Did I miss it?
I swear, I didn’t hear it mentioned once during the coverage of the NCAA national championship game on Monday night.
I didn’t even hear it in the oodles of postgame coverage on SportsCenter afterward.
I guess nobody wanted to take the sheen off of this one, ahem, shining moment.
But shouldn’t it have at least been mentioned somewhere during the course of the game that college basketball’s newly crowned national champions — the Kansas Jayhawks and coach Bill Self — are under NCAA investigation and have been accused of five massive Level 1 violations while their two sneaker-company bagmen sit in prison for bribing players to sign with KU?
That’s right, Jim Gatto and Merl Code, two former Adidas employees, probably couldn’t even watch the game Monday night (hey, bedtime comes mighty early in the federal penitentiary), yet Self was able to celebrate a national championship while making about $6 million annually under his new lifetime contract.
Move over, Rock, Chalk, Jayhawk and make way for Greet, Cheat, Compete!
Can you believe it? With revered Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski now retired, Self is now the new face of college basketball; a face that only an FBI investigator could love.
It’s no secret that Self and his program were part of the FBI investigation into the cesspool of cheating and chicanery better known as college basketball. I’m not going to bore you with all the sordid details from the past, but the gist of what happened is this: Kansas is the most high-profile Adidas school in college basketball and Adidas wanted to make damn sure it had elite players wearing its sneakers, winning national championships and building the Kansas/Adidas brand.
So Gatto and Code scoured the country, illicitly offering money to bigtime recruits and their families to come sign with Kansas. The FBI, through wiretaps and other means, charged them with bribery, money laundering and wire fraud.
Here’s where it gets laughable. Even though it’s pretty clear Self was in on the scheme, Kansas administrators have not only refused to fire him; they have painted him as the victim. They claim Adidas wasn’t representing the university and that Self had no earthly idea that Gatto and Code were — gasp! — offering players money to sign with the Jayhawks. Although all this was going on right under Self’s nose and text messages and testimony seem to implicate him, Kansas administrators claim Self was duped into thinking everything was aboveboard.
If you believe any of that, I have some oceanfront property in Topeka I’d like to sell you.
I personally know current college coaches and administrators who are embarrassed for their profession today and are just shaking their heads that Self has been rewarded for running an outlaw program. Sadly, even though the FBI investigation started more than four years ago and the NCAA started its own investigation into Self’s program 2 ½ years ago, there has been no punishment doled out.
Kansas State coach Bruce Weber took a not-so-subtle shot at Self and Kansas when he announced his resignation following the Big 12 Tournament a couple of weeks ago. Weber says he even told fellow members of the NCAA Ethics Committee that he would not get a hair cut until all of the schools in the FBI investigation were penalized for cheating.
“We did it the right way,” Weber said during his farewell news conference. “We did it with our guys graduating. ... I’m on the NCAA Ethics Committee. And in the meetings, I was told that they were going to take care of the people [involved] in the FBI stuff. So I told somebody, ‘I’m going to grow my hair until something happens.’ Obviously, it’s still growing. That’s the sad part of our business.”
What’s even sadder is that nobody seems to care. The bar has been set so low in college basketball that having a corrupt national champion is almost expected. Let’s not forget, KU’s opponent in the national title game — North Carolina — went unpunished a few years ago even though many of its athletes were enrolled in sham, no-show classes to keep them eligible.
There are those who try to justify Kansas’s illicit championship by pointing out that none of the current KU players was involved in the scandal. True, but in the transient world of college basketball, the coach is the most important component to a championship program — and he was involved in the scandal.
There also are Kansas defenders who say, “What’s the big deal? The alleged violations are now legal under the NCAA’s new name, image and likeness legislation.” This is simply not true. Even with NIL, it is still clearly against the rules to pay recruits to sign with your program and it’s certainly forbidden for head coaches to be involved in any sort of illicit scheme to pay recruits.
Well, since the telecast on Monday night didn’t think it was important enough to make mention of Self being accused of major NCAA violations, allow me to end this broadcast with a rendition of “One Shameful Moment” (sung to the tune of “One Shining Moment.”)
“The ball is tipped,
And there you are,
Coaching for your life,
And paying for Uncle Bob’s new car.
For all those years,
Gatto took the rap,
He’s in federal prison,
How did you avoid the wiretap?
In one shameful moment, your opponent is beaten,
One shameful moment, you’re the national champion of cheatin’.
(Mike Bianchi is a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel.)
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