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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Louisville KY

    Jay Bilas defending Coach Calipari


  2. #2

    Jay

    "UMass’ 1996 Final Four season was vacated because Marcus Camby took money from an agent. Calipari was not named in the investigation and not named in the findings. And with such a low burden of proof (i.e., none) for the NCAA to satisfy, the NCAA would have named him if they could have.

    In this latest case, Calipari was not named in the allegations or in the findings. Call me old-fashioned, but when I imply that a coach was masterminding academic fraud and conspiring with accounting staff to undercharge for charter flight services, I require credible proof. There is none. And when there is no proof, I try not to use coded terms like “plausible deniability” to call a guy a cheater."

    I can accept the idea that Calipari did not know about Camby taking money, assuming that there were no obvious signs that he was doing so. That is no different from Maguette at Duke. Unless anyone has information that Camby was spending way beyond his means at UMass, I would not blame Calipari for Camby's actions.

    Nevertheless, the credible proof idea at Memphis is a bit hard to swallow. There is a reason why in these cases people ask, "Did he know or should he have known?" When SAT scores go up as if by magic, especially by a player who has taken the exam repeatedly and for some unexplained reason goes to another city to take the test, my dog would realize immediately that the results were bogus. Unfortunately, by definition the plausible deniability excuse only works when it's plausible.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Location
    Atlanta, GA/Durham, NC
    Quote Originally Posted by miramar View Post
    I can accept the idea that Calipari did not know about Camby taking money, assuming that there were no obvious signs that he was doing so. That is no different from Maguette at Duke. Unless anyone has information that Camby was spending way beyond his means at UMass, I would not blame Calipari for Camby's actions.
    He took $28 GRAND!!! Cash!!! Most likely enough to pay his family's mortgage for a year and still have PLENTY left over. Ummmmm, I think I would notice a college student with that kind of money. But hey, that's just me b/c I know the difference between a pizza budget and a Ruth Chris' budget.

    According to a 1997 Sports Illustrated article, the agents, John Lounsbury and Wesley Spears of Connecticut, had hoped that Camby would hire them to represent him when he became a professional. The article reported that Camby had also received "jewelry, rental cars and prostitutes" from the agents.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Location
    Atlanta, GA/Durham, NC
    Oh yeah - there's a big difference between $2000 that was most likely used for shoes, clothing, food, and travel vs. money, cars, cash, clothes, and *$*%Y&#...

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Mar 2007
    Location
    Memphis, TN
    When you ask, "Did he know or should he have known?" with regards to Rose's SAT, keep in mind that fellow Tiger Robert Dozier was not allowed to attend Georgia (his first choice) because UGA felt his SAT scores might be fraudulent. Dozier's score went up some 700 points between tests. The same situation happened with Roburt Sallie who was spurned by Florida (or maybe it was Washington) for questionable scores.

    So, to answer the question, did he know? Only he can answer that. Should he have known? Absolutely.

  6. #6

    camby and maggette

    Quote Originally Posted by miramar View Post
    I can accept the idea that Calipari did not know about Camby taking money, assuming that there were no obvious signs that he was doing so. That is no different from Maguette at Duke. Unless anyone has information that Camby was spending way beyond his means at UMass, I would not blame Calipari for Camby's actions.
    The difference between the Camby case and the Maggette case (which, people keep forgetting, is also the JaRon Rush case, the Kareem Rush case ... and is the same as the Eric Barkley case) is that Camby took the money from his agent WHILE HE WAS AT UMASS ... Maggette (and the others) took their money from Piggie before they enrolled (and in Maggette's case, before he was even being recruited by Duke).

    Fair or not, that's a BIG difference in the NCAA's eyes. The NCAA schools have long insisted that once a player enrolls, the school is responsible for his behavior. The thinking is that the school should both inform the player of the rules and monitor his behavior.

    In Camby's case, Calipari and the school missed some obvious signs ... for instance, midway through the season, Camby began wearing a $5,000 gold necklace. Calipari claims that he asked Camby about it and Camby told him that it was junk jewelry. Calipari let it go at that. Kind of like Memphis' "investigation" of Rose's test scores ... when his score skyrocketed, they responded by asking Rose if he took the test. When he lied and said yes, they shrugged their shoulders and said, 'Well, that's all we can do."

    In Maggette's case, he received $2,000 from Myron Piggie in the summer of 1997 for playing on his KC AAU team. The problem with tracking the exact money is that it was legal for Piggie to pay Maggette's expenses to be on the team. Maggette was a Chicago kid who legally (according to the NCAA) flew to KC for practice and games and legally stayed in hotels (paid for by Piggie) during those trips. The $2,000 figure is a guestimate of how much above expenses that Maggette received.

    Should Duke have known? Well, Piggie was actually convicted in federal court of defrauding Duke (and UCLA and the other schools that recruited his players) for his illegal payments. If he had evidence -- or even asserted -- that Duke and the other schools knew about his actions, it would have been in his interest to produce that evidence in court. He didn't ever claim that the schools knew.

    I mentioned Barkley earlier because, while he was not involved in the Piggie case, he was in the exact same violation of the NCAA eligibility rules as all the Piggie kids. He received illegal prep school benefits before he signed with St. John's. Some of you may remember that his case was big news back in 2000, when St. John's came to Duke (and became the last non-ACC team to win in Cameron). Before the game, Coach K asked the Crazies to lay off Barkley.

    The NCAA's punishment in every case was the same -- the players involved were suspended for a number of games as soon as their case was discovered. The schools involved were not penalized beyond the loss to a key player for a number of games. Duke escaped that punishment because Maggette had jumped to the NBA before the Piggie case came to light. Had he returned to Duke for his sophomore year, Maggette almost certainly would have been suspended for 4-8 games during the 1999-2000 season.

    The point was that the NCAA was punishing the players for crimes committed before they arrived on campus -- crimes that had nothing to do with giving the teams they signed with a recruiting advantage. The NCAA didn't punish any of the teams involved.

    I've always thought that the school that dodged the bullet in the Piggie case was Kansas. The whole thing started when a Kansas City businessman -- and Kansas booster -- named Tom Grant began funnelling money to JaRon Rush. He gave some of it to Rush directly and some of it to Piggie to build a powerhouse AAU team around the Kansas-bound prospect. Once Piggie got a team in place that included the Rush brothers, Maggette, Korleone Young and others, he also started getting money from Nike, which he funnelled to the players (keeping plenty for himself).

    Grant always claimed a pre-existing relationship with Rush and thus argued that his gifts to the kid were legal. Of course, that relationship began when Rush was 13 years old and already tagged as a budding prospect. No one is quite sure how much Rush ended up getting from Grant and Piggie, but it was well over $60,000 ... and the kid just happened to commit to Grant's favorite school ... Kansas. At the time no one knew about the Piggie money, but Grant's involvement was well known.

    In the end, Roy Williams dodged the Rush bullet when he had a falling out with the kid over prospective playing time -- kind of like Duke's falling out with Kris Humphries. Rush ended up going to UCLA, where he was punished with suspension for the Piggie money.

    UCLA and Rush DID get a financial penalty and was forced to vacate an NCAA appearance in 1998 ... but that was because Rush took $15,000 from an agent WHILE he was at UCLA.

    Which gets us back to Camby and the fact that the NCAA treated UMass exactly the same for exactly the same crime.

  7. #7

    Now that's a horse of a different color!

    Quote Originally Posted by SupaDave View Post
    He took $28 GRAND!!! Cash!!! Most likely enough to pay his family's mortgage for a year and still have PLENTY left over. Ummmmm, I think I would notice a college student with that kind of money. But hey, that's just me b/c I know the difference between a pizza budget and a Ruth Chris' budget.
    If it was that kind of money, with gold jewelry to match, then I don't think Jay can claim "a low burden of proof (i.e., none)" for Calipari at UMass. At this point Jay is going to have to switch his justification from a low burden of proof/plausible deniability to something like a willing suspension of disbelief.

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