{"id":115,"date":"2008-02-16T11:46:06","date_gmt":"2008-02-16T16:46:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=115"},"modified":"2008-02-16T11:47:48","modified_gmt":"2008-02-16T16:47:48","slug":"kelvin-put-down-the-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=115","title":{"rendered":"Kelvin, Put Down the Phone!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sampson\"I’ve been a Kelvin Sampson fan for a long time.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In\u00a0twelve 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Not only was Sampson a great coach, but he was also (seemingly) a great guy, as well.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He seemed like a “model citizen” in the basketball coaching world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then the first bit of controversy came to light.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 When he took the job at Indiana shortly thereafter, most Indiana fans were unhappy with the hiring.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I thought the Indiana fans were being dumb.\u00a0 To me, the\u00a0illegal phone calls\u00a0were a minor offense, especially for a coach who had never done anything wrong in his career up to that point.\u00a0 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!\u00a0 In my mind, Sampson would go to Indiana, run a squeaky clean program, win a lot of games, and the fans would love him.<\/p>\n

Well, I was right on one account.\u00a0 Sampson has<\/em> won a lot of games since he took over at Indiana in 2006.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 However, in the past week, news has come out that Sampson is again under investigation for illegal phone calls<\/a>, and he could\u00a0be suspended or even fired by the university any day.<\/p>\n

It seems the only question to ask is: why?\u00a0 Why would Sampson, a seemingly smart guy that knows there are many people out there just waiting for him\u00a0to\u00a0break rules (especially rules that involve any sort of phone communication),\u00a0put his entire career on the line just to make some phone calls to recruits?\u00a0 The obvious answer is that he’s in an extremely competitive business and looking for\u00a0any edge he can\u00a0get.\u00a0 But the risk vs. reward here just doesn’t seem to add up.\u00a0 He could still go and recruit players, he just\u00a0couldn’t call them on the phone<\/em>.\u00a0 Yet, he\u00a0did, and now his\u00a0time at Indiana appears\u00a0to be coming to an end and he’ll\u00a0probably have a hard time landing another big-time job.\u00a0 It’s just\u00a0really 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maybe he’ll end up somewhere in Conference USA.\u00a0 I’m sure he’d have a lot of success there, but maybe his next employer should disconnect his phone.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been a Kelvin Sampson fan for a long time.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In\u00a0twelve seasons as the head coach … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[215,214,216],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-college-hoops","tag-indiana","tag-kelvin-sampson","tag-oklahoma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}