I know we've been gone for a while but WoodiusMaximus and I have decided to start blogging again. Over the last 24 hours, I've become increasingly frustrated with the coverage of the Eric Bledsoe/University of Kentucky/Coach Cal saga. If you haven't heard, check out these articles first: http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/
Now that you know the situation, I'd like to put my 2 cents into the argument. First off, Coach Cal has possibly cheated when recruiting, but so have almost every other coach. You cannot bring in the best recruits in any sport without bending the rules somewhere.
You're probably going to say "Well what if the team wins the championship every year, won't that bring in recruits". Yes, yes it will. But you know what, most 18 year olds would rather average 25.8 points and 11.1 rebounds per game on a weak Texas squad instead of a possible 15 and 8 on a loaded Ohio State team. That 18 year old is Kevin Durant and that Ohio State team had future NBA players Daequan Cook, Mike Conley Jr., and Greg Oden on it. They were in the Championship game in 2007. To get the talent needed to compete at the highest level, you have to be able to convince a Kevin Durant to sacrifice his numbers for a team goal. That's where a coach has to come up with a plan to get that athlete to their campus.
The cheating may not be handing somebody money or forging test scores but it could be something like getting someone (a booster, AAU or high school coach, or a basketball broker) to talk to the player for you or even calling them when you're not suppose to.
To be honest, when it comes to college athletics, if you aren't cheating, you aren't winning, and you surely won't get the stars to come to your school. We all know that once a player gets on campus, there are people that are in place to do their class work, help them cheat, etc, etc. If you've been in college and have known athletes personally, you've helped athletes out. They aren't there for an education, they are there for athletics. Sadly, that's the way it is. Everybody has cheated in school at one time or another, whether it's a star player or just a regular schmo. I've known people in classes like Organic Chemistry who've had the tests from the last 5 years. Fraternities and Sororities are notorious for this practice, but everybody will use whatever resources they can find to accomplish their goals. Even the smartest people cheat because nobody knows everything. Coach Cal has never been convicted of doing any illegal recruiting.
At UMASS, agents gave Camby 28,000 dollars because they saw how good he was and knew he was going to be a top pick. He ended up #2 in this draft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
At Memphis, Cal was caught with an illegal player who was declared by the NCAA Clearinghouse as eligible. If you don't know, the NCAA found that Derrick Rose did not take his own SAT while in high school. Somebody else took it for him and because of that, Memphis had to vacate its 38 win season and its Final Four appearance. Did you want him to stand over Rose's shoulder while he took the SAT? Of course not, because if he did that you would say he was giving Rose all the answers and now we're back to square one. Is he suppose to stand outside every testing location of all possible recruits and check their identification? Damn, that breaks another NCAA rule of illegal contact with recruits. How would he know the test score is fake? Other people faked it and his high school cleared it. He was then given the scores. It was still the responsibility of Derrick Rose and the NCAA Clearinghouse to determine if it was valid or not. It would be dumb for anybody recruiting Rose to question that he didn't take the test with the small amount of information they were given. Clearinghouse didn't have a problem with it and said he could play college ball, so how is it Coach Cal's fault? It took way too long after Rose left Memphis for the NCAA to even figure out he wasn't a legal score. Coach Cal is not only suppose to be a mind-reader, but he is also suppose to be a truth extractor.
Presently at Kentucky, the NCAA have ongoing investigations about the eligibility of former guard Eric Bledsoe. Let's begin by saying that it IS quite possible for somebody to make all A's for one year of high school if he knows his life depends on it and he can find people to help him out. I'm not saying he cheated but even if he did, it's a public high school, he wasn't the only one. Like college, cheating happens. For a former teacher of his to say he's a C student at best is one of the most despicable things a teacher can do. You don't judge a student and then put them on blast like that. Bledsoe moved to a new school his final year in high school and with positive changes in his attitude and work ethic on top of being in a new learning environment, it can spark great changes in his grades.
Listen, I know Bledsoe talks like he's a dumbass and he probably can't do an ounce of extremely challenging work, but it's not like we asked him to solve Newton's theory of relativity in high school. We asked him to simply pass 12 or so classes with A's. I don't know how many classes he took his final year in high school because he took night classes and online courses on top of his regular course load. What people don't understand is that he replaced some of his bad grades with new grades. So even if he had a 1.9GPA before his last year, the classes he retook changed his old GPA a lot. All he needed was a 2.5GPA to be cleared.
The second accusation is that his last high school coach demanded money from college teams to be able to talk to and recruit Bledsoe. Nobody would do this. Nobody. It's dumb. You easily turn off every team thinking about getting him. Those who say no would report this as soon as possible so that nobody else gets him. We didn't NEED Bledsoe bad enough to illegally recruit him. On top of that fact, the high school coach wouldn't ask the school for money; if he really wanted money, he could quickly find a Booster and get the money that way. He also denies doing it. The only "proof" there is comes to us from an anonymous coach saying that it happened to him and his staff. Well, if I'm recruiting against the best recruiter, I might make up a couple lies to tarnish him while keeping me from looking like a PURE SNITCH to the Hip Hop Generation. Anybody can make those comments, but there needs to be proof. I'm talking about Coach K coming out and saying that it happened to him. He is the biggest name that recruited Bledsoe. He doesn't need to hide behind an anonymous tag, he's well respected already. So here's what I need to be convinced: a phone bill that proves the high school coach talked to anonymous and then a recording of him saying it or even an email or something else that actually proves it. Until the coach admits to it, I don't believe it.
The last accusation is that the high school coach then went and payed 1200 dollars out of pocket for rent for Bledsoe and his mom. It's already been said that when they didn't pay rent and were evicted, they left the entire house a wreck. Wouldn't it seem possible that she made up this story about receiving this money in cash in order to get her name in the paper, make Bledsoe look like shit, and also get revenge for being screwed over? I'm just saying, she's not exactly a neutral witness. You can't prove that the high school coach paid it. Like he said, he doesn't get paid a lot and would not take food out of his own kids' mouths to help somebody else with that much money. There should be bank records that can exonerate him. And why would she come forward now about it after receiving the money. Why didn't she complain to the NCAA or Alabama high school sports association when it first started? She worked at the school, she knew it wasn't legal (athletics wise) if it did happen. Which brings me back to the point that it never happened.
So we have 3 accusations and only one could be possible in my eyes: Bledsoe being given passing grades. He wouldn't be the first high school athlete to get passing grades for below average work. Working at a high school myself for a semester, I saw that the teacher I assisted was more lenient to students she liked than ones she didn't. These kids weren't even athletes! These were Advanced Placement students, some of which will get A's instead of B's and possibly take your child's spot at their dream school. Even if this one is true, I still don't see how Cal could be punished for it. He did not have any relationship with anybody who was in charge of Bledsoe's grades. Clearinghouse cleared him and declared him eligible. To come back now and do that would be unfair to Coach Cal and the University of Kentucky. But Coach Cal is suppose to be a mind-reader, a truth extractor, and omnipotent.
If the NCAA wanted to, it could put an investigator in every college or university and then watch how many students will come and tell stories about how they've helped an athlete out in class, on a paper, project, or test. What if every grade given to an athlete was investigated by the NCAA for proper grading. It would be shown that some teachers give athletes breaks on grading. If these scenarios happened, every school and athletic program would be ineligible. The worse part of this entire situation is that it could have been avoided.
Thanks to David Stern, high school athletes who play basketball are required to go to college. Get rid of the Age Limit rule and the NCAA won't have these problems. Until then, FREE COACH CAL!
I'm just saying...
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