I’ve been a Kelvin Sampson fan for a long time. He’s been one of the premier X’s and O’s coaches in college basketball for a long time, but was never really given his due. In twelve seasons as the head coach at Oklahoma, which was never a basketball powerhouse, he took the Sooners to eleven NCAA tournaments, including an Elite Eight appearance and a Final Four in 2002. He did all that despite only having one NBA player in all those years, and that was Eduardo Najera, who’s never been more than a role player in the League.
Not only was Sampson a great coach, but he was also (seemingly) a great guy, as well. You never heard a bad word about him and he served as the President of the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC), which, during his tenure, created an Ethics Committee to address problems with coaches violating rules. He seemed like a “model citizen” in the basketball coaching world.
Then the first bit of controversy came to light. Toward the end of his tenure at Oklahoma, Sampson was found to have made illegal phone calls to recruits and, as a result, was banned from making any calls to recruits for three years. When he took the job at Indiana shortly thereafter, most Indiana fans were unhappy with the hiring. They thought it was wrong to be hiring a coach that just had a recruiting controversy, and were probably also hoping for a “bigger name” to come and restore the program to the glory of the Bob Knight era.
I thought the Indiana fans were being dumb. To me, the illegal phone calls were a minor offense, especially for a coach who had never done anything wrong in his career up to that point. It wasn’t like he had dropped a duffel bag full of cash at a kid’s doorstep or something, they were only phone calls! In my mind, Sampson would go to Indiana, run a squeaky clean program, win a lot of games, and the fans would love him.
Well, I was right on one account. Sampson has won a lot of games since he took over at Indiana in 2006. He took them to the Tournament last season, and this season they are currently 20-4 and ranked 12th in the nation, which is their best regular season showing in years. However, in the past week, news has come out that Sampson is again under investigation for illegal phone calls, and he could be suspended or even fired by the university any day.
It seems the only question to ask is: why? Why would Sampson, a seemingly smart guy that knows there are many people out there just waiting for him to break rules (especially rules that involve any sort of phone communication), put his entire career on the line just to make some phone calls to recruits? The obvious answer is that he’s in an extremely competitive business and looking for any edge he can get. But the risk vs. reward here just doesn’t seem to add up. He could still go and recruit players, he just couldn’t call them on the phone. Yet, he did, and now his time at Indiana appears to be coming to an end and he’ll probably have a hard time landing another big-time job. It’s just really hard to understand why a guy who’s such a great coach and won so many games without blue chip recruits (like Eric Gordon, the blue chipper that he took away from Illinois last season and is the team’s leading scorer), would resort to rule-breaking.
Maybe he’ll end up somewhere in Conference USA. I’m sure he’d have a lot of success there, but maybe his next employer should disconnect his phone.
See, I equate this with the Belicheat Spygate stuff. It is simply the arrogance of people that are actually goodf enough to get by without cheating, yet stil do it anyway. Once you get caught, the thought process isnt, “Jezz I better not do that again” it is “haha those bastards got lucky the first time, they will never get me now haha!”. Belicheat got warned privately by the NFl to knock off the cheating, because at the time the NBA had the Donaughy scandal and baseball was dealing with steroids. The NFL couldnt have their Great White Dynasty, captained by the Ass-Chin QB and the Hoodie-wearing Genius, be brought down in scandal. So they tried to tell him to knock that shit off behind the scenes. Sampson is a GREAT coach. But he got caught and was arrogant enough to believe he could get away with that same shit again. Same with Belicheat, who had the audacity to try it in a game he didnt even need it in against a guy who used to be in on it with him! It’s a shame, because Sampson seems like a nice guy and is a helluva coach. But his ass is gonna be on the street with a big ass scarlet letter sooner as opposed to later. And someone else is gonna be on the bench and reaping the glory when a good Hoosiers team enters March Madness. And frankly, if his dumbass was ignorant enougb to believe he would get caught at OU and then get away with the same shit at IU, then he deserves every bad thing that happens.