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Louisville not the only ‘slimy’ program in basketball

5 min read

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And you thought Rick Pitino was slimy.

Pitino was fired as University of Louisville basketball coach two weeks ago after an FBI investigation showed that one of his assistants helped Adidas pass $100,000 to a high school basketball player who ended up playing for him.

Pitino, of course, said he was shocked by the news and had no idea that any players had received money.

Pitino also was “completely shocked” in 2015, when an investigation found that good old U of L had provided strippers and escorts for players and potential recruits while they were on campus.

The university suspended Pitino for the first five ACC games this season and self-imposed a tournament ban for 2016.

It would be hard to imagine any self-respecting university covering itself in more slime than Louisville has in the last two years but the University of North Carolina managed to do it.

UNC avoided any major sanctions from the NCAA despite acknowledging the existence of bogus classes that were attended by football and basketball players the last 20 years.

North Carolina was able to show that there were actually some non-athletes who were dumb enough to take the bogus courses and that showed that athletes were not given special treatment and therefore no NCAA rules were violated.

Which means that, despite the worst academic fraud case in NCAA history, it will be business as usual for the North Carolina basketball and football programs.

Mary Willingham, an academic counselor at UNC, resigned in 2015, not long after she blew the whistle on the phony classes. She told CNN that she was shocked when a basketball player came to her for help with his class work.

He couldn’t read.

She also had to help a player who couldn’t read multisyllabic words that sound out Wis-con-sin. And another player who wanted her to teach him how to read so he could read about himself in the newspapers.

Instead of blowing up the basketball and football programs, which any administrator with an ounce of integrity would have done, UNC’s Provost, Jim Dean tried to smear Willingham.

She eventually resigned because of what she called a, “hostile work environment.”

Willingham sued the school and received a $335,000 settlement.

The University of North Carolina has a set a new standard for slime and, despite its 20-year exploitation of students, most of them black, will be back to defend its NCAA championship this year.

And I’ll be shocked if this story gets one-tenth the coverage it deserves from the national media.

• Looks like my decision not to watch Game 5 of the NLDS Thursday night was a good one. It lasted four hours and 38 minutes and there were no extra innings. Who wants to invest their time in a night baseball game that has a real good chance of going longer than four hours?

The final round of The Masters goes faster than that.

Someone with way too much time on his hands determined that the average time elapsed between balls in play was over three and a half minutes. There were 14 pitching changes and the Cubs and Nationals struck out a total of 21 times.

There were 19 runs scored in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. It lasted two hours and 36 minutes. Nobody struck out.

I can’t prove it but I think attention spans are a lot shorter now than they were in 1960. Adding two hours of nothing to a baseball game is probably not good for the future of Major League Baseball.

• All signs point to the Steelers losing to the Chiefs in Kansas City. The Chiefs are undefeated with wins over New England and Philadelphia. The Steelers haven’t played a really good team yet and they’ve lost to a bad one and a mediocre one.

Ben Roethlisberger is not known as a great road quarterback and there might not be a tougher NFL stadium to visit than Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City. So, don’t be surprised if the Steelers win if, for no other reason than the Chiefs are not going to go 16-0 and they’re due to lose.

• Major League Baseball’s final four teams come from the first, second, third and eighth largest TV markets and from the four biggest cities in the U.S. The NFL’s 2016 final four came from the seventh, eighth, 23rd and 70th markets. The NHL final four came from the second, 23rd, 29th and Ottawa, Ontario.

The Stanley Cup Final was between teams from two markets that are too small to support a Major League Baseball team.

• I don’t know if I have the emotional strength to handle the news about the U.S. team not qualifying for the World Cup. That’s going to leave me with a lot more soccer not to watch than usual.

I’m so embarrassed that I’m considering moving to Trinidad.

Or Tobago.

• Y.A. Tittle died Monday at the age of 90. He did OK for the New York Giants after the San Francisco 49ers decided that he was old and washed up at 34. From 1961-64, he was 34-6 and played in three NFL Championships. He threw 33 touchdown passes in 1963 and 36 in 1964, when there were only 14 games in a season.

• How can anyone watch Aaron Rodgers and still believe Tom Brady is the best quarterback in the NFL?

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