Besides NCAA recruiting violations, seems like there was a bit of a drug problem on Kelvin Sampson’s men’s basketball team at IU last year. According to standout freshman, Eric Gordon – now in the NBA – there was separation between those using drugs and those who weren’t, Gordon being one of the latter according to him, which caused a rift in the team and ultimately turned last year into a wasted season.
What a mess. I’ll take a 5-25 season if it means a clean program with hope of success in the future.
Me too!
A process of elimination (i.e., denials) will identify the suspected parties soon enough. EG removed three from the list, and there was a quick denial from another. The slowpokes are going to realize soon enough that they get branded with a sobriquet that they won’t be liking.
Um, well, first, Eric Gordon now plays in the National Chronic League; maybe the season’s too young for him to have noticed, or the Clippers are incredibly clean, or he just figures everybody in LA is naturally laid back, but I’m thinking somebody read that article and thought, “Uh, remember to disinvite Eric to the Xmas party”.
Second, whose drug use is responsible for his horrid shot selection down the stretch, exactly?
Hey, don’t get me wrong: he’s young, he was hurt, and he was pressing. But at the same time he’s a certain first-rounder who was playing out his league-PR-mandated year enriching a Division I school. What real call does he have on a program that’s a mere stepping-stone? “My teammates should have been better teammates”?
Let’s not lose sight of the problems here. IU has a reputation among its faculty as the greediest institution in the Big Ten. It hired Myles Brand. He privatized the hospital, went around the country lecturing about cleaning up college athletics, and wrote himself a golden parachute before becoming the mouthpiece of greedy college athletic programs. We sorta had the bad luck to fall into the Mike Davis era, although anyone but Bob Kravitz could see that those NCAA finals were a Steve Fisher fluke; we compounded the error exponentially by hiring Kelvin the Criminal, strictly with the intention of winning by whatever means necessary. It’d be a helluva lot easier to run a clean program if we did something about cleaning up college athletics in general.