Clarion Content

The departed Indiana Hoosiers coach, admitted cheater Kelvin Scam-son (Sampson) landed on his feet last week securing a job on new coach, Scott Skiles, Milwaukee Bucks' staff.

Sampson was caught out in October 2007 after an Indiana University investigation showed Sampson & Co. made more than 100 impermissible phone calls while still on probation for too many phone-calls to recruits issues at Oklahoma University. The Clarion was wrong in our initial assessment of Scam-son as a possibly successful hire for Indiana. Dead wrong. We warned by folks familiar with the Oklahoma program and didn't fully appreciate it.

The fallout continues, the recently released NCAA's academic progress report shows the Hoosiers well below the penalty line score of 925, at 899, an embarrassing 268th out of the 337 Division I-A schools. This means they face the loss of additional basketball scholarships. Worse yet, this is the kind of scandal that chips at the very fabric of what Indiana basketball stands for, what is supposed to set it apart. As the Clarion understands it, "one and dones" (freshman players who leave after one year) who don't finish the second semester of the school year have a dire affect on a program's score. So if Scam-son recruit Eric Gordon decided to blow-off classes during the semester that just ended Indiana could face the loss of additional scholarships...

Wow, that is some record for old Scam-son, so who hired him? Scott Skiles, a former Indiana high school basketball hero who then Coach Bobby Knight wanted no part of because of rumors of problems; Skiles was subsequently arrested twice while an undergraduate at Michigan State.

Labels: college basketball, sports