Kentucky fans, Calipari haters need to get a grip about "secondary violations"

When has being a UK fan ever been so dramatic? No, I am not talking about any of the “fantastic finishes” UK fans have experienced over the years. I am talking about just the pure drama and hysterics UK fans have been showing over really ….. nothing. The Bluegrass as been ripe in drama ever since Coach Calipari took the reigns. Let’s have a quick recap, shall we?

• UK walk on basketball player Landon Slone is given his walking papers from the UK basketball team and apparently, Calipari was unaware that Landon wanted to talk to him in person before this happened. Some UK fans go ballistic.
• Coach Calipari debuts his personal website of which about 90% is free just for signing up with an email address. The other 10% of the site is pay content designed to raise money for Calipari’s charities. Some UK fans go ballistic and flood his facebook page with complaints that the whole site is not free.
• In an attempt to capitalize on the press UNC got from President Obama and to get a UK jersey in the hands of the most powerful man on the world, Calipari sends a custom #44 UK jersey to President Obama. UK fans go ballistic and flood his facebook page with complaints so that Calipari’s people pull the post from Facebook.

And yes, from today’s news. UK admitted a “secondary violation” to the NCAA concerning former assistant Bilal Batley who (horrors) illegally rebounded the basketball when talking to a UK player about academics. And now, websites, messages boards, and twitter accounts are all flutter about this “secondary violation. And it’s just now UK fans that are being overly dramatic. Calipari and UK haters have banded together to foreshadow gloom and doom upon the Big Blue Nation because apparently everything Calipari touches turns to *vacated*.

First off, on the matter of the “secondary violations”. In the infinite wisdom of the NCAA, the NCAA fully expects schools to commit secondary violations because of the absurdly long 472 page rule book. The NCAA has a lot of fun rules that no one really thinks are violations like providing an athlete cream cheese with his free bagel or a basketball staffer grabbing a rebound for a player. Secondary violations happen, and generally are not even punished. Because here is the Catch 22: you have to report secondary violations to show the NCAA that your compliance staff is doing their job and enforcing their rules. If you don’t self report any violations, the NCAA figures that lawlessness has taken over and that student athletes are running around with cream cheese on their bagels all over the place. And seriously. Who can have that type of anarchy?

So Kentucky fans. Chill out about the secondary violations. As long as we are self reporting them, UK compliance is doing their job as they are expected to. To all the Calipari haters that want to bash Cal and say “oh there he goes again” and mention the championships that Calipari has not won yet being vacated soon …. get a grip. When it comes to secondary violations, you really need to be concerned about YOUR schools. Case in point:

• On June 30, 2009, Georgia Tech self reported 4 secondary violations that occurred in the first 6 months of 2009.
• On June 2, 2009, Georgia reported 6 secondary violations to the NCAA, 3 of them concerning football.
• On July 7, 2009, South Carolina reported 14 secondary violations to the NCAA, one of them for the classic “impermissible snacks” and 5 were concerning the basketball program.
• On August 22, 2009, Middle Tennessee State University reported 3 secondary violations to the NCAA.
• On August 14, 2009, Clemson reported 4 secondary violations to the NCAA, including 2 for the infamous “girdlegate” where players wore illegal compression shorts to 2 practices.
• On May 22, 2009, Tennessee reported the 2nd secondary violations of the Lane Kiffin error era. Kiffin even laughs at them, saying that he is “trying to go a week without that (a violation).”

Have I found your team yet, Calipari haters? If I kept on, I am sure that I would as I just went to “google”, typed “NCAA secondary violations” and that was the first few results that popped up. These secondary violations happen all the time. In 2008 alone, the NCAA received 3,916 self reported violations. As a university, UK seems to be about on average with the rest of the teams listed as they reported 59 recent violations from 2004-2008 (all of them BEFORE Calipari), including the recent Joe Bologna’s violation.

In short, is reporting self violations a good thing? No, not necessarily. But once one is committed, the staffs usually undergo a rules session or two to make sure that these things are nipped in the bud before a bigger violation occurs. So I am fine with UK self reporting these things. I love John Calipari, but from all appearances, UK has a pretty tight leash on him. It’s tighter than most other schools whose fans that like to bash Calipari have on their own coaches. So in the end, one school can not really talk smack about secondary violations because 1) it’s a particularly nerdy thing to cause drama over and 2) your school probably has more than UK.

I think we all need to follow the advice of the great Sam Jackson in “Pulp Fiction” and in the case of self reporting secondary violations, need to chill and just be cool like little Fonzie’s.

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