When You Live In Glass Houses

Intercollegiate athletics generates millions of dollars each year for the NCAA, its member institutions and the administrators and coaches of those institutions. It seems like everyone is getting rich except for the athletes that actually play the games, but that’s a discussion for another time. With all that money flowing in all sorts of directions, there’s going to be people willing to cross the line and break rules to gain an advantage. It’s going to happen. College sports is an ugly, nasty business.

To hear some folks tell it, the University of Kentucky and its head men’s basketball coach John Calipari are the poster children for everything wrong with college basketball and the NCAA. Coach Calipari, he of two vacated Final Four appearances and Kentucky, with its own history of NCAA impropriety are easy targets for those that want to use them when discussing or opining about all the evil in college sports. When Coach Cal arrived in Lexington in 2009, rival fans and slightly biased journalists practically licked their chops in anticipation of the next Calipari/Wildcat scandal. But, a funny thing happened.

At SMU, head men’s basketball coach Larry Brown has been hit with probation. The same for Hall of Famers Jim Boheim at Syracuse and Jim Calhoun at Connecticut. We’re all still waiting on when, if ever, the NCAA with finally adjudicate the decades old academic fraud perpetrated by North Carolina. Most recently, a tell-all books was published detailing how an assistant basketball coach arranged for prostitutes for men’s basketball players and potential recruits, spending some $10,000 over a 4 year period around the 2013 NCAA basketball title for… the University of Louisville Cardinals.

Mandatory

Credit

: Jamie Rhodes-USA TODAY Sports

At this point, everything that has come out regarding the Cardinals is all allegations. The person make the allegations implicates herself (and her own daughters) in what is essentially a sex for money scheme, so there’s going to have to be some additional evidence to corroborate her story. So, it’s not clear what exactly happened or didn’t happen, let alone what the fallout will be from this story. Right now, it’s unseemly and puts another mark on the once pristine reputation of the University of Louisville.

While the Kentucky Wildcats and Coach Cal have remained blemish free, Card Nation has endured its head men’s basketball coach getting caught in an extortion scheme while admitting to having sex with a woman not his wife in a local restaurant, having an assistant football coach and lead recruiter implicated in the ongoing scandal at the University of Miami, settle a discrimination lawsuit with a former athletic department employee and bring back a former football coach that was let go from a previous job because of hiring his mistress on the payroll and lying about it to his boss (not to mention leaving the Cards high and dry after his first go round in Louisville. For everything that was supposed to happen in Lexington, a lot of stuff has happened further west on interstate 64.

I’m not saying that things don’t happen at other places. Obviously, they do. And for all I personally know, my beloved Wildcats could be the top story on Sportscenter tonight for some sort of NCAA infraction. Again, with that much money flowing, people are going to cross or dive head first into that gray area and cross some lines. And that’s my point. When you’re a fan of a college athletic program, you are living in a glass house because you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s ridiculous to get on your high horse about your program and point out your rival’s issues while completely ignoring things occurring in your own backyard.

All it takes is one 18 year kid, greedy booster or morally challenged assistant coach to knock out the windows of anyone’s glass house.