Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Heyman's MLB Predictions - Buckeyes Offensive and Defensive Players to Watch - Thursday MLB Schedule

Thursday MLB Schedule
Detroit at NY Yankees 1:05 PM Verlander vs Sabathia

Atlanta at Washington 1:05 PM Lowe vs Hernandez

Milwaukee at Cincinnati 2:10 PM Gallardo vs Volquez

LA Angels at Kansas City 4:10 PM Weaver vs Hochevar

San Diego at St. Louis 4:15 PM Stauffer vs Carpenter

San Francisco at LA Dodgers 8:00 PM Lincecum vs Kershaw








Buckeyes Offensive Players to Watch this Spring
By Brandon Castel
theozone.net I love Brandon's Articles
5 QB Braxton Miller (6-2, 185, Fr.) – If you haven’t heard the name Braxton Miller before, then let us also tell you that Terrelle Pryor is suspended for the first five games of the season. Shocking, right? In fact, Pryor likely won’t even participate in spring football because of the foot injury he suffered in the Sugar Bowl. That leaves the other four quarterbacks to compete for the job, and make no mistake about it, this really is a competition. Five games is a lot of football, and they can’t simply hand the ball to Joe Bauserman and tell him to hold down the fort until Pryor, and Jim Tressel, return. No offense to the others, but Miller clearly has the most talent, but how quickly can he pick up the system? Being at Ohio State for spring practice will be a huge help.

24 RB Rod Smith (6-3, 200, rFr.) – If Miller isn’t the most talked about name heading into the spring, then it has to be Rod Smith. Like Miller, Smith has never played a down at Ohio State, but he has future star written all over him. Not only does he look like Eddie George with his shirt off, but Smith was one of the most productive running backs in Indiana high school history. He brings a different level combination of speed and power than any other back on the roster, and he has been raved about by his teammates since the end of the regular season. Expect Smith to be right there in the competition to replace Boom Herron for the first five games.


4 RB Jaamal Berry (5-10, 200, rSo.) – Everyone is talking about Smith, but Jaamal Berry is a name that should not be forgotten. Unlike Smith, Berry has actually seen time on the field, and he averaged 8.3 yards per carry last season as Ohio State’s fourth-leading rusher. Berry seems to have put injury concerns from his freshman season behind him, and with Herron suspended for five games; this is the perfect opportunity for Berry to step to the forefront. He might look like Jordan Hall from physical standpoint, but they are two different players. Berry has less wiggle, but more burst, and he isn’t afraid to stick his nose in there between the tackles.

80 WR Chris Fields (6-0, 185, rSo.) – Like Berry, Chris Fields was on our list of players to watch last spring, and he didn’t disappoint. If you think back to last year, Fields actually had a tremendous spring. He was one of the best receivers on the team during drills, and even worked his way into the lineup with the first team offense a little bit. But then Taurian Washington had that big spring game, and Corey Brown came on strong in the fall and Fields fell behind both of them. Washington is gone, along with Dane Sanzenbacher, and DeVier Posey is suspended for five games. That leaves the door wide open for fields, who has great quickness and athleticism.

18 WR T.Y. Williams (6-5, 218, rFr.) – It also leaves the door open for a guy like T.Y. Williams, who brings a totally different feel to the wide receiver position. Listed at 6-foot-5, Williams is tall and skinny, but seems to have added a little bulk this off-season. He took a redshirt last year because he wasn’t mentally prepared to play the game at this level, but former receivers coach Darrell Hazell had nothing but good things to say about him. If he has picked up the mental part of playing the position, Williams could be a star on the verge of breaking out.

14 WR Verlon Reed (6-0, 195, rFr.) – There is no indication that Verlon Reed will be in the mix for a starting spot this spring, but he is worth keeping an eye on. A former high school quarterback, Reed had some tough moments adjusting to the wide receiver position last year. He wasn’t much of a route-runner, but once he gets the ball in his hands, Reed has electricity in his feet. He probably wouldn’t beat Corey Brown or some of the other guys in a track meet, but with the ball in his hands, there might not be a faster guy on the roster, except maybe Jaamal Berry.

78 OT Andrew Norwell (6-5, 308, So.) – We got to see a little bit of Norwell last year, as he stepped in for J.B. Shugarts at right tackle whenever his foot problem became too much to bare. Physically, Norwell looks like an upperclassman on the offensive line. He’s big, strong and has a wide base. He played very well as a true freshman last season, and has to be considered the front-runner to play left tackle while Mike Adams is serving his suspension.

79 OL Marcus Hall (6-5, 321, rSo.) – Like Norwell, Marcus Hall saw some good playing time as a freshman behind Shugarts at right tackle. He even started the game against Iowa, and it looked like Hall was on his way to something great. He even competed with Adams and Andrew Miller for the left tackle job last off-season, before academics forced him to take a redshirt. That doesn’t mean Hall’s career is over, far from it. He continued practicing with the team and is back on the field this spring. Expect him to compete for one of the starting spots vacated by Justin Boren and Bryant Browning. Yes, that means he would be playing guard, but Hall is one of the best five linemen on the team and needs to be on the field.







Buckeye Defensive Players to Watch this Spring

Here is a look at some defensive players to keep an eye on as the Buckeyes try to replace seven key seniors on defense, including Cam Heyward, Brian Rolle, Ross Homan and Jermale Hines.

51 DL Joe Hale (6-4, 290, Fr.) – This isn’t a guy we knew much about when he committed to Ohio State, but after seeing him in morning workouts, Joe Hale is definitely someone to keep an eye on this spring. We don’t know exactly where the Indiana native will play down the line, but something about him says he might be in the mix for Jim Heacock this season. Hale has a strong lower body and spent most of his time in the weight room with John Simon. That’s not a bad thing for anyone trying to get stronger. If he’s willing to play inside, Hale could have an immediate impact.


6 LB Etienne Sabino (6-3, 240, rJr.) – One of the most intriguing players to watch this spring will be Etienne Sabino. The last time we saw him was last fall practice, because Sabino willingly took a redshirt last year in order mature enough to compete for a starting spot this season. The Buckeyes have two openings in their linebacking corps after the departures of Brian Rolle and Ross Homan, and Sabino could play either Mike (middle) or Sam (strongside) in 2011. He was a big-time prospect and is a physical specimen, but it will interesting to see how much he grew mentally during last season.

11 LB Dorian Bell (6-1, 230, rSo.) – Another linebacker to keep an eye on this spring is Dorian Bell. We really haven’t seen much of the former five-star prospect since he got to Ohio State, except on special teams last year. He battled some concussion issues, but was arguably their best kick coverage guy in 2010. That is usually what Luke Fickell likes to see from his guys before they step into a starting role. Bell would likely play the Sam linebacker spot if Sabino can settle in at the middle spot. If that doesn’t work, then Storm Klein becomes a guy to keep your eye on at middle linebacker.

5 LB Ryan Shazier (6-2, 210, Fr.) – He probably isn’t going to compete for any major playing time this season, but Ryan Shazier is a talented young football player who could easily be the future at Sam or even Leo (defensive end/linebacker hybrid). He has speed and he comes off the edge well as a pass rusher. Like Hale, Shazier enrolled at Ohio State in January, and should be quick to pick things up this spring. He could factor in on special teams, but more likely just a young freshman to watch for the future.

8 CB Dionte Allen (5-11, 185, Sr.) – Nobody, including the Ohio State coaching staff, can possibly know what to expect from Allen this season. Originally recruited by the Buckeyes out of high school, Allen spent three years at Florida State before transferring to OSU prior to last season. He was a highly-touted recruit, but never played much for the Seminoles, in large part because of injury. Travis Howard would appear to be one of the guys to step in at corner, but Allen should be competing for the other spot.

25 CB Bradley Roby (5-11, 176, rFr.) – Another guy who will be right there in the mix now that Chimdi Chekwa and Devon Torrence are gone is Bradley Roby. A redshirt freshman out Georgia, Roby showed a lot of promise last fall despite the fact he wasn’t considered a defensive prospect until his senior year of high school. He is still a bit raw for the position, but has great natural instincts that you look for in a good corner.


2 DB Christian Bryant (5-9, 175, So.) – Bryant is a name we already know and a player we have already seen on the field. He took over for Tyler Moeller at the Star position last season before battling an infected foot, but returned to play big minutes in the Sugar Bowl. The reason to keep an on Bryant this spring is because we don’t know exactly where he’s going to play. Star would appear to be his best position, but there are two openings at corner, which is what Bryant played in high school. If Moeller isn’t out there, then Bryant might be the first-team Star this spring, unless he’s competing for the starting corner spot. It’s hard to think he won’t be one of the 11 guys on the field this fall.

4 DB C.J. Barnett (6-0, 190, rSo.) – The only returning starter on our list, Barnett hasn’t started a game since the win over Miami, when he was lost with a season-ending knee injury. With Jermale Hines gone, Barnett should assume his starting role on the back end of Ohio State’s defense, but it will be important to watch how he looks coming off the knee injury.

21 DB Jamie Wood (6-1, 198, rSo.) – Although the Buckeyes have good depth at safety, there aren’t a lot of guys who will challenge Barnett and Orhian Johnson for one of the starting spots. Jamie Wood is one of the few. A highly-rated prospect out of Pickerington, Wood has the tools to be a good safety at the collegiate level. We haven’t seen a lot of him at the safety spot, but this could the off-season where he makes his move, much like Barnett did last year.






My predictions for 2011: Some safe, several that will surpriseJon Heyman si.com

The only safe prediction for the coming baseball season regards Francisco Rodriguez's $17.5 million vesting option for 55 game finishes. He won't be getting it, the games or the money.

K-Rod was brilliant this spring, and he may well continue that brilliance. But he isn't getting those games. Certainly not from the Mets. Nobody wants to pay more than Mariano Rivera money to another closer, least of all a team that has, shall we say, financial problems.

That was an easy one. Now here are the rest of my predictions for the 2011 baseball season.

Alex Rodriguez will win the American League MVP. He looked like a new man in Yankees camp, sporting a leaner physique while pumping balls over the fence at George Steinbrenner Field and out toward Tampa's busy Dale Mabry Boulevard.

Buster Posey will win the National League MVP. Sure, Albert Pujols could easily take it as he heads toward free agency. And so could his teammate Matt Holliday, who seems fully comfortable a year after signing his own big deal to stay in St. Louis.

But Posey is primed for a monster year with the pressure off after leading the Giants to a World Series championship despite beginning last year in the minors. As one scout said, once Posey learns how to pull the ball, he could be unstoppable.

CC Sabathia will win the AL Cy Young award, and not just because he gave up Cap'n Crunch, is down to 290 pounds or has an opt-out clause to exercise. Sabathia knows that the Yankees need him more than ever, and as is characteristic, he will answer the challenge.

Ubaldo Jimenez will win the NL Cy Young award. It looked like he was well on his way to doing so last year when he ran out of gas. This time, he makes it happen -- though of course it wouldn't surprise anyone to see any of the vaunted four of the Phillies -- especially Roy Halladay or Cliff Lee -- take the trophy.

Angels' first baseman Mark Trumbo will win the AL Rookie of the Year award. He wasn't even supposed to be on the roster, except for Kendry Morales' continuing lower-leg issue. But Trumbo was hot all spring, and if he keeps it going they're going to have to find room for him, even after Morales' return. And the Rays' Jeremy Hellickson will be the AL's rookie pitcher of the year. One scout compared him to no less than Greg Maddux. That's probably a bit of a stretch, but big things are expected for the poised young man.

Giants first baseman Brandon Belt will win the NL Rookie of the Year award. Scouts loved what they saw from him in spring. Even if he doesn't make the Opening Day Roster, he is expected to make a difference at some point this season and he's a major threat for this honor. The Braves' Freddie Freeman, another first baseman, is an understandably popular choice. He'll get plenty of chances, since there's no backup plan there.

The Yankees will make the playoffs for the 16th time in 17 years, but they will do it as the wild card. The Red Sox, who will win the AL East, imported Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez to replace Victor Martinez and Adrian Beltre, and just as important, they get Jacoby Ellsbury, Dustin Pedroia and Kevin Youkilis back and healthy, giving them baseball's best lineup. They also have a more solid rotation than the Yankees do, though there are understandable concerns in Boston over Josh Beckett's health and Daisuke Matsuzaka. Their bullpen isn't bad, either, with former closer Bobby Jenks, future closer Daniel Bard and current closer Jonathan Papelbon.

The Rays will be better than folks suspect, but it's hard to imagine a bullpen with no names thriving in the AL East. The Blue Jays will get another monster performance from Jose Bautista, and they have to get more out of Aaron Hill and Adam Lind than last year, but the task still looks a bit out of reach for them. The Orioles are much improved but still look like all but a certain cellar dweller even with Buck Showalter managing things from the start.

The White Sox will win the AL Central, with Adam Dunn coming to U.S. Cellular to hit his usual 40 home runs, Gordon Beckham on the cusp of stardom and as solid a pitching staff as any team. As long as the ultra-talented Miguel Cabrera can stay sober, the Tigers loom as a major threat -- though 2012 might be a better year for them, when young pitching phenoms Andy Oliver and Jacob Turner could be ready to help. The Twins almost always outplay the expectations, and it just might happen again, although bullpen concerns are a worry, which is why Chicago's South Side team is the pick here. The Royals will be great, in 2013. And the Indians hope to be.

The Rangers will win the AL West. Their offense is insanely good, and that should be enough. The A's have a very nice rotation led by Trevor Cahill, Brett Anderson and Gio Gonzalez, but not enough offense. The Angels, long the class of the division, have an imposing rotation, an improved outfield and slugging first baseman Mark Trumbo (six HRs, 20 RBIs this spring), but too many questions (the bullpen, left-handed batting and a leadoff man, to name three). The Mariners look like they have an enviable future with Michael Pineda, Dustin Ackley and others, but that fine future probably won't include any part of the 2011 season.

The Braves will win the NL East. It'll be considered an upset by all, but their starting pitching is terrific by any standard except for Philadelphia's, they have not one but two decent closing options in Craig Kimbrel and Jonny Venters, and while there are defensive questions, at least at second (Dan Uggla) and third (Chipper Jones), Jones looks like he's primed for a big finish, Brian McCann is in the best shape of his career and Freeman and Jason Heyward might both turn out to be megastars.

The Phillies have that fantastic pitching, good enough to justify their tag as World Series favorites. But their spring was an unmitigated disaster. Chase Utley is out indefinitely, Brad Lidge is hurting and so is Placido Polanco. The Marlins have two great players in Hanley Ramirez and Josh Johnson, and maybe a third in young slugger Mike Stanton, and they could pose a threat. The Mets still possess Jose Reyes, for now, anyway. But there's no Johan Santana, at least until July (and quite possibly longer), Carlos Beltran still has a knee issue, there are all sorts of questions about the bullpen, not to mention the pall that's been cast by the Madoff mess and the realization that only nickels remain to spend. The Nationals have a nice lineup but don't have a set closer and have mostly back-end starters filling out their rotation, at least until phenom Stephen Strasburg returns, probably next year.

The Cardinals will win the NL Central despite the loss of ace Adam Wainwright. This is the toughest division to call, but the returning Kyle Lohse and just-promoted Kyle McClellan give them a chance to unseat the defending Central champion Reds in their burgeoning rivalry. Cincinnati looks very good, but late-spring health concerns surrounding Johnny Cueto, Homer Bailey and Bronson Arroyo bring just enough doubt. The Brewers, who are all in for 2011, have been similarly hit by injury, including the self-inflicted rib cage injury for big winter pickup Zack Greinke, whose love of pickup hoops cost him at least his first few starts. The Cubs got over the early spring scuffle precipitated by overpaid, over-wrought pitcher Carlos Silva, who was dispatched by spring's end, a cleansing that can only help. The Astros are fortunate to be in the same division with the Pirates, who may be only halfway through their drought the way things are going there -- though new manager Clint Hurdle will maintain his smile throughout the continuing rebuilding process.

The world champion Giants will prove that they are no fluke, winning the NL West. The Rockies, who have the best tandem of every-day stars in Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez, will take the wild card. The Dodgers have very solid pitching and Matt Kemp may finally realize his full potential after a huge spring, but they have too many holes in their lineup in a very difficult division. The Padres still have that great bullpen, but their offense has a chance to regress with A-Gon gone, and their rotation is going to find it hard to duplicate its performance of a year ago. The young Diamondbacks will test their impatient manager, Kirk Gibson.

Anything can happen in October, and my guess is that the Rockies beat the Rangers to win the World Series. How's that for conviction?

Other predictions ...
• Derek Jeter will become the 28th player to reach 3,000 hits, and he'll experience a rejuvenation at the plate. His new stance will be credited for the rebirth, but the placidity brought by his new long-term deal will be the real reason.

• Mariano Rivera will get his 600th save, and finish the year with exactly 601, by saving 42 games (his uniform number).

• Jim Thome will hit his 600th home run, solidifying his spot in Cooperstown.

• Albert Pujols will reach 2,000 hits and 1,000 walks.

• Ivan Rodriguez will play in his 2,500th game (that's an easy one, he'll do it on Opening Day). And he isn't close to being done.

• Not nearly as many managers will be fired as last year. Marlins manager Edwin Rodriguez, who received a one-year deal after the long courtship of Bobby Valentine failed, starts the year with the biggest bull's eye on his back, considering owner Jeffrey Loria's annually lofty standards in relation to the team's puny payroll.

• White Sox GM Kenny Williams and manager Ozzie Guillen will continue to bicker in the longest-running soap opera in major league baseball.

• The relationship between Yankees GM Brian Cashman and his bosses, who don't always agree with Cashman on player personnel decisions (see Rafael Soriano) will continue to be among the more interesting ones in the game. And it will continue when Cashman and Hal Steinbrenner/Randy Levine come to a contract extension agreement after the year to keep Cashman in the Bronx for another three years.

• The McCourts will hang on in Los Angeles. It seems that everybody but them wants them out as Dodgers owners, but justice moves slowly, and it'll take at least a year to sort out the mess and boot them from Chavez Ravine to one of their four homes in Holmby Hills or Malibu.

• The better-liked (at least in baseball circles) Wilpons will hang on for a while, too, as the Madoff mess is untangled. The trustee who is suing them won't get his $1 billion, as there's no real proof that the Wilpons knew the score. But their legal bills will run high enough that their ownership won't be secured, either, and they might have to take on an equal partner.

• Pujols will return to the Cardinals with a contract after the season. St. Louis wants to see the market, but will ultimately have no choice but to pay him about $256 million over eight years to keep him at home.

• Prince Fielder will play out the year with Milwaukee and leave for the rival Cubs, who will need to make a splash and give him close to what he wants, maybe $180 million over eight years.

• Jose Reyes will be traded at mid-year when the Mets don't contend. Carlos Beltran (if he's still standing) and K-Rod will go, too. And the new team won't want to give Rodriguez his 55 finishes, either.

Cavaliers top LeBron, Heat 102-90 - Ex-Auburn players tell HBO they were paid -




Cavaliers top LeBron, Heat 102-90
Sorry Prince, but no parking in our garage!!!!

CLEVELAND (AP) -- As he left the arena, Cavaliers coach Byron Scott smiled and accepted fist bumps and congratulations from security guards lining the hallway.
"Coach," one of them said, "we're going to talk about this one all summer."
And probably for many more.
Cleveland got the win it wanted most.
Take that, LeBron.
Despite blowing a 23-point lead, the Cavs battled back to beat the Miami Heat 102-90 on Tuesday night, getting a small dose of satisfaction against James, the franchise's biggest star who was making his second homecoming visit to Cleveland since bolting last summer.
J.J. Hickson scored 21, Anthony Parker scored 20 and unsung center Ryan Hollins threw around his weight for the Cavs, who were embarrassed by the Heat 118-90 on Dec. 2 - a night when Cleveland fans unleashed pent-up hatred on James, the native son who scorned them.
This time, it was James who left the floor beaten. He finished with 27 points, 12 assists and 10 rebounds and had to endure another night of constant booing from fans who once cherished his every move but now view him as a bitter enemy for betraying them.
James took the loss in stride, giving the Cavs credit they deserved.
"Anytime we play anybody, we know we're going to get the best out of them," James said. "They came out and played extremely well. It was a good win for them."
It was more than that for Cleveland.
James' departure was a crippling blow to a city that hasn't celebrated a championship since 1964, and a region desperate for something positive to happen.
For at least one night, Cleveland rocked again.
"This was for the fans and for their support," Cavs guard Daniel Gibson said. "They've stayed behind us and this was a way of saying thank you."
In the closing seconds, the sellout crowd of 20,562 cut loose at a victory even the most loyal Clevelander couldn't have imagined. Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, who accused James of quitting in last year's playoffs after the two-time MVP announced he was joining Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in a poorly conceived TV special, high-fived anyone within reach.
On the floor afterward, Parker, whose last 3-pointer with 2:47 left capped a 12-0 run and put the Heat away, addressed Cavs fans.
"You guys deserve it," he said as the fans erupted.
Later, Parker said the Cavs were out to fix what went wrong on Dec. 2.
"The first time we played them here, we were embarrassed and they took a little from us," he said. "This is the night that we wanted to get that back, for us, but more for the fans. That was great getting it back for them."
James' second homecoming didn't begin smoothly.
He was delayed getting to the morning shootaround after his car and another following him were not allowed to enter the Cavs' underground parking garage because he had not received clearance from his former team. James was eventually allowed in, but some in his party were not.
Gilbert didn't miss a chance to take another swipe at James after the game, posting "Not in our garage!!" on his Twitter page.
The Cavaliers were a different team - literally - from the one that laid down against the Heat here in December. Injuries and trades have reduced Cleveland's roster to a shell of the one James played with and helped win 60 games last season.
The Heat rallied from a 71-48 deficit, tying it at 83-all on Mike Bibby's seventh 3-pointer with 7:03 left. But Miami, which wasted a chance to move into second place in the Eastern Conference standings, went scoreless for 4:24, allowing the Cavs to get just their 15th win - and most lopsided this season.
Wade added 24 for the Heat, who had their winning streak stopped at five.
Cleveland shot a season-high 56 percent from the field, a number that made coach Erik Spoelstra's skin crawl.
"We got exactly what we deserved," Spoelstra said. "They played harder than us. They came out with much more desperation and sense of urgency. We're a little confused what our identity is."
Baron Davis scored 10 points in his first start since coming to Cleveland in a trade. The Cavs also got a big lift from Hollins, who had 13 points, three blocks and played physically - something none of Cleveland's players did in December.
Hollins stopped one of Wade's drives with an elbow, exchanged words with Miami's guard and knocked James' headband off under the basket.
"I feel like if they're more concerned about me, then that's a good thing for our team," Hollins said. "That's the way I wanted to play tonight."
There wasn't the same venom and hatred that shrouded James' first visit four months ago. The crowd was energetic but not as outwardly angry toward James, who was booed every time he touched the ball. Security was extremely high, but there were no reported incidents.
The teams took turns going on extended runs in a wild, back-and-forth third quarter.
Cleveland scored 18 straight and opened a 71-48 lead, sending their fans into a frenzy and putting the Heat in a deep hole. But Miami was a long way from done as Wade hit a pair of 3-pointers and scored 10 points in a 19-1 spurt that pulled the Heat within 72-67 on James' jumper.
Christian Eyenga's 3-pointer with 2 seconds left put the Cavs ahead 75-67. James flung a 3-pointer from a few steps beyond halfcourt to end the quarter, a shot that was initially ruled no good but changed after the officials reviewed TV replays between periods and determined there was a clock malfunction.
After the game, the NBA released a statement saying the shot actually should not have counted, but it was too late to change the score.
James arrived at the arena that was his pro basketball home for seven seasons at 5:12 p.m. Wearing headphones and a shirt with the inscription: "Long Live The King," James went through security and waved to a few guards before ducking into the visitor's locker room for the second time.
James wasn't sure what he would be facing, but he was confident things would not be nearly as hostile as his previous visit.
"I expect the worst," he said. "But worse than last time, Dec. 2? No."
He got something else he didn't expect.
Notes: Heat F Mike Miller sat out with a bruised knee that Spoelstra described as "slightly sprained." Miller will be re-evaluated when his knee "calms down," Spoelstra said. ... During a timeout in the second quarter, a fan made a 3-pointer and won $10,000. ... Miami plays its next three at Washington, Minnesota and New Jersey, teams with a combined 58-162 record.



Ex-Auburn players tell HBO they were paid
Posted by Tom Fornelli

There have been rumors floating around the internet for weeks about a story HBO was doing for its Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel that would not shed a favorful light on Auburn. The program is set to air on Wednesday night, but Brooks from SportsByBrooks received an advanced copy of the show, and there are quite a few bombshells dropped in the interview.

Brooks was kind enough to transcribe the interviews. Here's a taste of the talk between HBO's Andrea Kremer and former Auburn Tiger Stanley McClover.

Kremer voiceover: “McLover said it wasn’t until he attended an all-star camp at Louisiana State University that he realized how the game is played. A game of money and influence.”

McClover: “Somebody came to me, I don’t even know this person and he was like, ‘we would love for you to come to LSU and he gave me a handshake and it had five hundred dollars in there. … that’s called a money handshake … I grabbed it and I’m like, ‘wow,’ hell I thought ten dollars was a lot of money back then. Five hundred dollars for doing nothing but what I was blessed to do. I was happy.”

Kremer to McClover: “What did you say to the guy when he hands you five hundred dollars?”

McClover: “Thank you and I’m seriously thinking about coming to LSU.”

Kremer voiceover: “But McClover says there were money handshakes from boosters at other football camps too. At Auburn for a couple hundred dollars and at Michigan State. All the schools denied any wrongdoing. And things really started heating up a few months later when he went to Ohio State for an official visit where schools get a chance for one weekend to host prospective athletes. McClover says there were money handshakes from alumni there too. About a thousand dollars. And something else to entice him.”

McClover: “They send girls my way. I partied. When I got there I met up with a couple guys from the team. We went to a party and they asked me to pick any girl I wanted.”

Kremer: “Did she offer sexual services?“

McClover: “Yes.”

Kremer: “Did you take them?”

McClover: “Yes.”

Kremer: “McClover committed to Ohio State right after that weekend. The recruiter at Ohio State who says he dealt with McClover that weekend denied the school was involved in any wrongdoing.”

On what caused McClover to sign with Auburn over Ohio State:

Kremer voiceover: “McClover says what he asked for was money. A lot of it. And that he got it. Delivered in a bookbag, exact amount unknown.”

Kremer to McClover: “You opened it up, what are you thinking?”

McClover: “I almost passed out. I literally almost passed out I couldn’t believe it was true. I felt like I owed them.” Kremer to McClover: “You felt obligated to them (Auburn)?”

McClover: “I felt totally obligated.”

Kremer to McClover: “Because of the money?”

McClover: “Yeah.”

The word that should be in your head as you read that is the same one that was stuck in mine the entire time: Wow. In just one segment of the interview we have McClover not only saying that he was given money by Auburn to attend the school, but also that he received money from LSU, Michigan State and Ohio State during his recruitment. Oh, and then the tiny tidbit of Ohio State basically hiring a prostitute to help convince McClover to come to Columbus.

And remember, this is just the interview with McClover. The talks with other former Auburn players Chaz Ramsey, Troy Reddick and Raven Gray don't exactly do Auburn any more favors. There's Reddick saying that Auburn wanted him to change his major because they felt his class schedule was getting in the way of football, and McClover also saying a booster bought a car for him.

Now, it's important to point out that there's no way to prove what these players are saying is true, which I'm sure plenty of Auburn fans will point out in the coming days. Still, the fact that four players are coming out and saying so, without any real motivation, makes you wonder what, if anything, they'd have to gain by lying about all this. Of course, this isn't the first time in the history of college football that players have been paid, and it won't be the last either. To pretend like this isn't going on at other schools right this very moment would be incredibly naive, but obviously, this is not good news for Auburn.

If Auburn thought he Cam Newton sideshow was a distraction in 2010, well, things won't be any quieter on the plains in the coming months either.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

2011 All-Americans Announced - 2011 Coaching Carousel - Geno Ford Takes Over at Bradley -


Geno Ford Takes Over at Bradley

Geno Ford, the Mid-American Conference Coach of the Year the last two seasons at Kent State University, will become the 13th head coach in Bradley Basketball history when he is formally introduced to the public during a noon press conference Monday in the Renaissance Coliseum arena.

"I am ecstatic to work at such a great institution with such a rich basketball history," said Ford. "The passionate Bradley fan base, academic excellence and exceptional facilities will give us an opportunity to compete at the highest levels of the Missouri Valley Conference.

"I would like to thank President (Joanne) Glasser and Dr. (Michael) Cross for affording me the opportunity to lead the Braves. I am excited about the support for our program and the resources we have to achieve at the highest levels. The investments made in our program will give us a chance to achieve our maximum potential."

In his third season at the helm of the Kent State program, Ford, 36, became the first men's basketball coach to lead his team to consecutive, outright MAC regular-season titles in 48 years. After winning the 2009-10 title with a 13-3 league record, Ford welcomed back only three returning players for the title defense, but successfully navigated the season with 10 newcomers to earn the repeat MAC championship in 2010-11 with a 12-4 conference mark. Denied a trip to the NCAA Tournament after losing in the MAC Tournament championship game, Kent State won NIT contests on both coasts - at Saint Mary's (Calif.) and Fairfield -- before dropping an 81-74 decision at No. 1 seed Colorado in the quarterfinals to finish the season with a 25-12 overall record.

Ford produced a 68-37 (.648) record in his three seasons at Kent State, including a 35-13 (.729) ledger in the Mid-American Conference. In addition to his two MAC Coach-of-the-Year Awards, Ford was the 2009 NABC District 14 Coach of the Year. Including previous head coaching stints at NAIA Shawnee State (22-10 in 2001-02) and NCAA Division III Muskingum (29-22 from 2005-07), Ford comes to Bradley with a six-year career record of 119-69 (.633).

"Geno Ford met every quality that I was seeking in the head coach of Bradley Basketball," said Director of Athletics Dr. Michael Cross. "He has tremendous values, high basketball IQ, is a gifted and charismatic communicator, appreciates the educational quality of Bradley and has demonstrated he is a proven winner time and time again.

"Coach Ford is a perfect fit for Bradley and I have every confidence that our program will thrive under his leadership. I look forward to working with Geno on a daily basis and welcoming his family to the Peoria community."

Ford earned his bachelor's degree in organizational communication from Ohio University in 1997 and his master's degree in athletic administration from Ohio in 1999. He was a high-scoring guard for the Bobcats from 1993-97, finishing his career as the fifth-leading scorer in school history with 1,752 points and earning second-team All-MAC honors in 1995-96 and first-team honors in 1996-97.

Ford immediately began his coaching career upon graduation, averaging 17.8 points per game for the British Basketball League Leicester Riders in 1997-98, while serving as head coach for the Riders' junior team.

He returned to his alma mater in 1998 as a graduate assistant coach under Ohio head coach Larry Hunter and was promoted to assistant coach on the Bobcats staff in 1999. In his first year as full-time Bobcats assistant, Ford was on the bench for Ohio's 63-52 win against Bradley in the third round of the 1999 Rainbow Classic.

Ford quickly earned his first head coaching position in 2001 when he took over the NAIA program at Shawnee State, and he was named the American Mideast Conference Coach of the Year in his lone season after guiding the Bears to a 22-10 record and 10-win improvement compared to the previous season.

He returned to the MAC the next season, however, with a three-year stint as an assistant coach at Kent State. From 2002-05 as an assistant for the Golden Flashes, Ford helped Kent State to a 62-31 (.667) record, a pair of MAC East Division titles and a trio of NIT appearances.

Ford began his second stint as a head coach in 2005 at Muskingum and immediately produced the program's best record in 15 years by guiding the Muskies to a 17-9 record in 2005-06. He followed with a 12-13 mark in 2006-07, before returning to Kent State as an assistant in 2007-08.

Leading the recruiting effort that landed 2008 MAC Player of the Year Al Fisher, Ford helped Kent State to a 28-7 record in 2007-08, which culminated in a sweep of the MAC regular-season and tournament titles and a No. 9 seed in the NCAA Tournament, the best tourney seed in KSU history. In seven seasons as an assistant coach at Ohio and Kent State, Ford helped the two MAC schools to a combined 149-72 (.674) record, meaning his teams boast a 268-141 (.655) record in his overall, 13-year college coaching career.

Ford's teams also have excelled beyond the hardwood. In his first year as Kent State head coach, his players combined for the program's best semester grade point average during the 2008 Fall semester and five of his student-athletes have been honored at the Judith K. Devine Athletic Academic Honors Dinner each of the last two years.

One of the most prolific scorers in Ohio High School history, Ford was tabbed "Mr. Basketball" in 1993 by the Ohio Associated Press following his senior season at Cambridge High School in which he averaged 35.9 points, 4.5 rebounds and 4.5 assists per game. Playing for his father, Gene, the 5-foot-8 guard poured in 2,680 career points, ranking him third all-time in the state, 34 points better than current NBA superstar LeBron James (2,646).

Geno Ford was inducted into the Ohio Valley Athletic Conference Hall of Fame in 2004. After 24 years as the head coach at Cambridge, the elder Ford took over at Muskingum - his alma mater - in 2007-08.

Ford and his wife, Traci, are the parents of two sons: Darin (15) and David (7).

Ford will take over a Bradley program that finished 12-20 overall in 2010-11 and tied for ninth in the Missouri Valley Conference regular-season standings with a 4-14 league record. The Braves are expected to return nine lettermen and five of the top seven scorers for the 2011-12 season.




2011 Coaching Carousel
School Out Years Record In
Alcorn State Larry Smith 3 12-78
Arkansas John Pelphrey 4 69-59 Mike Anderson
Bradley Jim Les 9 154-140 Geno Ford
Cal State Bakersfield Keith Brown 6 68-105
Colgate Emmett Davis 13 165-212
Dayton Brian Gregory 8 172-94
Eastern Washington Kirk Earlywine 4 42-78
Fairfield Ed Cooley 5 92-69
Florida A&M Eugene Harris 4 46-80
Florida Gulf Coast Dave Balza 9 153-121
Fresno State Steve Cleveland 6 92-98
Georgia State Rod Barnes 4 44-79 Ron Hunter
Georgia Tech Paul Hewitt 11 190-162 Brian Gregory
IUPUI Ron Hunter 17 254-219
Kennesaw State Tony Ingle 11 248-215
Kent State Geno Ford 3 68-37
Lamar Steve Roccaforte 5 76-78
Louisiana Tech Kerry Rupp 4 57-69
Loyola (IL) Jim Whitesell 7 109-107
Manhattan Barry Rohrssen 5 58-95
Missouri Mike Anderson 5 111-57
Missouri State Cuonzo Martin 3 61-41
Monmouth Dave Calloway 14 178-227
North Carolina State Sidney Lowe 5 86-78
Northern Illinois Ricardo Patton 4 35-83 Mark Montgomery
Oklahoma Jeff Capel 5 96-69
Pepperdine Tom Asbury 3* 28-68 Marty Wilson
Providence Keno Davis 3 46-50 Ed Cooley
Stetson Derek Waugh 10+ 120-192
Tennessee Bruce Pearl 6 145-61 Cuonzo Martin
Tennessee Tech Mike Sutton 9 149-129 Steve Payne
Texas A&M-Corpus Christi Perry Clark 4 54-71 Willis Wilson
Texas Tech Pat Knight 3+ 50-60 Billy Gillispie
Towson Pat Kennedy 7 71-144
Utah Jim Boylen 4 69-60
Wyoming Heath Schroyer 3+ 49-68
*This was Tom Asbury's second stint as Pepperdine's coach.

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/basketball/ncaa/03/07/coaching.changes/index.html#ixzz1HzXJV97K








2011 All-Americans Announced

Seniors dominated The Associated Press All-America team for the first time in five years.
Jimmer Fredette of BYU, Nolan Smith of Duke and JaJuan Johnson, all seniors, were joined on the team Monday by junior Kemba Walker of Connecticut and freshman Jared Sullinger of Ohio State.
It's the most seniors since four made the 2006 team.
Fredette led the nation in scoring at 28.5 points per game while shooting 40.4 percent from 3-point range, a number more impressive because of the shots he lets fly from well behind the line.
He received all but one vote from the 65-member national media panel that selects the weekly Top 25. The voting was done before the NCAA tournament.
Fredette became one of the most popular players in recent memory as teams that lost to BYU were "jimmered."
"I think that it's a great accomplishment. Unbelievable," BYU coach Dave Rose said. "It shows how good his work ethic is. He's a player who has worked his way into an All-American. What he's meant to our program over the last four years -- it's really kind of immeasurable."
He is BYU's first All-American since Danny Ainge in 1981.
"If you go out and play your game and have confidence in yourself, you can accomplish great things," Fredette said. "That's what I've always said in my head, and it's worked out."
Smith, who received 61 votes, averaged 21.3 points, 4.6 rebounds and 5.2 assists in leading the Blue Devils to the top of the polls for 10 weeks this season. He assumed most of the ball-handling for Duke after star freshman Kyrie Irving went down early in the season with a toe injury and was responsible for defending the other team's top perimeter player.
"It's been a long process for me, just getting better each year and improving," Smith said. "That's something I hope to share with younger kids coming up. If you put the time in and get better and better and then by the time your senior year hits, you'll start to accomplish some of those individual goals, and that's something that I've done."
Smith is the fifth Duke player to be an All-American since 2000; two of them -- Jason Williams and J.J. Redick -- were selected twice.
Sullinger burst onto to the national scene by averaging 17.2 points and 10.1 rebounds while shooting 53.6 percent. The 6-foot-9 Sullinger, the seventh freshman All-American over the last five years, received 58 votes.
"I felt he was going to have a great impact not just on our program but on college basketball. The productivity he's had throughout the course of the season has really been incredible," Buckeyes coach Thad Matta said. "He so much fun to coach. As I've said, if I was starting a team, I'd select him to be our first player."
Walker had a strong start to the season and then capped it with an incredible performance in leading the Huskies to five wins in as many days to win the Big East tournament. He averaged 23.5 points, 5.3 rebounds and 4.3 assists and was the leader of one of the youngest teams in the country.
"It feels good, especially because I wasn't a preseason All-American," said Walker, who received 51 votes. "I just wanted to come into the season and try to win as many games as we could. From winning, it really helped me be a better player and just get more recognition."
Huskies coach Jim Calhoun said the 6-1 Walker, Connecticut's first All-American since Emeka Okafor in 2004, was "without a doubt the most important player to his team this season. I can't imagine where we would be without him."
The 6-10 Johnson was Purdue's inside presence, averaging 20.5 points, 8.2 rebounds and 2.3 blocks. He was the first Boilermaker chosen to the first team since Glenn Robinson in 1994. Johnson returned to Purdue after considering leaving for the NBA.
"Your senior year, you don't want to leave anything out there, and I definitely have no regrets. It worked out," he said. "The only thing I wanted to do that we didn't get done was go to the Final Four. Other than that, we got it all done."
Marcus Morris of Kansas led the second team and was joined by Derrick Williams of Arizona, Ben Hansbrough of Notre Dame, Jordan Taylor of Wisconsin and Kawhi Leonard of San Diego State.
Fredette and Johnson were both on the preseason All-America team, along with Kyle Singler of Duke, Jacob Pullen of Kansas State and Harrison Barnes of North Carolina.



The AP All-America first team


• Jimmer Fredette
BYU
6-2, senior
28.5 ppg, 4.2 apg
64 votes

• Nolan Smith
Duke
6-2, senior
21.3 ppg, 5.2 apg
61 votes


• Jared Sullinger
Ohio State
6-9, freshman
17.2 ppg, 10.1 rpg
58 votes

• Kemba Walker
Connecticut
6-1, junior
23.5 ppg, 5.3 rpg
51 votes

• JaJuan Johnson
Purdue
6-10, senior
20.5 ppg, 8.2 rpg
44 votes

Monday, March 28, 2011

The End is Near - Firing Pearl right move by UT ... how 'bout it, Ohio State? - Tressel may be forcing Ohio State's hand with more alleged deceptions



Tressel may be forcing Ohio State's hand with more alleged deceptions
Andy Staples
USC football coach Lane Kiffin, currently awaiting his day in NCAA court for alleged violations committed at Tennessee, said something Thursday that suggests he has studied the history of the NCAA's enforcement process.
"As you read the reports, when you look at those things, it has to do with issues of how you deal with the NCAA and how you communicate with them through the process," Kiffin said. "I don't think that's a question at all in this situation."
Kiffin is confident, believing he and Tennessee were forthright with investigators, and the charge leveled against him suggests the NCAA believes that as well. Kiffin was charged with failure to monitor -- an allegation many a coach has survived with his job intact. Among those who follow the NCAA's enforcement process, the general rule of thumb is this: The NCAA's Committee on Infractions can forgive a few transgressions, but one it rarely forgives is hiding the truth from the NCAA. That's why Kiffin should feel much safer than Ohio State's Jim Tressel, whose own school has turned him in to the NCAA for a violation of Bylaw 10.1, which prohibits Unethical Conduct.
Tressel has already been fined $250,000 and suspended for the first five games of the 2011 season, but a look at past infractions cases suggests he isn't out of the woods. An SI.com study of the past 177 NCAA infractions cases involving violations of Bylaw 10.1 revealed that coaches accused of such violations rarely retain their jobs. The cases in the NCAA's Major Infractions database dated back to 1989, and included schools from each of the NCAA's three divisions. Offenses ranged in severity from a coach providing free T-shirts to recruits to former Baylor basketball coach Dave Bliss encouraging others to lie to the NCAA about the habits of a murdered player. Of the 177 cases, 172 involved coaches or athletic administrators accused of committing unethical conduct. Of those, 159 resigned or were terminated. Eighty-one cases involved coaches or athletics administrators accused of providing false or misleading information to NCAA investigators or encouraging others to lie to investigators. Of those, 78 resigned or were terminated. In many of the cases, the coaches accused of lying to investigators also were accused of other violations. One intriguing aspect of Tressel's case is that it does not -- at this point -- include any other violations on his part.
E-mails from a former Buckeye to Tressel last spring alerted the coach to a Columbus tattoo parlor that was trading cash and tattoos to at least two players -- a clear violation of NCAA rules. According to Ohio State, Tressel notified neither his superiors nor the NCAA. In September, Tressel signed an NCAA form indicating he knew of no violations of NCAA rules. In December, when NCAA investigators came to Columbus to investigate Ohio State players' relationship with the tattoo parlor, after the school was tipped off by federal authorities, Tressel never mentioned that he knew what was going on. The story got even messier Friday when The Columbus Dispatch reported that Tressel forwarded the information to Ted Sarniak, the 67-year-old owner of a Jeanette, Pa., glass factory and a "mentor" of Buckeyes quarterback Terrelle Pryor, one of six players found to have traded memorabilia for cash and/or tattoos at Fine Line Ink in Columbus.
Those three acts -- 1) the forwarding of the information to someone other than his bosses or the NCAA, 2) the signing of the form and 3) the failure to divulge his knowledge of the arrangement in December -- are likely to draw the ire of the Committee on Infractions. In essence, Tressel will stand accused of knowingly playing ineligible players and then hiding that ineligibility from the NCAA.
But not all 10.1 cases are equal. For instance:
Section 10.1_(b) prohibits engaging in academic fraud. Tressel's case has nothing to do with academic fraud. When the enforcement team finishes its work and hands down a Notice of Allegations, Tressel could be charged with a violation of section 10.1_(c), which forbids knowing involvement in providing extra benefits. In that case, the committee would have to prove Tressel knew of the arrangement and did nothing to stop it. A more likely charge is a violation of section 10.1_(d), which forbids "knowingly furnishing the NCAA or the individual's institution false or misleading information concerning the individual's involvement in or knowledge of matters relevant to a possible violation of an NCAA regulation."
Basketball coach Bruce Pearl is charged with a 10.1_(d) violation in the same Tennessee case as Kiffin, but Pearl won't have to wait for the Committee on Infractions to rule to learn his fate. Tennessee fired him Monday with athletic director Mike Hamilton citing "the cumulative effect of the evolution of the investigation combined with a number of more recent non-NCAA-related incidents."
What should concern Tressel just as much as Pearl's dismissal is that even in cases where coaches who knowingly used ineligible athletes didn't hide that fact from NCAA investigators, those coaches still lost their jobs.
In 2006, the NCAA released its infractions report for Iowa's men's swimming program. The report detailed how former coach John Davey knowingly used three ineligible Polish swimmers between 2001-04 and never reported that they were ineligible to his superiors. Davey was not accused of misleading NCAA investigators; in fact, the case never got that far. Iowa conducted its own internal investigation that ended in January 2005. By then, Davey was gone. The school put out a release on Dec. 20, 2004 saying he had resigned for "personal reasons."
"John has been an outstanding representative of the University of Iowa and the Iowa Athletic Department," then-athetic director Bob Bowlsby said in a release. "We always hate to lose someone of his caliber and talents."
Another similar case offers the only time the head football coach at Ohio State will ever draw a comparison to the rugby coach at tiny Southern Vermont College. Jeremiah Madison, who shepherded Southern Vermont's rugby club team into NCAA play, was fired in 2008 for knowingly using ineligible players. One player, according to the NCAA report, played in a game under the name of an eligible player.
But not everyone found to have misled investigators got fired. Alcorn State women's basketball coach Shirley Walker was accused of multiple violations between 2002-04. They included impermissible benefits (giving ineligible players travel per diem) and using ineligible players in practice. The COI also found that Walker provided misleading information to investigators regarding several issues. But Walker didn't lose her job. Though the COI in 2006 cited her continued employment as an "aggravating factor" in its decision to impose a postseason ban, it accepted the school's self-imposed two-game suspension and threatened further sanctions if Walker wasn't suspended from the first week of practice for three consecutive seasons.
In the end, it wasn't the NCAA that got Walker. It was her record. The 30-year veteran was fired in 2008 after going 12-18.
Tressel can only hope his fate is determined by his 106-22 record at Ohio State. Because since 1989, the record of coaches and administrators accused of violations of Bylaw 10.1 is quite dismal.






The End is Near
Posted by Chip Patterson
sportsline.com

With the NCAA investigation into Ohio State and head coach Jim Tressel still unresolved, the local media is bound to do some further digging on the topic. As we saw this past season in the high-profile cases of Auburn and North Carolina, the paper trail can reveal much more about the situation at hand, or in some cases misdirect the focus of violations in the first place. For Ohio State, this bit of information may raise more questions than it answers.
The Columbus Dispatch is reporting that when Tressel received the famous emails of warning regarding his players selling memorabilia to a local tattoo parlor, he forwarded them to a man close to star quarterback Terrelle Pryor. Ted Sarniak, 67, is described as "a prominent businessman in Pryor's hometown of Jeanette, Pa." Sarniak has acted as Pryor's mentor and advisor since high school, and reportedly was the recipient of the warning emails when they were forwarded by Tressel.
In the news conference to announce the violations against Tressel, the coach nodded when asked if he had forwarded the emails. He was quickly cut short by athletic director Gene Smith, and has maintained that the reason he kept the information to himself was to protect his players and the confidentiality of the federal investigation against the owner of the tattoo parlor. Tressel apologized profusely, and has since received a five game suspension as punishment for keeping the information from the university and the NCAA.
But the report also raises questions about Sarniak, and his relationship with Pryor/Tressel/Ohio State. Of all people involved with the Ohio State football program, why would Tressel choose to inform Pryor's 67-year-old mentor on the issue rather than Pryor's family. Ohio State has not turned over any email records as of yet, but compliance director Doug Archie was quick to erase any doubts regarding Pryor's relationship with Sarniak.
"Mr. Sarniak and Terrelle Pryor have been friends for a number of years, and their friendship dates back prior to Terrelle's enrollment at Ohio State," Archie said in an email to The Dispatch. "As the friendship developed, Mr. Sarniak is someone who Terrelle has reached out to for advice and guidance throughout his high-school and collegiate career."
When the NCAA investigation concludes, Tressel's five-game suspension and $250,000 fine could be upheld or increased. A big-name program like Ohio State would prefer that the investigation move quickly, so that the media attention can focus on football rather than independent investigation. Unfortunately for the Buckeyes, the NCAA has a tendency to take their time with these matters.





Firing Pearl right move by UT ... how 'bout it, Ohio State?
By Gregg Doyel

Jim Tressel got Bruce Pearl fired.
No one at Tennessee would ever say it, but I don't care about that. Tennessee is the same place that said Pearl would weather this storm and remain as coach. The storm came. Pearl got washed away. So now I don't believe a word Tennessee says -- and I won't believe a word Tennessee says until it has removed its overmatched athletics director. If Mike Hamilton is talking for Tennessee, I'm not listening.
But Tressel got Pearl fired. Believe that. And ask yourself this:
Could Bruce Pearl do the same to Jim Tressel?
I believe so, because public perception is everything to Ohio State, and to Tennessee -- it's the tail wagging both those dogs. Look at Tennessee, where cheating didn't do in Bruce Pearl. Lying to the NCAA didn't get him fired. Neither did losing to Michigan by 30 points in the NCAA tournament.
Public perception buried Pearl.
And Jim Tressel provided the last shovel of dirt.
Pearl was surviving the scandal, just as Hamilton hilariously said he would months ago. Everywhere Tennessee went for a road game, the local paper wrote about its ethically empty basketball coach. Every time Tennessee was on national TV, the announcers talked about its ethically empty basketball coach. Those were shots to the body, wearing on Pearl, wearing on the people above Pearl -- and above Mike Hamilton, too.
But nobody ever got knocked unconscious by a body shot.
Jim Tressel provided the KO blow. It was a sucker punch to Pearl's glass jaw. The facts of the cases are different, but the underlying ethical emptiness was the same:
• Pearl committed an NCAA violation and tried to hide it from the NCAA.

• Tressel learned of NCAA violations and tried to hide it from his bosses -- and therefore, from the NCAA.
When Pearl committed his blunder, the people at Tennessee -- blinded by the revenue he generates -- forgave it. Excused it. Rationalized it away as a mistake, but not a fatal mistake. Certainly nothing that warranted firing a winning coach. Tennessee was so close to the situation, it couldn't see the forest. It kept staring at that Bruce Pearl money tree.
Then came Tressel. Doing the same basic thing.
And that, Tennessee could see. Hell, the whole world could see. Most folks were outraged by, and even embarrassed for, Ohio State. How could a school keep a coach who did what Tressel had done? Insane, when you think about it. Tressel learned that his best player, Heisman candidate Terrelle Pryor, had committed an NCAA violation that would jeopardize his eligibility -- and Tressel did nothing. Told nobody. Sat on the information and built his 2010 season around Pryor's offensive skill-set.
And then in late December, when the NCAA came calling and Ohio State athletics director Gene Smith asked Tressel about Pryor's violation -- trading on his celebrity by selling goods to a Columbus, Ohio, businessman -- Tressel played dumb. Said he didn't know about it. In other words, he lied.
And Ohio State kept him? Suspended him for just two games? Hahahaha. Laughable. Ohio State made a mockery of itself, and everyone but the most blindly loyal Buckeyes fans knew it.
Even the people at Tennessee knew it.
That happened two weeks ago. When did Tennessee turn on Bruce Pearl? About a week ago. That's when Hamilton went on a local radio station and revealed that Pearl's job was in jeopardy after all. That stunned Pearl, stunned Tennessee fans, stunned everyone. It was a 180-degree spin from Tennessee's position for months, even after the NCAA had called Pearl a cheater and a liar in its notice of allegations Feb. 22.
What happened in the last two weeks?
Jim Tressel happened.
Tennessee understood, finally, what it had done, what it had condoned and -- most importantly -- what it was going to face. It took the Tressel fiasco for Tennessee to realize the NCAA was going to devastate its basketball program if Bruce Pearl were still the coach. Even with blindly loyal Volunteers fans gathering in support of their ethically bankrupt coach, Tennessee did the right thing on Monday by firing Pearl -- but don't give the school much credit. It did everything wrong, from start to finish, until stumbling onto the only resolution acceptable: firing a coach who would dare try to cover up NCAA violations.
Now the focus falls to Ohio State, and public perception will weigh heavily on the Buckeyes. For the second time, Tennessee has set the bar for responding to an ethically empty coach. The first time, Tennessee went for the in-season suspension. The SEC sat down Pearl for eight games, and that was good enough for Tennessee. And so it was good enough for Ohio State, which sat down its own ethically empty coach, Jim Tressel, for the first two games of the 2011 season.
Two games became five games after the Buckeyes gauged public perception, which bordered on ridicule, and accepted Tressel's offer to increase his own suspension. Which I don't believe for a second, by the way. Tressel lied to his own boss, but I'm supposed to believe he's telling the truth about his five-game suspension? Not gonna happen.
But now, here's what happened: Tennessee raised the bar from suspension to dismissal. Tennessee learned from Jim Tressel that its coach had to be fired.
So what did Ohio State learn from Bruce Pearl?

Friday, March 25, 2011

David Lighty energizes Ohio State - Friday's Tournament Schedule - Photos of Last Night's NCAA Games

Great Pictures from Last Night!


BYE! BYE! DUKE!












MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP - EAST REGION - SWEET 16 AT NEWARK NJ

11Marquette(22-14, 9-9 Big East)
2North Carolina(28-7, 14-2 ACC)
CBS 7:15 PM ET Preview

BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP - EAST REGION - SWEET 16 AT NEWARK NJ2

4Kentucky(27-8, 10-6 SEC)
1Ohio St(34-2, 16-2 Big Ten)
CBS 9:45 PM ET Preview


MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP - EAST REGION - SWEET 16 AT NEWARK NJ1

12Richmond (29-7, 13-3 A 10)
1Kansas (34-2, 14-2 Big 12)
TBS 7:27 PM ET Preview


MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP - SOUTHWEST REGION - SWEET 16 AT SAN ANTONIO3

11VCU (26-11, 12-6 CAA)
10Florida St (23-10, 11-5 ACC)
TBS 9:57 PM ET Preview











David Lighty energizes Ohio State
Brian Bennett www.espn.com
Good article on Lighty and the Buckeyes by Brian.

CLEVELAND -- Ohio State showed up at Quicken Loans Arena for an early-morning shootaround this past Saturday in between the second and third rounds of the NCAA tournament. Watching David Lighty, you might have thought it was the Final Four.
With stars around him, David Lighty is charged with doing a lot of the Buckeyes' dirty work.Lighty ran onto the court in the near empty building shouting, "Let's go!" Two arena workers sitting at the top of the arena let out an "O-H." Lighty returned the cheer by screaming "I-O!" at the top of his lungs.
That was just a regular morning for the Buckeyes senior, whose energy and boundless optimism provide the fuel for the tournament's No. 1 overall seed.
"There will be times where I've just gotten out of bed and my bones haven't even woken up yet, and he's already jumping up and down," teammate Dallas Lauderdale said. "It just gets me juiced up as well. He's always happy and in a good mood."
Ohio State (34-2) heads into its Sweet 16 matchup against Kentucky on a major roll, having thrashed its first two tournament opponents by a combined 61 points. On a team that seems to have a peg for every hole, Lighty is the consummate glue guy.
"He holds the whole thing together," senior Jon Diebler said. "He's someone you need to have on your team to be successful."
The 6-foot-5 swingman serves as the defensive stopper, often drawing the assignment of guarding the other team's best player. He also ranks second on the team in both rebounds and assists.
Freshman Jared Sullinger, guard William Buford and the sharpshooting Diebler are the Buckeyes' main offensive options, but Lighty can score when needed. Ask George Mason. The Patriots decided to concentrate on Sullinger and Diebler and slack off Lighty early in Sunday's third- round game. Lighty lit them up for 25 points, burying all seven 3-pointers he attempted.
Ohio State coach Thad Matta told Lighty before the season that if he could shoot 40 percent from 3-point range, the team would be hard to stop. Lighty -- who hoisted shots from a chair this summer while recovering from a broken left foot -- is now at 43.5 percent behind the arc after Sunday's performance.
Lighty's intangibles may be even more valuable than the stats he contributes. Matta has coached several first-round draft picks, including Evan Turner, Greg Oden, Mike Conley and future lottery selection Sullinger. Yet he says Lighty -- who's never even made a first- or second-team All-Big Ten squad -- deserves a statue at Ohio State's basketball facility. He calls him "the best practice player I've ever had."
As the elder statesman, Lighty's guidance has proved crucial to Ohio State's success."I say to him every day, 'If I had one-tenth of your energy, I would be the happiest person in the world,'" Matta said. "And I only want one-tenth of it. He's been that way from day one. In his five years, we've practiced at damn near every hour of the day. And I don't care if it's 6 in the morning or 10 at night, he's the same guy."
Playing in his hometown last weekend, Lighty could barely stop smiling. He took the Buckeyes to his family's church for a soul food feast Saturday night, and when the George Mason game ended, he went into the stands to hug his parents and other family members and friends. He was the most infectious presence at the tournament site, which is pretty normal for him.
"We're alive and breathing, so you've got to be happy," Lighty said. "I don't ever think, 'It's time for me to pick it up,' or anything like that. And if I'm not doing it, guys look at me like, what's wrong?"
That's an impressive amount of energy for someone who seemingly has played for the Buckeyes since the school won its only national title in 1960. Or as Sullinger jokes, "He tells us to enjoy this, because his 20 years at Ohio State really went by fast."
Lighty received a medical redshirt after a broken foot -- the same injury he suffered last summer -- limited him to just seven games in 2008-09. He is also the lone holdover from the 2007 team that lost to Florida in the national title game (he scored four points in the loss).
With that extra season, he has been a part of 129 wins, most in school history and the most of any active NCAA player. That experience proves valuable even on this veteran-laden Ohio State team.
"He's the only one who's been to the national championship game, so he knew what they did, how they prepared," Lauderdale said. "He knew what they didn't do in off-the-court situations, what they didn't get involved in. We're trying to have the same run, so he can tell us the same things to do."
Lighty said his main advice to the younger Buckeyes is just to play without nerves and to approach every possession like it's your last one.
Of course, for a player that approaches every practice like it's the most exciting event on the planet, only one outcome for the end of his college career could match his enthusiasm.
"At the end of the day, it's just about us being on the court with the streamers coming down and holding the trophy," he said.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

The Real Bruce Pearl - NCAA Hoops Tournament Schedule for Thursday



NCAA Hoops Tournament Schedule for Thursday

THU, MAR 24 7:15 PM ET (3) UConn, (2) SDSU

West THU, MAR 24 7:27 PM ET (3) BYU, (2) Florida

Southeast THU, MAR 24 9:45 PM ET (1) Duke, (5) Arizona

West THU, MAR 24 9:57 PM ET (8) Butler, (4) Wisc.









Bruce Pearl’s First Con, And The World That Created A Monster
Excellent article from Libit on Pearl. There is much more at www.deadspin.com

Daniel Libit — The first time I met Jimmy Collins was in 2004. I was working on a profile of UW-Milwaukee's ascendant basketball coach Bruce Pearl and had come to Chicago to get the other side of the story. Collins was coaching at the University of Illinois-Chicago, but by that point he was much better known as Pearl's foil, a sort of perpetual other side of the story. The short version goes like this: In 1989, Pearl, then an assistant at Iowa, accused Collins, then an assistant at Illinois, of offering a Chevy Blazer and $80,000 to a recruit named Deon Thomas, who was a star at Chicago's Simeon High School. Pearl had proof: a surreptitious recording of a phone conversation with Thomas. The controversy that ensued temporarily crippled one Big Ten program and two coaching careers, and it was still very much on the principals' minds in 2004 when Pearl offered a handshake before a game and Collins rejected it. This had caused some squirming around the Horizon League. Beyond that, nobody much gave a shit.

But Collins cared, and he was not about to curb himself, not for the sake of his conference commissioner, who had asked him to play nice, and certainly not for the sake of Pearl — a "shyster," in the old coach's words today, one of those "he-who-smelt-it-dealt-it guys." And so I met Collins one day in UIC's basketball offices, and he was more than happy to spend an hour answering some questions about Pearl. Collins, it turned out, was holding a lot more than just a grudge. He told me he still had reams of transcripts of NCAA testimony related to the Thomas affair, and then he issued a warning.

"Believe me, I keep them in a vault," Collins said. "I'll never let them burn up. If a fire comes up into my house, they are in a burn-proof vault. And I tell [Pearl]: Every time you want to toss mud, we'll toss. Otherwise, you keep my name out of your mouth and I'll keep your name out of mine."

Now, it seems, everyone is tossing mud at Bruce Pearl, who was fired yesterday by Tennessee. For much of his career, no two people could agree on what Pearl was, exactly. A fink? A whistleblower? A cheat like any other? A trailblazer? But with Friday's blowout loss to Michigan, and with this fall's revelation that he had lied to NCAA investigators looking into his recruiting activities, Pearl looks like the two things a college basketball coach is not permitted to be, at least not simultaneously: a crook and a loser.

In the wake of Pearl's firing, it's worth revisiting that seminal moment in his career, the Deon Thomas recruiting saga, from which we've obtained a number of little-seen and revealing documents. It may not have been the most important sports scandal in recent memory. Given what's happened at Tennessee, it may not have even been the most important sports scandal to involve Pearl. But it was a model scandal. It had all the elements. It was Cam Newton and Renardo Sidney and O.J. Mayo and Blue Chips, all rolled into one and topped off with a touch of Nixonian spycraft. No one came off well: not Pearl, who'd broken a kind of coaching omerta; not Collins, who was labeled a cheat at a time when Illinois's rivals around the Midwest were trying to lay recruiting inroads in Chicago; not Thomas, who looked like another kid with his hand out; not Thomas's supposed best friend, who acted as Pearl's snoop; not Mike Slive, who was then a lawyer hired (and subsequently fired) by Illinois and who is now SEC commissioner; not Randy Rueckert, a former NCAA investigator, who once allegedly hounded Deon Thomas up and down the sidelines of a pickup game; not Rich Hilliard, the former head of the NCAA's enforcement staff, who was a college friend of Pearl's and who would have some trouble of his own staying on the right side of the rules. Even two decades on, it still has something to teach us — about Pearl, yes, but especially about the nature of that burn-proof vault of yellowing secrets known as the NCAA.
The Player: Deon Thomas
Deon Thomas's grandmother had Bruce Pearl pegged a long, long time ago. She could spy the deceit in the young Iowa assistant's eyes.

"My grandmother saw right through him as clear as glass," Thomas said, "and that was one of the things she told me, one of the things she would often say: 'People need to be who they are.'"

Pearl, Bernice McGary believed, was not the person he purported to be. And for this, she dissuaded her grandson from being a Hawkeye. And why wouldn't Deon heed her advice? She had taken him in when his mother was laid waste by drugs. She had cared for him, loved him, and raised him during his formative and fruitful high school years. And he trusted her. And he loved her. And that, he said, is why he decided to go to Illinois.

"While I was playing I really tried to not give it much thought," said Thomas, who played four years at Illinois and then spent most of his 14-year professional career abroad. He is now the men's basketball coach and athletic director at Lewis and Clark Community College in southwestern Illinois. "My grandmother said, 'Don't think about the past because you can't change it.' And you will often hear me quote her, because my grandmother, and my mother were the biggest influences on me. My grandmother was the reason I didn't go to Iowa — which the NCAA didn't want to hear. But I guess maybe they didn't believe the poor black kid knew money wasn't the be-all and end-all."

Thomas imagines that none of this would have happened if he'd had a strong male figure in his life. His father was largely absent during his teen years, and his coach could do only so much to fend off the college suitors. A psychologist hired by Thomas's attorney during the investigation found him to be clinically depressed. Still, Thomas said, he knew right from wrong.

"I went to University of Illinois for $80,000 and a Blazer?" he said. "That is crazy."

That's Deon Thomas's story now, and that's been his story since the NCAA launched its investigation. For the particulars of the saga, you can find thorough, if perhaps biased, accounts all over the web. We'll keep ours brief:

Thomas enrolled at Illinois in fall 1989, having chosen the Illini over Minnesota and Iowa, to which he had at one point supposedly given an oral commitment. Thomas was reckoned one of the top incoming freshmen in the country. Pearl had pursued him aggressively, and on April 9, 1989, sensing his prize was slipping away, the coach secretly (but legally) recorded a phone conversation with Thomas that included the following exchange, according to documents related to the investigation:

Pearl: Okay baby. Listen, I just want to go over a couple of things and ask you a couple of questions.

Thomas: Uh-huh (yes).

Pearl: Okay? When you went down to the Indiana game…

Thomas: Uh-huh.

Pearl: … and you talked with Jimmy and Jimmy offered you $80,000 and the Blazer, that upset you didn't it?

Thomas: Yeah, somewhat.

Pearl: Tell me how…what your reaction to that was.

Thomas: Nothing, I was just more amazed, you know.

Pearl: Yeah.

Thomas: I didn't say anything about it to him.

Pearl: Yeah.

Thomas: You know, I just laughed it off.

Pearl: Really? I felt at the time Deon that…at the time, I really felt like even though you were leaning towards Iowa, I felt that Illinois was in decent shape. Especially if they could play well this year, give it all their talent (?) you know what I'm saying? And I thought you were going to take a look. But when they offered you the money, didn't that turn you off a little bit?

Thomas: No. No, not really.

Pearl: It didn't?

Thomas: You know. I just thought about it a little bit more that's all. It didn't really turn me off.

Throughout the investigation and in the intervening decades, Thomas has maintained that no bribe was ever offered and none was accepted, and that whatever he said to Pearl that day was merely his attempt to get an overzealous recruiter off the phone. (Pearl had put in nine calls to Thomas in the previous 48 hours.) In addition, the tape submitted to the NCAA contained just six minutes of a 14-minute conversation; the full version never was provided. There are Illini fans who believe to this day that the tape was doctored. (Thomas would file a lawsuit against Pearl in 1993 for secretly recording him. The suit was dismissed.)

In response, attorneys for Collins and Thomas submitted to the NCAA a list of counter-allegations against Pearl [PDF]. Among the charges: that Pearl had given Thomas $100 in cash and various other inducements; that he had provided gifts and the promise of a scholarship offer to Thomas's high school friend, Renaldo Kyles; that he had made improper recruiting contact with Thomas in Amsterdam; that he had offered Thomas's grandmother "financial assistance"; and that he had helped another family member get a job; that he had "knowingly provided false and misleading information to the NCAA enforcement staff and investigators from the University of Illinois."

In a 14-page response sent on Dec. 2, 1991, David Berst — then an assistant executive director for enforcement, currently the NCAA's top cop — said he could find no corroborating evidence to support any of the accusations made against Pearl. According to Berst, Pearl did cop to suggesting that Kyles apply for a scholarship for managers and trainers, but he denied making any guarantees. Regarding the allegation about "financial assistance" for Thomas's grandmother, Pearl told the NCAA that it was in fact Illinois that had offered to move McGary into a nicer building. Pearl, he explained, had mentioned Illinois's offer in conversation with her in an attempt to explain that Iowa would provide no such assistance. "[S]he seemed confused and did not understand what he was trying to say," Berst wrote. [PDF]

Berst's response was dismissive and at times even sarcastic. "Your statement that travel out of the continental United States for recruiting purposes is not expressly permitted by NCAA legislation is interesting," he wrote of the incident in Amsterdam, where Thomas and his Simeon team had traveled for a tournament, and where Pearl had followed them, still hot on his recruit's heel, "but is no more relevant than the statement that travel to Chicago, Illinois, for recruiting purposes is not expressly permitted."

What's striking and especially telling about the letter is the stuff that didn't raise Berst's eyebrow — Pearl tracking a recruit all the way to Amsterdam, one of seven trips involving the recruitment of Thomas that cost Iowa more than $10,000 in all, according to one account; Pearl enlisting a kid as a mole and dangling a scholarship in front of him; Pearl creepily recording phone conversations with Thomas; and so on— and the stuff that did, like whether or not Thomas received a $100 jogging suit.

The Idealist: Bruce Pearl
Pearl at first was unnerved when I broached the topic of Thomas in one of our latter interviews in 2004. But, eventually, he warmed to the idea of a public testimonial.

I remember Pearl getting wet in the eyes, and I remember him telling me: "I've been asked a question: 'If you had to do it again, would you?' And I answer it reluctantly. Reluctantly, I would say yes. Reluctant, because it hurt me. Reluctant, because it hurt Deon. Reluctant, because it hurt Jimmy. Reluctant, because it hurt Illinois, their fans, and their university. Reluctant, because it was a pain in the butt to the people in Iowa. Reluctant, because there was enough of a percentage of the population that thought I was wrong. I understand that. I am an idealist. Having gone through this, I'm more of a realist."

Pearl has seen himself this way since the Deon Thomas affair came to a close: the tortured whistleblower who sacrificed his professional prospects — Dick Vitale called his actions "career suicide" — at the altar of truth. Of course, that's not how Pearl himself put it in a 10-page memo, marked "confidential," that he drafted for his superiors at Iowa [PDF]. The memo was a sort of bill of indictment. He mentioned Collins's $80,000 offer, then wrote: "The only other details Deon offered was that it was the most Illinois had ever offered to pay for a recruit's signature. Marcus Liberty of archrival Martin Luther King in Chicago had been offered only $75,000 and a new car when he decided to choose Illinois at the last minute over Syracuse." He cited conversations he'd had with Kyles, Thomas's "best friend," that corroborated the claim about the offer. He found several other minor violations — illegal recruiting contacts and such — and even permissible actions that nevertheless elicited a burst of high-mindedness:

Current Illinois basketball players, and former Simeon stars Nick Anderson and Irvin Small, where in attendance for at least five Simeon basketball games and made several school visits with the intent of recruiting Deon to Illinois. I realize this is not a violation of NCAA rules, but due to the number of contacts and the reasoning behind the visits, it does prompt one to ask the question "when exactly are these players in class."

But the most revealing section was the final one, entitled "strategy." It was not the work of an idealist. It was a tour de force of cold-eyed college recruiting realpolitik:

1. Notify the NCAA soon, prior to mid June when Deon arrives at summer school in Champaign. Chances of having the truth come out are better if the investigation takes place in Chicago.

2. Work with someone in Enforcement that we know personally. For example, I graduated from Boston College with Rich Hilliard and we have stayed in touch.

3. Can we discuss some "conditions" with the NCAA prior to turning over evidence.

a) The University of Iowa must remain nameless or we'll lose any chance of Deon coming to Iowa.

b) Renaldo Kyles, Deon's best friend who worked with me, must also not be named in the investigation for exactly the same reason.

c) All us the opportunity to advise them on the best way to get at the truth. That being simply this: There are several people who knew about the offers of cash prior to Deon's commitment. Many of these same people have been with Deon when he's made some purchases that prior to signing with Illinois he would not have been able to. Those most likely to tell the truth are Deon's teammates, Jackie Crawford, Antoine Johnson and Avery Stallings. These young men are going to junior college and might tell the truth about what they know if their eligibility at an NCAA school is put in question. Also Deon's girlfriend, Latisha Scott, whom I've never met or talked to, might be willing to tell the truth if she could be convinced we're not trying to hurt Deon.

4. The object of this action is to punish the University of Illinois and prevent them from doing it again. We cannot be placed in an uncompetitive situation with anyone in our conference.

5. Finally and most importantly, if this all can be done without destroying Deon Thomas, I'm in favor, but if the NCAA cannot adequately protect Deon and treat him as a victim also, then I would not feel the same way about this course of action.

Pearl's whistleblowing was unmistakably an act of self-interest. So strong was that self-interest that the possibility of destroying a teenager seemed almost an afterthought; he raised the issue in the same breath that he considered blackmailing "the truth" out of Thomas's teammates.

Although the NCAA never found Collins guilty of the major charges Pearl levied, it did sanction the school for three self-reported minor violations and "a lack of institutional control." Illinois was put on probation, banned from the 1991 tournament, and limited to two scholarships in 1991-92 and 1992-93. Recruiting was severely restricted. Thomas wound up sitting out his freshman season.

Through a Tennessee spokesman, Pearl declined to revisit the topic with me a few weeks ago. But in November, when his league suspension was handed down, he made at least a vague allusion to this history.

"I have been a very public advocate for playing by the rules," he said. "When you don't play by the rules, these are the things that can happen."

The Bloodhounds: Randy Rueckert, Rich Hilliard, And Mike Slive

Collins was as lucky as he was guilty. Randy Rueckert remains sure of that. He was one of the NCAA investigators who handled the Thomas case, a former Cook County prosecutor who now works as a private eye in Chicago, and he is certain today that Collins bribed Thomas.

When I asked Rueckert if the allegations against Pearl at Tennessee changed his opinion of what took place at Illinois, he swiftly cut me short: "No." He is offended, he said, by the implication of my question and offended moreover by the statements and innuendo that succeeded the investigation, ones that Collins has continued to float: that the whole thing was a sham; that Hilliard, an NCAA enforcement officer at the time, was in cahoots with Pearl, his old BC chum; that the NCAA was possessed with finding wrongdoing in Champaign.

"It really bothers me to think that it is being characterized as a witch hunt that we went on because Hilliard knew Pearl and we were out to get Illinois, and there isn't anything further from truth," Rueckert said. "It was a comprehensive, lengthy investigation, and we would have never brought it to the committee if we didn't feel it happened."

To impugn Hilliard, Rueckert said, is to impugn him.

"I was a major part of that investigation, so you can sugarcoat it all you like, but the implication is clearly there," he said.

Thomas's attorney, Stephen Beckett, cited telephone records showing five phone calls that Pearl made to Hilliard in July and August 1989. In addition, during the course of the investigation, Beckett and at least two Illinois administrators recalled an episode in which Rueckert and another NCAA investigator, Bob Minnix (now a senior associate athletics director at Washington State), had stalked an un-enrolled Thomas to a gym on the Illinois campus and berated him over the matter.

In his 1991 book, Undue Process: The NCAA's Injustice for All, Don Yaeger writes of the alleged incident:

Deon Thomas was playing a pickup game on the challenge court. Playing on the adjacent court was Jim Anderson, professor in the College of Education and chairman of the Illinois Athletic Control Board.

According to his statement, Anderson looked over and saw two similarly dressed men — both wearing polo shirts and blue slacks — watching Deon as he made his way up and down the court. Suddenly, one of the two men, later identified as Rueckert, began walking up and down the sidelines yelling at Deon while he was playing. Just as suddenly, Deon quit in the middle of the game and walked away. The two men followed. So did Anderson.

The still-unenrolled Thomas made his way downstairs to the weight room with the men following. From the top of the stairs, Anderson identified himself as a university administrator and asked the two men what was going on. Rueckert told Anderson that he and Minnix were from the NCAA and were actually on their way to Chicago when they decided to stop in and see Deon. As Thomas worked out in the weight room, Rueckert and Minnix watched through a glass door. Anderson stood back and watched them. When Thomas left the building, using a service door in the rear, the two investigators hustled out to meet him. There, they ran into Craig Stenson, a member of the school's athletic staff. According to a statement from Stenson, Rueckert began yelling at Thomas. "You're a liar," Stenson quotes Rueckert as saying. "You're going to talk to me. If you don't have anything to hide, you'll talk to me."

Today, Rueckert calls that account "absolute bullshit."

"I am not going to dignify it with a comment," he told me. "It is the most ludicrous allegation out there."

Thomas, meanwhile, has maintained that's exactly what happened. Minnix did not respond to an e-mail seeking his comment.

I was unable to reach Hilliard for the story, but after years of being paid to sniff out impropriety in college sports, it seems he learned a few things from his old prey. In 2001, as an attorney for the Indianapolis-based law firm Ice Miller, Hilliard was forced to settle a malpractice suit brought by his client, David Ridpath, a former assistant athletics director at Marshall. Then, in 2005, the Illinois Supreme Court suspended Hilliard from the state bar for five months after he was found to have used money for his own purposes that St. Bonaventure University had paid to retain Ice Miller as outside counsel. Hilliard was using it to pay off his personal gambling debts.

Slive declined a recent interview request to discuss the Thomas affair; he has, I'm told, turned down other opportunities to speak on this since taking over at the SEC. At the time, Slive was an attorney for Bond, Schoeneck & King, and he was initially hired by Illinois to conduct a parallel investigation of Pearl's allegations and make recommendations to the university. Like Ice Miller, Bond, Schoeneck & King is considered one of the go-to shops for athletics departments in trouble, and it was more or less Slive's job to act as a lower court and to get Illinois to punish itself before the NCAA stepped in. Slive was certain of Collins's culpability; the university was not.

"Our perception was that Slive was working in concert with NCAA and his whole process was to throw Jimmy under the bus and ask Illinois to grovel for mercy and leniency," said Mark Goldenberg, the attorney who represented Collins throughout the investigation. Eventually, Goldenberg, along with Thomas's attorney, prevailed upon the school to relieve Slive of his duties.

Collins calls Slive a snake who tried to "force-feed me words." He has long maintained — without evidence — that Slive was part of Pearl's conspiracy against him. And this fall he thought he saw the old alliance at work once again. While suspending Pearl for eight conference games, Slive lent verbal support to the embattled coach. "In the analysis I determined there may well have been enough for the entire conference season," Slive said in November, "but the fact that he owned up to what he had done, owned up to the underlying violations, I felt half of the conference season was an appropriate matter."

For his part, Pearl responded much as he did at Iowa, wrapping himself in virtue. In January, when asked by ESPN's Jimmy Dykes what he had learned through this latest ordeal, Pearl said: "That my faith in God has never been stronger and that my faith in man has never been weaker — including myself."

Reading that quote on his iPad one day, Collins smelled a familiar skunk.

"It's a con man's game, and he's running it," he told me in January. "And he's never going to con me, because I know what he's about. I know what the guy's about. Anytime you use God, you bring God into what you've done? You're conning. How are you going to buy that?"

The Mole: Renaldo Kyles

"I have nothing negative to say of Bruce Pearl," the man of God told me. "He is a hell of a basketball coach. He is a great friend."

Rev. Renaldo Kyles, Pearl's snitch in the Deon Thomas camp, is now a pastor and director of interfaith services for Chicago Public Schools. He said that he stayed in touch with Pearl for a number of years after the incident. When Pearl got the job at Tennessee, Kyles called to congratulate him.

Kyles's role in the story is one of its uglier elements — a high school kid being urged to rat on his peer, all so that one basketball program might gain leverage over another one — and even today it's unclear who was conning whom harder, Pearl (with his talk of a scholarship for Kyles) or Kyles (with the suggestion that he was part of Thomas's inner circle). Thomas recalls Kyles as a chubby, unpopular kid whom his group of friends had taken in. Pearl, however, thought Kyles was Thomas's closest pal. Pearl and Kyles communicated frequently throughout the recruiting process. Kyles, according to transcripts of telephone conversations, had told Pearl that Collins was offering tens of thousands of dollars to lure Thomas to Illinois. An investigator hired by Thomas's attorney later interviewed Kyles, and, according to the investigator's report to the NCAA, Kyles claimed he never heard Thomas tell him about the $80,000 or the Blazer — contrary to Pearl's claims. However, the investigator said that when he had asked Kyles to sign a statement avowing this, his father stepped in and wouldn't allow it. In his official response to the NCAA, Thomas called Kyles "a shakedown artist."

Here's the transcript of one call between Kyles and Pearl, soon after Thomas had decided not to make make an official visit to Iowa City:

Pearl: Are you talking to Deon?

Kyles: Yeah, what?

Pearl: What did he say? (Pause) You just called him?

Kyles: Huh-uh (no), he called me.

Pearl: He called you after I called him?

Kyles: Huh-uh, he called me just a few minutes ago, him and his girlfriend.

Pearl: Really?

Kyles: Yeah, they're supposed to be coming over here later on.

Pearl: What did he have to say?

Kyles: Nothing. He still know I'm upset.

Pearl: Yeah. Well I think the most important thing you can do right now is be his friend, first. I've told you that from the beginning, haven't I?

Kyles: But I don't see how coach. It's like he betrayed me.

Pearl: You've got to...hey, you've got. I feel betrayed too now, you know, I mean stake my job and my reputation on the fact that he was coming to Iowa, and if he doesn't even come in and visit, it's going to make me look real bad.

When I reached him by phone last month, Kyles said he didn't want to revisit the incidents of 22 years ago. "That is a chapter I closed and moved on with my life and I don't want to rehash old feelings," he said. "I am praying for Bruce Pearl and his family."

Kyles had even less to say about Thomas, with whom he hasn't spoken since the investigation. "I think I was caught in the middle with having a relationship with Deon and a relationship with Pearl, and it made my last year at Simeon hell," he said. "I took a lot of negative publicity about it and I just would rather leave the past where the past is."

The Recruiter: Jimmy Collins
This past January, seven years after our first meeting, I invited Collins to lunch. Pearl's recent troubles with the NCAA had just begun, and it was time once again to seek out the other side of the story. We met at a Caribbean restaurant in Chicago's Hyde Park. Collins wore warmups and sneakers and looked very much like he has just come from a basketball clinic, even though he had retired in August. A handful of diners recognized him and came over to our booth to exchange pleasantries. Collins told me he was mulling an autobiography, and he seemed to have been doing a lot of reflecting of late. For all the ups and downs of his life, for all that he endured growing up in the projects of Syracuse, N.Y., he had come to the conclusion that he never really felt the weight of hardship until Pearl's accusations.

"The reason it impacted me so much was the longer it went on the longer I was finding out tidbits," Collins said. "They were really causing me to try to lose my job, my livelihood, the way to feed my family. That's why it hurt so bad, because I knew it wasn't true, and I knew that they knew it wasn't true."

Collins knew what it was like to stand at the mercy of someone else's judgment. After a brief NBA career, he'd spent seven years as a juvenile probation officer for a notorious hard-ass Circuit Court judge in Chicago named Maurice Pompey (who had corruption problems of his own). "If you would violate his probation," recalled Collins, "he would send you to jail."

As the judge's right-hand man, his job was not inconsistent with his future duties as a college recruiter — find kids and bring them in — and in this weird way he grew to know the high-school scene in Chicago. In 1983, Lou Henson hired him as an assistant at Illinois, and Collins was his Chicago bird dog, bringing in the likes of Nick Anderson, Lowell Hamilton, and the ill-starred Ben Wilson.

Collins, who took the head job at UIC in 1996, had a career enough for two, but when he left the Flames after 14 seasons, he departed with the nettling thought that he had failed to reach his true coaching potential for reasons beyond his control. He told me that in 1988, the season before the NCAA's dogs were unleashed upon him, he met with Tennessee to discuss the head coaching position there. The job ultimately went to Wade Houston, father of former New York Knick Allan, but Collins was sure he soon would've landed a commensurate job had it not been for Pearl, whose rise in the hoops world — until very recently — only salted the wound.

"In Champaign, all the people down there know it didn't happen," Collins said. "But the further I get away from Champaign, I get people saying, 'Ah man, how you doing? It's so good to see you beat that case.' I [worked in] the probation department for seven years and when you beat the case, it means they didn't have something on you to prove that you did it — but you did it and you got away with it."

Even at UIC, the past pressed in on Collins. He once had an opening on his staff, he told me, and wanted to bring Thomas aboard, but he couldn't convince his bosses. "My athletic director thought it would raise eyebrows, because the press was going to revisit the investigation and he wanted none of that," Collins said. "In a way, I understand it. In a bigger way, I don't because that almost tells me that he thought we had done something wrong, too. That bothered me. It still bothers me."

The Big Fraud
The mistake people have often made in analyzing the Deon Thomas affair is in seeing it as a matter of perfect guilt and innocence — as if such a thing were possible. If this particular scandal has anything to teach us now, it's that just because there are horns in college basketball doesn't mean there are also halos — a proposition to keep in mind these next few weeks, as the recent hagiography of Bruce Pearl is fully dismantled. After all, the whole enterprise of big-time college sports rests on maintaining the lie that it's not an enterprise at all, and what we get as a result is an unending series of petty frauds, all of them tiny subsidiaries of that Big Fraud, the ultimate burn-proof vault. Pearl's crime at Iowa was insisting too ostentatiously on the rule of law in a lawless land. His crime at Tennessee was winking too conspicuously at same. Somewhere in between is where the Big Fraud is most comfortably sold.

On Friday, after Tennessee's 30-point loss to Michigan and 72 hours before Pearl was sacked, I called Collins. I was curious if he had watched the blowout and reveled in the misery of his nemesis. He said he hadn't. In fact, he seemed to have softened a bit from our previous conversation.

"He is getting beat down, he is getting beat down pretty severely," Collins said. "I don't see how he can survive it."

"I think he will pop up somewhere else," he went on, "and more power to him. People are willing to forget about what happened at Tennessee if he can restore their program."

I told him it sounded as if he now felt bad for Pearl, but Collins quickly interjected.

"I don't feel bad for him," he said. "I do know that when you go into these venues to play other universities, I do know the student body and the fans are very, very cruel to the point where you almost feel like you need to have a guard or have something with you to protect yourself. And I know that for the last few months, he has had to endure some very, very nasty words and some nasty actions that are being thrown towards him. I hate to see anybody go through that, and maybe the best thing for him would be get away for a while and let people's feelings subside."

Now that it was upon him, Collins said he didn't need Pearl's ultimate comeuppance for his personal vindication. He was no longer bothered.

"People know a little more about him," he said. "And that taste is pretty sweet."

Daniel Libit is a writer in Chicago. He can be reached at djlibit@gmail.com.

Middle Pearl photo via the Knoxville News Sentinel.