Indiana Pays Price for Hiring Known Cheat

I have had the privilege of meeting many of college basketball's greatest coaches over the course of my own coaching career. Tubby Smith was a delightful, honest and classy individual - the same guy you see during games and in interviews. John Calipari was pleasant, hyper and distracted. Lute Olson was friendly, handsome and a bit overweight (not that it matters, but it surprised me).

Meeting Kelvin Sampson was a different experience for me. Sampson was heavily recruiting one of my former players and I was invited by our head coach to sit in on a meeting with Sampson and his assistant coach. I was somewhat starstruck by Sampson who had been to a Final Four and won everywhere he has coached.

I left the meeting wanting a shower.

Kelvin Sampson is a used car salesman who knows how to coach basketball. He had canned answers to questions. He spent ten minutes defending himself against allegations that we were not making about him. His exchanges with his assistant coach were rehearsed and phony.

Sure enough, Sampson was found to have made improper phone calls to recruits and got the University of Oklahoma placed on probation. In the months afterwards, Sampson was punished for his lack of ethics by being hired as the new head basketball coach at Indiana University.

Indiana has always had one of the preeminent basketball programs in the country. Led by Bob Knight, the Hoosiers won three national championships while running a clean program that graduated its players. Heck, the greatest basketball movie of all-time is called Hoosiers.

Indiana should have known better than to hire a known cheater like Kelvin Sampson. It should have been worried, rather than elated, when Sampson unethically recruited Eric Gordon who had already committed to Illinois. Now, it is about to get burned. Big time. The Hoosiers are looking at probation, loss of scholarships and the need to replace Sampson who will likely be fired in the coming weeks.

Indiana University only has itself to blame. When a school hires someone like a Kelvin Sampson, Jim Harrick, Dave Bliss or Jerry Tarkanian, what else do you expect? They are liars. They are cheats. They win, but at what cost?

For Indiana, the cost is not just basketball probation, but an institutional black eye that was earned not from Sampson's phone calls, but from hiring a known cheat in the first place.