JUST WIN, BABY

 

               The NCAA Final Four weekend is about kids playing basketball, of course, but it also serves another function. It’s an annual, though informal, coaches’ convention, where college hoops mentors from around the country gather to network and gossip, the latter talk centering on what might be available where in the game’s always-lively job market.  A colleague once remarked to me that every sportswriter in America was on the lookout for a better job. The same is true of coaches, and then some.

               The celebrities of the conclave are the coaches whose teams are boogying in the “big dance,” or who have otherwise distinguished themselves. Coaches are among the most suggestible of people, always eager to put to use anything that might add a W” or other filip to their resumes. The saw “nothing succeeds like success” is nowhere more applicable than in their profession.

               The lessons of what counts or doesn’t in the scramble up the greasy pole were rarely more evident than at the just-ended get together in Indianapolis. Exhibit A was Kelvin Sampson, whose University of Houston Cougars were a Final Four contestant. If you follow the sport loosely you might have been surprised to learn that Sampson still worked at the collegiate level. He’s a heckuva coach, with a long record of winning seasons, but also left a trail of slime as a result of NCAA rules violations at Oklahoma and Indiana, his previous collegiate employers. He put both those schools on probation before moving on.

               NCAA members don’t trust one another so the organization has a fat rulebook, full of petty crimes. Thus, it’s easy to dismiss some violations as nitpicking. Not so in Sampson’s case. At Oklahoma he was found to have made, um, numerous improper recruiting phone calls over a several-year period ending in 2005, 550 to be exact. That figure impressed the most jaded and earned the school a three-year spanking, which included recruiting restrictions.

               Sampson wanted no part of that so by the next year he’d fled into the waiting arms of Indiana U., a promotion by most standards. In short order there he not only repeated his depredations but also lied about them to university and NCAA investigators. In 2008 Indiana got a three-year rap and Sampson personally was tagged with a rare order that effectively barred any NCAA school from hiring him for a five-year period.  

               That made him unemployable collegiately but he landed on his feet with a number of NBA teams, whose coaches employed him as an assistant. The fraternity takes care of its own that way. His penance completed, he’s thrived at Houston, pulling down a reported $3 m yearly to guide young men there, a shining example of rehabilitation.

               That, maybe, is what the good fathers at Iona College, a Catholic institution in New Rochelle, New York, had in mind went they hired another FF-weekend celeb, Rick Pitino, as their basketball coach last year, and watched him lead the Gaels to this year’s tourney.  A peripatetic type who’s bounced between the pros and the colleges, he got in trouble at his last employer, the University of Louisville, when it was discovered that his team hired stripper/prostitutes to entertain recruits in parties at school dorms.

 A hapless assistant coach took the rap for that one but none was available when Pitino’s name came up in the “pay for play” scandal of 2018 that had the shoe company Adidas funneling money to recruits to play at schools that used their products, so out he went. In between, he’d bravely fought off a shakedown attempt from the wife of an assistant with whom he’d had an adulterous relationship.  His reported Iona salary of $1 million a year is a small fraction of what he’d made at L’ville, but it’s probably enough to get by on.

Also taking bows at the tourney was another “Adidas school” principal, Bill Self, the head basketball coach at the U. of Kansas. His latest distinction was for landing a five-year rollover contract that amounted to a lifetime pact at the school at a $7 million-plus annual salary, something about which his contemporaries can only dream. Self was taped by the FBI yakking with an Adidas functionary about payoffs to one recruit, and about the guy’s continuing help in keeping KU supplied with future NBA lottery picks. Nonetheless, he denies all.

 Sean Miller, the coach at the U. of Arizona and another figure in the long-moldering scandal, just lost his job, but unlike Self’s teams Miller’s didn’t continue to win big in the three years since the thing broke. The point has been taken, I’m sure.

Another figure of veneration for the educators was Roy Williams, who retired after 18 years as head coach at the U. of North Carolina. Williams’ tenure at Chapel Hill included eight years (2003-2011) during which the school maintained an academic shell department, called African and African-American Studies, whose main function over an 18-year period (1993-2011) was to keep UNC athletes eligible by handing out no-work credits and grades. The Drake Group, a faculty-based college-sports watchdog, called it “the mother of academic fraud violations.”

Butch Davis, UNC’s football head coach at the time, was fired when the story surfaced. Not Williams, whose teams were busily winning ACC championships and contending for national honors. He claimed total ignorance of the fraud, and over the years questions about it faded. The New York Times devoted two full columns of its national-edition sports pages to Williams’s career when he called it quits, and only one paragraph mentioned the episode.

 How does that line go: “The evil men do lives after them”?

 Well, sometimes.