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Sunday, Jun. 07, 2009

UK hoops notebook: Responsibility vs. Deniability

Knight Commission member: Coaches should take high road

College coach invests time, brainpower and a sizable portion of the recruiting budget on the pursuit of a high-profile prospect. After prospect enters college, whispers grow about prospect cheating on an entrance exam. No direct evidence links college coach to the testing. If cheating occurred, the college coach has what politicians call plausible deniability

Len Elmore wonders just how plausible that deniability is.

As a former All-America player for Maryland and then a longtime college basketball commentator, Elmore knows the ways of big-time athletics.

"You can't tell me that coaches don't have control over situations that have a direct impact" on an incoming player and the program, he said. " ... I'd really be surprised if there wasn't at least some inkling. Coaches have intuition. They've been around. Many of them have been around a long, long time. They know what the proper path to recruiting and admission of a student-athlete would be all about. And they also probably would be able to smell something that wasn't right."

Elmore was speaking in general terms. He made sure to note that he had no knowledge of the current case involving Memphis, star recruit Derrick Rose and then-coach John Calipari, who came to Kentucky this spring. The NCAA charged Memphis with a major violation of academic fraud in connection to Rose's college entrance exam.

Memphis conducted an investigation. In its official response (what amounts to a not-guilty plea), the school said that its basketball staff was not involved and had no knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Rose's entrance exam.

The NCAA's judicial body, its Committee on Infractions, heard the case on Saturday and is expected to render a decision by the end of July.

Then ESPN.com reported later in the week that another Memphis player, Robert Dozier, had had his SAT score invalidated. An anonymous letter to the NCAA Clearinghouse questioned the score, ESPN.com reported. That led Georgia to deny Dozier admission.

After attending Laurinburg Institute, a prep school in Laurinburg, N.C., Dozier played for Memphis. In May, the NCAA announced that it would no longer accept academic records from Laurinburg Institute. Dozier was one of three starters on the Memphis 2008 Final Four team who previously attended Laurinburg. The other two were Joey Dorsey and Antonio Anderson.

In offering an opinion about coaches' attention to academic eligibility, Elmore was not speaking for the Knight Commission, which aims to help bring reforms to college athletics.

Elmore, who is a member of the Knight Commission, simply shared his opinion about how closely he believed college coaches monitor a prospect's efforts to meet academic eligibility standards.

"If they don't, I'd say that coach is negligent," Elmore said. "But in the end, it comes down to you-can-tell. I don't care who you are, you can tell. You can tell a lot. You can tell by speaking to a young man. You can tell by the school the young man goes to.

"Sometimes you can be wrong. But all too often, you can tell who is going to have a problem and who's not."

If the coach senses a problem or knows of a problem with a college entrance exam, he's obligated to investigate, Elmore said. "To me, that's your responsibility."

It would take a courageous coach to voluntarily turn down the chance to add a star player because of a questionable college entrance exam. That's where Elmore saw the plausible deniability enabling the coach to look the other way and take the player.

"That, to me, is a protecting wall that allows the coach to avoid having to face the decision to act courageously," he said.

Accountability

The Memphis-John Calipari case might bring back unhappy memories for UK President Lee Todd.

When the NCAA found that the Kentucky football program broke rules earlier this decade, Todd decried how Coach Hal Mumme could move on to another program while the leftover UK players had to deal with the penalty of a one-year bowl ban.