "sign of the times." It's important to draw a distinction between hiring an unqualified assistant coach because of his connections and hiring a qualified assistant coach for his connections.
  

Again, despite my minor quibbles, this is an excellent article and well worth your time.

IU's response to failure to monitor charge.

IU now has responded to the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions concerning "allegation 6" against IU arising out of the Sampson debacle. You may recall that this charge was added by the committee after the June 2008 hearing and was not the work of the NCAA's enforcement staff. Unsurprisingly, IU hammered that issue hard. Here's a link to Inside the Hall, which compiled the documents (one main document, two sets of exhibits) in one post.

The essence of IU's position can be found in the executive summary on page 11 of the first pdf document. The highlights:

• IU's "two-tiered, redundant" monitoring program actually discovered the violations;
• False information provided by IU coaches prevented the university from discovering the vast majority of the improper calls;
• IU performed a 100 percent audit of the coaches' identified phone records, as opposed to an average of 10 percent at other I-A schools, according to a survey;
• Only four calls, of 70,000 monitored, could have been discovered;
• IU did discover the calls in a timely manner and self-reported;
• IU's self-imposed sanctions are sufficient.

Other notes:

• At page 18, IU quibbles with the way the allegation is written, claiming the bylaw citation is incorrect and that the date range is overbroad.
• Also on page 18, IU notes that it requested a postponement of the hearing because of McRobbie's prior commitments and because of the associate AD's (presumably Grace Calhoun, perhaps Jennifer Brinegar) maternity leave. IU was told that the agenda for the August meeting was full, but at the hearing, the committee members contradicted that, claiming that IU could have selected the August meeting, and the committee also considered hearing the failure to monitor charge at the "full" August meeting. Right hand, meet the left hand.
• Continuing on to page 19, it appears that the Committee focused the initial hours of its inquiry on IU's monitoring systems, and issued the FTM charge just days after the hearing. While IU's response doesn't come right out and say it, the implication is, "hey, assholes, if you knew you were going to charge us with FTM, and you planned to grill us for hours about it, why didn't you amend before the hearing and resolve the whole thing in August?"
• IU also noted the vagueness of the FTM charge, which lacked the factual detail of the other charges.
• IU notes, and I think this is an important point, that the discovery of the violations was as a result of the second tier of monitoring. Unless any missed violation is a "failure to monitor," then isn't the fact that a double-check revealed the problem evidence of an effective, if imperfect, monitoring effort?
• On page 36, IU implores the committee members to check with their own institutions to see how their monitoring programs stack up. It's a good line, but I'm not sure I would taunt a rabid animal like the NCAA.
• At page 41 of the pdf, IU notes that the NCAA seems to be imposing a "strict liability" standard. Strict liability is a legal doctrine, most commonly applied against the manufacturers of defective products, that basically means that if a product causes harm, the manufacturer is liable even if the manufacturer acted reasonably. It's not quite as simple in application as "it happened, so you're on the hook," but that's the concept.
• Amazingly, IU doesn't seem to have any better insight than the rest of us about what exactly the NCAA means by "atmosphere of non-compliance" and the like. I presumed that there must have been some smoking gun at the hearing that would make this more obvious, but it doesn't seem so.
• Pages 54-55: "this is an unethical conduct case, not a failure to monitor case." IU notes the strong cases against Senderoff and Sampson.
• At page 58, IU notes that the committee's approach amounts to a prohibition of hiring of any coach who has committed NCAA violations, or at least holding a school strictly liable for any similar violations that occur.
• IU notes that asking coaches, as a matter of course, to turn over their home phone records has implications. Because IU is a public institution, the records then would become public records, discoverable upon a proper request by any citizen.
• As to the idea that IU didn't properly respond to the secondary violations involving Derek Elston, IU details its investigation process.

In sum, IU seems to be saying, between the lines, that if the NCAA wants to impose draconian rules on institutions that hire coaches with NCAA records, it should impose such rules, but that existing rules and precedent don't justify a finding of failure to monitor.

Finch granted NCAA waiver.

The Hoosier Scoop reports something quite foreign to IU fans recently: good news from the NCAA. Safety Jerimy Finch has been granted a waiver, based on extenuating family circumstances, from the requirement that he sit out a season after his transfer from Florida to IU. For those who aren't familiar, Finch is a former star at Warren Central who was the nation's top safety prospect as a high school senior. Initially, he committed to Michigan, but sometime in fall 2006 switched his commitment to IU. On the eve of signing day, Florida suddenly has a scholarship available, and Finch signed with the Gators. He played in Florida's first three games in 2007, but after making his first career interception against arch-rival Tennessee, he broke his leg in the same game and missed the rest of the season. As I've mentioned a million times, I'm not a recruiting fanatic, but off the top of my head I would guess that Finch is the most highly rated prospect to enroll at IU since Bo Barzilauskas in the early 1990s. Hopefully, this arrangement will be better.

I don't know much about the circumstances affecting Finch's family, and I held out no hope that he would play before 2009. This is a nice gift on the eve of the season, and should help IU with the defensive backfield, the only unit of IU's defense that lost many players because of graduation.

Odd hire.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, Chad Hawley, an assistant commissioner for compliance for the Big Ten, changed his mind about becoming IU's assistant AD for compliance and decided to stay at the Big Ten office. Hawley, who has a law degree, was to make just over $100,000 per year. IU now has elevated Ian Rickerby, who had held the title of "director of compliance" since March 2007 (I think I have been using that term sloppily--the position being filled is assistant athletic director for compliance). I can't find the article that included his salary, but it is somewhat lower than what IU was going to pay Hawley. The good news, of course, is that Rickerby wasn't with the compliance department when the worst of the worst was occurring. He joined the department on March 1, 2007, just a few weeks before the sanctions on the basketball staff were to end. Of course, that also means that IU's new assistant athletic director for compliance has just over a year of experience in the field. He previously had been an assistant soccer coach at IU, Iowa, Evansville, and Purdue. As Chris at the Hoosier Scoop notes in comments, it's fair to assume that this probably isn't a long-term hire and was a move made by necessity given the current upheaval in the athletic department. Still, while I mean no offense to Rickerby, the idea of hiring an outsider with conference-level experience to oversee what certainly will be a period of probation was much more appealing than promotion of a relatively inexperienced insider.

Also, the British Empire's takeover of IU continues. President Michael McRobbie is an Australian, and Rickerby is from England. And whatever the merits of the hire, "Ian Rickerby" is fun to say in a fake British accent.

In other news:

• Today is the first of two Big Ten media days. Hopefully there will be much to say tomorrow and Saturday.
• ESPN has introduced a Big Ten blog (terrorist fist bump: Black Shoe Diaries). The blog is authored by Adam Rittenberg, formerly of the Arlington Heights Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago paper long known for its excellent sports writing (Bruce Miles, the DH's Cubs beat writer, runs circles around his competitors at the Tribune and Sun-Times). I haven't read much yet, but he seems to be posting a wealth of information daily and doing some original reporting and interviewing as well. I don't expect that he will cover any individual team as well as those on the right sidebar do, but it seems like a nice quick way to catch up on the entire conference.

Around Indiana.

Spring practice still is a few weeks off, but here are a few IU-related notes from around the Internet:

• The Hoosier Scoop reported this on July 10, but on July 19 the Indianapolis Star decided that it was news and then the wire services picked it up: Chad Hawley, who was going to leave a position at the Big Ten office to become IU's director of compliance, changed his mind and is staying in Chicago. On June 3, a few days before IU's NCAA hearing, IU announced that compliance director Jennifer Brinegar would be assigned to a new position overseeing on-campus recruiting. It's probably irresponsible to speculate, because Hawley might have had personal or professional reasons unrelated to IU that led to his change of mind. But I'll speculate anyway. There has been some speculation concerning whether Rick Greenspan's resignation, announced on June 26 effective at the end of 2008, was long-planned or was a direct response to the NCAA's addition of the failure to monitor charge. The timing of Hawley's decision when compared to the NCAA timeline suggests that he expected to be working for Rick Greenspan for the forseeable future and changed his mind after Greenspan's sudden resignation. Again, that's one of dozens of possible explanations for Hawley's decision, and I have no information other than the circumstantial evidence above, but certainly it's another event that tends to suggest that IU and its counsel were blindsided by the FTM charge.
• IU will use FieldTurf to replace the five year-old Astroplay surface that was ruined by the early summer floods in southern Indiana. Although the press release promises only that the field will be ready for IU's August 30 opener, all indications here are that the field will be ready for the Drum Corps International championships, which begin on August 7, less than three weeks from today. As I have mentioned before, conducting this event as Memorial Stadium is itself a contingency plan: DCI and Indianapolis entered a multi-year deal to host the championships at the new Lucas Oil Stadium with the understanding that the 2008 event would be in Bloomington if LOS wouldn't be ready by early August.
• Football recruiting continues. Be sure to follow the Hoosier Scoop for recruiting news, including this post noting that IU now has 14 commitments for its 2009 freshman class. As far as the recruiting services are concerned, most of these players are in the two star range (and committing to IU won't help their rankings no matter how they play as high school seniors) but newcomer Hugh from the Hoosier Scoop makes a good observation:

  The hidden benefit of receiving so many verbals so early is that you can now focus on the big fish, the four and five-star recruits that are game-changers. Instead of spending the fall and winter trying to slam together a class, Lynch can focus on a few players and give them more time than might have been available in years past.

  Recruiting isn't an exact science, but that certainly sounds like a decent plan.

Where from here.

As I said last week, my goal is to return to more-or-less daily posting from now through the Thursday of the Big Ten Tournament (see, because the basketball team...it's gallows humor). The big caveat is that we are expecting son #2 in mid-October (yep, great timing, especially with my Cubs in first place), so things may get a bit dicey around that time. When football season begins, I'll be doing the usual preview/wrapup posts as I did last year, and I'm sure that the Big Ten Bloggers roundtables will begin soon (Northwestern blog Lake the Posts has been sponsoring an insanely detailed preseason prediction roundtable, but I did not partake).

Between now and then, I'll be doing the following:

• Before last football season, I did a "season that was" feature from scratch, recapping each game of the 2006 season. I plan to do the same this year, but this time I'll be able to recycle my own work, refreshing your mind and mine about how the memorable 2007 season transpired. These won't be on any sort of regular schedule, but I plan to start this week.
• In August, of course I will take a look at IU's returning roster: what the Hoosiers lost, who is returning, and the like.
• As with last season, I probably will preview IU's opponents during game week rather than before the season, but I will do my best to point you in the direction of preseason previews posted by bloggers covering IU's opponents.
• Last summer, I wrote quite a bit about the Big Ten Network saga. It's not nearly as up-in-the-air as last year, but it will be interesting to see whether the other major cable providers such as Time Warner and Bright House (I don't know if Bright House counts as major, but BH covers quite a bit of central Indiana, including downtown Indianapolis, the old city limits of Indianapolis, and some suburban areas) are on board by the time the football season begins.
• Of course, I'll continue to follow the NCAA saga and IU's search for a new athletic director.

What you won't see from me are any more predictions about the NCAA proceedings. Most conspicuously here, but also elsewhere, I was quite confident in my prediction that IU would not face a failure to monitor charge. I still stand by what I said about NCAA precedent, but this situation is unique and doesn't seem to fit in to any sort of framework. While penalties such as TV bans and postseason bans seem a bit much in these circumstances, it's now obvious to me that even though IU's NCAA record was pristine, the NCAA is going to treat IU as a "repeat offender" to the full extent possible as punishment for hiring Sampson. Nothing would surprise me at this point, so no more confident predictions from this corner. As I said in the linked post:

I think there are two competing equities here that will pull the NCAA Committee on Infractions in two directions: first, the temptation to hammer IU for knowingly hiring a coach with an NCAA history who then committed similar infractions in his first year, on one hand; and on the other, IU's attempts to monitor the behavior of the staff and IU's prompt self-report and investigation.

The Committee made clear a couple of weeks ago in which direction they are being pulled.

In any event, it's football season, and my focus will be there for now.

More on the failure to monitor charge.

First, here's the letter (hat-tip: Inside the Hall). It was faxed to Ice Miller on June 19, so IU has had it for a week. The IU hearing took place on June 13 and June 14, so the Committee on Infractions didn't waste any time in adding this additional charge against IU.

Before discussing the substance, I'll skip to the end. IU has three response options: 1) do nothing, and rest on the earlier presentation; 2) file a written response; or 3) file a written response and request an additional hearing. Based on IU's stated intent to "vigorously" contest these charges, I would guess that IU will choose option 3. The downside of that option is that it could delay the proceedings. And, of course, my track record of predictions concerning this scandal is not good.

The NCAA lists six "particular instances" of failure to monitor:

a) Failure to adhere to the self-imposed corrective actions set forth in IU's August 1, 2006 report to the NCAA (this was IU's adoption of the Oklahoma sanctions, I think, although I can't find the document online, as it predates this blog);

b) the "scope and nature" of IU's violations of E, F, and L of the report sanctioning Oklahoma. E reduced the frequency of permissible calls to high school juniors; F reduced the frequency of permissible calls to high school seniors; L imposed the one-year phone call ban and off-campus recruiting ban against Sampson.

c) the "scope and nature" of the violations set forth in allegation 2 of the case summary, which described the impermissible calls to recruits and their guardians.

d) failure to uncover violations in a timely fashion. This is the issue that has received the most publicity, of course: the phone calls.

e) failure to provide "meaningful follow-through" as to the above violations.

f) failure to provide "extra-close scrutiny" in light of the history of violations, and the university's approach to investigation of secondary violations.

g) atmosphere of non-compliance in the men's basketball program.

I have a tough time with a) though d). The NCAA has known all of those things for months or even nearly a year. As for f) and g), I suppose these are the sorts of items that could have arisen at the hearing. In the absence of new facts, it's hard to know what led to this increase, and the NCAA letter is fairly vague. My amateur assessment is that the NCAA's main motivation is punishing IU for hiring Sampson in the first place. Unfortunately, I think that the NCAA's actions could provide a chilling effect toward other programs. In particular, item d) bothers me. "Better late than never" may seem like a flimsy position, but punishing a school for late self-reporting of a violation creates an incentive to not report late-discovered violations at all.

I'm glad that IU reported the violations as soon as it found them and pulled the trigger on Sampson as soon as the NCAA issued its report in February. Both were the right thing to do. But I'm not sure that the NCAA's actions create much incentive for the next school to do the same thing.

I'll try to check back tomorrow with more detail.

Mea Culpa.

Yep. Busy day, just read the news. Nothing to comment upon, haven't read anything, but obviously my predictions that IU wouldn't be charged with failure to monitor were wrong. More later.

Judgment day, part II.

The Hoosier Scoop guys traveled to Seattle to cover IU's hearing before the NCAA's Division I Committee on Infractions. It seems unlikely that there will be much to report, otehr than Kelvin Sampson's determined but unsuccessful efforts to avoid the cameras, but the H-T does report that the hearing has carried over into day two. I have no idea whether that is good, bad, or neutral.

Mark Alesia really wants the NCAA to add charges.

As has been standard in the run-up to Friday's NCAA hearing in Seattle, the Indianapolis Star is reporting long-known facts as if they are breaking news. As I write this post, the banner headline on the Star's website reads: "Bills: IU compliance staff missed calls." No shit? You mean that when IU held that press conference in October 2007, and admitted that an intern discovered improper calls in a year-end audit, which led to the discovery of the three way calls, that meant that the compliance staff had missed those calls earlier? Really? You needed to see the bills themselves to know that? Certainly, it's nice that the Star requested the bills themselves and has provided us with a look at them. But we have known this for as long as we have known that there was a problem.

Alesia, in what nominally is a news article, engages in some blatant editorializing by describing "easily identifiable three-way calls." Indeed, this article and the article that I discussed three weeks ago lead to the impression that Alesia is practically begging the NCAA to add an institutional failure to monitor charge against IU. Much as Mark might want that, and with the constant caveat that I'm not an expert on NCAA procedure, that seems unlikely. As I discussed in the post linked above, Long Beach State received notice of the Committee on Infractions's revision of the charges in time to provide a written response and in time to address the issue at the hearing. Not only has the Committee not done that, but in recent weeks the Committee actually reduced one of the charges against IU (the Derek Elston t-shirt/backpack issue) to a minor violation. Certainly, I suppose (again with the caveat) that the Committee could add charges and schedule another hearing. But again, what the Star reports today has been obvious since day one. The three way calls were detectable earlier than they were actually detected.

Certainly, the compliance office should have left no stone unturned. But I do think it's important to remember that what is obvious in hindsight isn't always apparent in the moment. Senderoff wasn't prohibited from making three way calls. He wasn't prohibited from making three way calls with recruits. He was prohibited from making three ways calls involving Sampson and recruits. Obviously the prudent thing to do would be to identify the third party on each of the three ways calls. Yet, it's also understandable that the compliance staff's main objectives were 1) reviewing Senderoff's records to make certain that he was complying with sanctions and NCAA rules; and 2) to review Sampson's records to make ceretain that he was complying with the sanctions and NCAA rules. Again, given the stakes the compliance staff should have left no stone unturned. But it is understandable that they fell into the trap of checking Senderoff's records for Senderoff's compliance and Sampson's records for Sampson's compliance but not Senderoff's records for Sampson's compliance.

Alesia again raises the specter of the Long Beach State case. As I have noted before, the LBS case is quite different factually and was in a different procedural posture when the Committee added the "failure to monitor" charge. But it seems to me that the far more relevant precedent would be the case against Oklahoma, the case involving Sampson's similar violations at his former school. In that case, the NCAA did find OU guilty of failure to monitor. Why isn't the Star talking about the OU case, which seems to be the most facually analogous recent NCAA proceeding? Here's what the NCAA Committee on Infractions said about OU's call monitoring (emphasis added by me):

The enforcement staff took the position that the facts of this finding demonstrated a lack of institutional control. The institution asserted that the facts of this finding demonstrated a failure to monitor the telephone contacts with prospective student-athletes. The committee finds that the facts establish a failure to monitor by the institution.

As shown by over 500 impermissible calls made over four years going undetected, the system in place to monitor phone calls made by the men's basketball coaching staff was wholly inadequate. The coaching staff got together on Sunday nights, reviewed the calls they had made and recorded a countable call on forms different than those supplied by the compliance office. The completed forms weren't turned in to the compliance office but were instead stored in a filing cabinet in the basketball office.

However, review of the records by compliance personnel was sporadic at best, occurring approximately once per year. It wasn't possible to say with certainty when the reviews took place, as no records were maintained by the institution. Compounding the problem was that the reviews were conducted by interns rather than by trained and experienced compliance personnel. But perhaps the most glaring deficiency was that the logs produced by the basketball staff (which were incomplete since the coaches failed to record all calls made) were never cross-checked against institutional phone records; the coaches were taken at their word when even a cursory review of men's basketball office, cell phone and calling card bills would have revealed the myriad of impermissible calls being made by multiple coaches over a period of years.

Though seriously flawed, a system for monitoring the phone calls did exist. The coaches were regularly educated regarding phone contact rules, written policies were in place and forms to record the activities were supplied to the coaching staff. It was the monitoring of the calls that contributed to the problems; the phone logs compiled by the coaches were not checked on a regular basis and the reviews that took place did not involve cross-checking the logs with available institutional records. Finally, the violations involved only one aspect of one sport. For these reasons, the committee finds that the facts establish a failure to monitor the men's basketball program by the institution rather than a lack of institutional control.

Hey, NCAA, don't knock interns! The point, however, is that IU's compliance program did all the things that Oklahoma's did not do. The coaches turned their logs in rather than maintaining them in the basketball office. IU maintained detailed records. Compliance staff cross-checked phone records with the phone logs. That monitoring failed to detect the violations in a timely manner, but it ultimately did detect the violations, obviously, because IU reported the violations itself. I don't mean to apologize or rationalize for IU's compliance staff or athletic department, which failed at an important task. But failure to detect a particular violation isn't necessarily "failure to monitor." If it were, every NCAA case would include the allegation.

The NCAA isn't always a predictable organization, so there's a decent chance that I will be eating my words. But based on the facts of IU's case, consideration of the LBS and OU cases, the current procedural posture of the case, and the Committee's recent downward revision of one of the charges, I think it's highly unlikely that IU will face an institutional failure to monitor charge. The NCAA being the NCAA, Alesia may turn out to be right, but he hasn't made a convincing argument that a last-minute "failure to monitor" charge is a real risk for IU.

Argh, I can't resist.

I have sworn, many times, that I would not give this guy the time of day. But it's the middle of the offseason, I haven't posted much lately, so here it is. Bob Kravitz continues to suck. The supposed point of his column--that Rick Greenspan should be fired--is a perfectly respectable position argued in a completely disrespectable way.

Really, all that anyone needs to know about Bob Kravitz is contained in the first sentence:

After reading all 96 pages of the Tolstoy-esque case summary regarding Kelvin Sampson and Indiana University....

Here, Kravitz is attempting to impress us with a literary reference. "Wow, Bob Kravitz has heard of Leo Tolstoy, who wrote War and Peace, a really long book!" The NCAA's case summary was 96 pages, long, including a list of the participants, a table of contents, and many charts. If Bob Kravitz thinks that this document is "Tolstoy-esque," he really has no idea how the world works outside of the toy section. The rest of the article removes any doubt about that proposition.

Again, I can get on board with the idea that Rick Greenspan should be fired. But here's a quick sampling of where this column falls short:

• The article implies that Kravitz didn't know that IU received an e-mail clarification from the NCAA in May 2006. That's been known since IU released its self-report last October. Of course, if Kravitz thinks that 96 pages is Tolstoy-esque, let's take bets on whether he read IU's self-report.
• Kravitz suggests that an institutional "failure to monitor" allegation is on the table. As the Star reported a few weeks ago and as I discussed in this post, the NCAA Committee on Infractions did add a failure to monitor charge against Long Beach State even though it had not been charged by the enforcement staff. As I noted earlier, the Long Beach State case is quite different from the IU case. LBS involved the institution's willful blindness to the sudden academic excellence of its borderline recruits. IU's case is different. But in any event, the Committee on Infractions informed LBS long enough before the hearing that LBS had the chance to brief the issue before the hearing. The hearing is five days away, and not only has the Committee not done that to, IU, but the Committee actually reduced one of the charges, the T-shirt and backpack given to Derek Elston, to a minor violation. I'm not an expert on NCAA procedure, but if Kravitz has reason to believe that IU is facing an institutional monitor charge, he should present us with the evidence.
• Kravitz just lies when he says that Sampson was on a "Bob Knight Zero Tolerance Program." Not true, not analogous.
• The context of the statement is that IU should have fired Sampson immediately upon discovering the evidence of three way calls. Hiring Ice Miller to investigate was overkill, according to Kravitz, as was waiting until the spring to fire him. I'm not going to defend every step of IU's process here, but Kravitz's easy answers are what should be expected from a guy who has never done anything for a living other than run his mouth. Kelvin Sampson wasn't an at-will employee. Had IU canned him in July 2007, IU would have owed Sampson over $3 million absent sufficient evidence to terminate him for cause. In Kravitz's world, IU would have been making that decision based only on ten three-way calls: no witness interviews, no coaches' home phone records, no Derek Elston backpack, nothing else. By the time IU actually pulled the trigger, IU was in a strong enough position to get Sampson to sign away his rights for 30 cents on the dollar. Now, maybe Kravitz would argue that money was no object, and IU should have done whatever was necessary to rid itself of Sampson at the first hint of trouble, no matter the cost. But that's much easier to say with hindsight, knowing today what the investigations by IU and the NCAA revealed. More importantly, that would have been an honest and nuanced article, and Kravitz isn't big on honesty or nuance.

To be clear, I would shed no tears for Rick Greenspan. I still hope that Kravitz, Hutchens, or someone will someday be able to tell us exactly what happen in February and March 2006. But absent that, some clear-headedness would be nice, but I know I'm looking in the wrong place.

Within 75 miles of downtown Indianapolis are an NFL team, and NBA team, two Big Ten universities, another Division I-A football program, four more Division I basketball programs, and the two largest one-day sporting events in the world. The state's largest paper can trouble itself to hire only one general-interest sports columnist...and it's this guy.

I did not have telephonic relations with that recruit.

Inside the Hall has been all over the recent release of the "case summary" from the NCAA. The summary doesn't include all of the underlying evidence, but does provide excerpts of the transcripts of interviews with former recruits such as Demetri McCamey and Dujuan Blair and Yvonne Jackson, the mother of former IU signee Devin Ebanks, and former IU director of basketball operations Jerry Green. The case summary is an interesting read, but the quick summary is that if Kelvin Sampson is telling the truth, he is the victim of a very elaborate conspiracy.

Failure to monitor?

Mark Alesia of the Indianapolis Star notes today, correctly, that it's possible that the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions could add charges, including failure to monitor, even if the NCAA enforcement staff did not initially charge IU with such violations. To analogize to the legal system, it would be as if a judge had the right to add criminal charges that had not been filed by the prosecutor. Alesia notes that the Committee recently did just that in a proceeding against the Long Beach State basketball program. While Alesia is technically correct, there are some important differences that distinguish the Long Beach case from IU's situation.

First, it's important to consider the Long Beach State situation and how it differs from IU's situation. Here's the NCAA's public report on LBS. After a couple of lousy seasons, LBS signed a handful of academically questionable junior college kids (academically questionable even by juco standards, that is). The NCAA enforcement staff charged LBS with the following: "impermissible inducements and benefits," mostly payments by assistant coaches for summer and correspondence courses used to get these players eligible; "improper transportation and phone contacts," all involving one player who failed to be admitted to LBS and was therefore reclassified as a prospect; "unethical conduct" by two assistant coaches in misleading the NCAA and otherwise obstructing the investigation; and "failure to monitor by the head coach," which is what it sounds like. As Alesia notes, the NCAA Committee on Infractions added a charge of "failure to monitor by the institution."

The first question, of course, is whether there is really a chance that the Committee on Infractions will add charges. I'm no expert on NCAA procedure, but I tend to doubt it, or at least doubt that IU will be forced to address such an issue at the June 13 hearing. The NCAA's report on LBS makes clear that the Committee notified LBS that it would consider the institutional failure to monitor charge at the hearing. LBS responded at the hearing and in two post-hearing filings. While there's no indication of when the Committee informed LBS of the new charge, IU's hearing is three weeks from tomorrow. While I would never underestimate the ability of the NCAA to act unfairly, that would be a pretty tight timeline for IU's counsel to adequately prepare a response to a new allegation. Of course, it's always possible that the NCAA will put IU in a time crunch or will postpone the hearing, but my hunch is that if IU were going to have to address new charges at the hearing, the Committee would have told IU by now.

Second, the facts of the LBS situation are readily distinguishable from IU's situation. In a nutshell, LBS admitted a bunch of academically marginal players. Several of those players moved to Southern California, enrolled in schools other than LBS, and did surprisingly well with very heavy course loads. As the NCAA notes, LBS pretty obviously should have known that something was up, but simply covered its eyes and claimed that it had no obligation to monitor these recruits until they were enrolled at LBS. The NCAA disagreed. I think it's important to consider the entire paragraph that contained the "high alert" language cited by Alesia:

These academic deficiencies in and of themselves should have put the institution on high alert. So too should the fact that these six prospects constituted the majority of the recruiting class in men's basketball. Yet there was neither effort to educate or remind the coaches as to their responsibilities in dealing with the prospects nor oversight of their conduct to ensure rules compliance. These non-actions clearly constitute a failure to monitor on the part of the institution. Conversely, if the athletics administration was not aware of the number of prospects who faced serious questions regarding their admission and eligibility, then this too was a failure to monitor.

Later in the discussion, the NCAA throws in this one liner that certainly should give us pause:

Finally, as set forth in Finding B-3, 23 impermissible phone calls were made to student-athlete 1 from August 2004 to May 2005. The institution's compliance office failed to detect them in a timely fashion, which is also indicative of a failure to monitor.

The passage in bold sums up why I don't expect IU to face an institutional failure to monitor charge. Obviously, IU's compliance procedures were not perfect. If IU's procedures had been perfect, IU would have caught the three-way calls within weeks after they were made instead of months. And of course, IU never should have hired Kelvin Sampson in the first place given his history with improper phone calls. Nevertheless, let's not lose site of the fact that IU's "monitoring" is the only reason this issue is before the NCAA right now. IU notes that the arcane way in which three-way calls are noted made them difficult to detect. Still, IU, when doubling back over previously reviewed bills, found the calls and reported the calls to the NCAA. IU required all of its assistants to list all phones used to make recruiting calls. All three assistants lied on those forms. Also, in contrast to LBS, IU did try to educate the coaches, through weekly meetings and e-mail updates, of their obligations. It seems to have gone in one ear and out the other, but IU's efforts are well-documented.

It is further worth considering that the 23 impermissible phone calls made by LBS were made to a former signee who had been reclassified as a prospect after he wasn't admitted to LBS. It seems that the NCAA was punishing LBS for its coaches' ignorance of that reclassification.

The most troubling aspects of the allegations against IU are 1) the impermissible three way calls; 2) Sampson's improper use of others' phones; 3) Senderoff's use of his home phone for a huge number of impermissible calls. Violations 2 ans 3 were basically undetectable, and IU did detect violation 1, although belatedly.

I think there are two competing equities here that will pull the NCAA Committee on Infractions in two directions: first, the temptation to hammer IU for knowingly hiring a coach with an NCAA history who then committed similar infractions in his first year, on one hand; and on the other, IU's attempts to monitor the behavior of the staff and IU's prompt self-report and investigation. As tempting as the former must be to the NCAA, hammering IU despite the latter could have a chilling effect on monitoring and self-reporting. Unless the NCAA's position is that any unsuccessful monitoring constitutes a failure to monitor, I will be surprised if the NCAA adds this charge.

Is there a journalist in the house?

Terry Hutchens, in his most recent blog entry:

I would still like to get to the bottom of how much Rick Greenspan really wanted Kelvin Sampson as his men's basketball coach, or whether it was shoved down his throat by Adam Herbert and board of trustee member Jeff Cohen? I think those questions need to be answered because when you look at the kind of person that Rick Greenspan has hired at Indiana, Sampson is the one hire that sticks out like a sore thumb. And I'm just talking about character here. Nothing more, nothing less.

I would like to get to the bottom of it too, Hutch. If only I didn't have this pesky day job, or if I had spent a decade as the IU beat reporter for the state's largest newspaper, then maybe I would put some time into it.

IU's response to the NCAA.

Inside the Hall has posted the full text of IU's very long response in two separate .pdf files. The beginning of the first documents contains an overview of the allegations and IU's response. In the mid-30s of the first document, we begin to see how IU's investigation expanded beyond the three way calls in to the speakerphone and cell phone handoff shenanigans. I probably won't have time to give much of an account of this report, but the juicy stuff, the discussion of the post-October allegations against Sampson, begins on about page 82 of the first document. The report itself runs to page 144 of the first .pdf documents. On pages 145-146, there is a list of the attachments, which comprise the remainder of the 700+ pages.