Within minutes of the news that Kelvin Sampson was definitely out as Indiana's coach, my cell phone started ringing. My instant message started blooping. People all over the place -- a coach here, a friend there -- wanted to talk about Sampson. And they wanted to laugh. And they wanted me to laugh along with them.
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| Kelvin Sampson leaving Indiana is a tragedy of his own making. (US Presswire) |
Party? Party?
What's wrong with people? This was no time to celebrate. Even if you were of the belief that Sampson had to go -- and I was of the belief he never should have been hired in the first place -- this was not a day to celebrate.
OK, I suppose in the abstract it was. Good won over bad. Principle beat production. A basketball school put its reputation ahead of its basketball team. In an era when bad men are allowed to run amok as coaches, this was a day to celebrate a school's decision to choose the ideal of fair play over the reality that college sports is a cesspool.
But this wasn't a time, and there will never be a time, to celebrate the demise of Kelvin Sampson.
This is tragedy, man. This absolutely sucks. It's a tragedy of Sampson's own making, so don't get me wrong here. I'm not bemoaning the bad luck that happened to Sampson. This wasn't luck or fate or karma or any of that nonsense. This was a guy with everything to win going out of his way to lose. And to lose as big as any coach I have ever seen.
What's so shocking about this whole saga is that Sampson threw away his career for nothing. This isn't California coach Todd Bozeman giving $30,000 to the parents of stud recruit Jelani Gardner in 1995, resulting in an NCAA investigation that cost Bozeman his job. After sitting out the eight years mandated by the NCAA, and then two more years because he still couldn't get a job, Bozeman is back on the bench at Morgan State. He has one of the smallest, one of the hardest, jobs in college basketball. He's back in the game, but compared to his once-majestic career trajectory, he's irrelevant.
But at least Bozeman can look back on his downfall and know that he went down swinging. I mean, $30,000 to get a point guard? That's not just breaking a rule. That's cheating. Bozeman lost everything, but he lost in an attempt to win big. He pushed everything he had into the middle of the table and (thankfully) busted.
Sampson? He lost everything over nothing. If this was poker, he didn't have a pair of kings, pair of fours, pair of anything. He gambled his entire career with absolutely nothing in his hand, nothing more than a few phone calls to a handful of recruits.
This was breaking rules for the sake of breaking rules, nothing more or less, and it was breaking the same rules he had already broken before at Oklahoma. This wasn't cheating. This was self-destruction.
This was pathetic.
So, no, I'm not throwing a party now that Sampson is gone. I'm happy he's gone, but only because of what it means to college basketball: one less unethical creep in coaching. There are still plenty, and there will be more to take Sampson's place, but this is a fight that must continue. Once we stop worrying about coaches who make a few illegal phone calls, what will we stop worrying about next? Coaches who give recruits a few bucks?
