Portfolio 05
The University Daily Kansan — Mon., Oct. 16, 2006 — Page 1B
Phillips: University sanctions 'not a fatal matter'
By Michael Phillips
A football program that recruited players who were not academically eligible. A basketball program that had gifts given to its players by boosters. An athletics director, Al Bohl, who said “compliance doesn’t sell tickets.”
Thursday should have been a bad day for the Kansas Athletics Department.
Instead it was a bad day for the NCAA.
Collegiate sports’ governing body was revealed to be toothless, doling out punishments that will barely be a speed bump to the different programs.
“Even though the reduction in scholarships is a serious matter, it’s not a fatal matter,” football coach Mark Mangino said.
Basketball coach Bill Self did his best to sell the sanctions as an inconvenience. He said that because the team brought all its recruits into town last weekend for Late Night, they might have seen the sanctions and been scared away.
But I don’t think that’s what they saw at all.
They saw a Kansas program that had a “lack of institutional control” get punished with the collegiate equivalent of a time-out.
They saw an impotent NCAA organization refuse to take a stand against blatant cheating and fraud because it happened at a big-time, big-money school.
And they saw an Athletics Department that, from the top down, has the NCAA in the palm of its hand.
At this point, Bill Self is like former president Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The only thing left for him to do is reenact the Saturday Night Live skit and announce that, “I ... am ... bulletproof.”
In August, the entire Kansas staff flew to Baltimore, sat in a room for eight hours in what women’s basketball coach Bonnie Henrickson called a “scared-straight program,” and tried to defend themselves against the allegations.
Ultimately, the crew was unsuccessful, and the NCAA deemed that Kansas had a “lack of institutional control” when the violations occurred. But that hearing wasn’t the start of Kansas’ problems. It was the end of them.
The loss of scholarships will have a negligible effect. Mangino’s program, like most college-football programs, almost never operates at full scholarship capacity, and Self volunteered to take his scholarship loss next year, perhaps assuming that a certain Brandon Rush won’t be using his.
As for “probation,” it’s a fancy term that means, as Self put it, “one misstep, and you could be in a bad situation.”
By the time the dust had cleared Thursday night, you’ve got to wonder if he even believed his own words.
After all, NCAA, the next time you try to come after Self and the gang, you’d better bring kryptonite.
Phillips is a Wichita senior in journalism. He is the Kansan sports editor.
— Edited by Kristen Jarboe