BearsTruth Board

Q: Bruce Pearl lied to the NCAA. It was a petty lie, but a lie 
nonetheless. It looks like he’s probably coached his last college 
basketball game. Of all the rule-breakers in college sports in the 
last few years, he probably doesn’t even rank in the Top 5. Am I the 
only one that finds something wrong with this?

WOLKEN: There are two issues here. Let’s deal with the actual violation first. I think if they were being 100 percent truthful, Pearl and his assistants would tell you that having recruits at an illegal bar-b-que is pretty far down the list of stuff they could have gotten fired for. But the way the NCAA is set up, it has very little leverage most of the time except for cases like this when they have photographic evidence of a violation and the coach lies to them. When that happens, they have to drop the hammer. You have to understand how the NCAA works. They’re understaffed and they have no subpoena power, so they know they can’t catch most of the cheating. They’re always working at a disadvantage, so they just don’t have time for liars. If you’re a coach, lying about a minor violation is the one thing you can’t do, and the NCAA has to make that known.

My other issue: How do you know Pearl wasn’t one of the biggest rule-breakers? I hate the whole white hat-black hat thing in college basketball when the truth is we’ll never know for sure how most stuff gets done in recruiting. Of the top 15 players in this recruiting class, I’ve heard stories, rumors, innuendos about 14 of them. But if one of those kids signs with Duke or Carolina, most people (and probably most journalists) will assume it was clean. Take the same kid and have him sign with Baylor and message boards will light up about how it must have been a dirty deal. Just stop with the myth making already. There’s on particular program right now – an elite program that most fans wouldn’t ever guess – that everyone in basketball knows is straight-up paying guys. Will they get caught? I don’t know, but the more this stuff gets exposed, the more we can shatter these ridiculous media-fueled notions about who’s dirty and who isn’t.

I do have a theory, though, that if the NCAA believes you’re dirty and they can’t catch you on the big stuff, they’ll use whatever means they have available to say that you’re cheating. Go back and look at the Derrick Rose-Memphis case. There’s really no legitimate justification for vacating the 2008 season because there was never a shred of evidence that Derrick Rose cheated on the SAT or that Memphis knew about it. The circumstances of that test look shady as hell, but the way the NCAA report is written, they didn’t even attempt to prove that he cheated or tie it to Calipari and Memphis. Their reasoning for vacating the season was that because Derrick Rose didn’t respond to requests to take the test again in March of 2008 – even though it was eight months after the NCAA cleared him to play and he had already turned pro – he was retroactively ineligible and Memphis was responsible for it. It’s one of the most insane decisions in NCAA history. So was it really Derrick Rose’s SAT or a critical mass of shady stuff that took place under Calipari, with the NCAA basically just saying “Eff it, we’ve had enough of you and now we can get you on a technicality?” I tend to think it was the latter, and you know, maybe the end justifies the means. I think the way the NCAA handled the case was ridiculous, but if you take the macro view, Memphis probably got what it deserved.

I have no sympathy for Pearl here. If this had been Calipari or Bob Huggins – guys who’ve had the black-hat reputation for years – you wouldn’t be trying to minimize it. But when this story first hit last October, a lot of people were pre-disposed to stick up for Pearl because he’d never been painted as a cheater before. In fact, a lot of people that cover college basketball – people who should’ve known better – had spent years making the guy into a martyr over the Iowa/Deon Thomas stuff, which was just nauseating. When Pearl went to the Sweet 16 with Wisconsin-Milwaukee and started having success at Tennessee, you saw a lot of stories that helped create this bullshit narrative about how Pearl got blackballed by the dirty coaching business for “doing the right thing” when he turned Illinois into the NCAA. It’s a nice storyline, but it’s pure fiction. Pearl didn’t do the right thing. He did the sleazy thing. The dude essentially tried to blackmail Deon Thomas into going to Iowa by secretly recording phone conversations and trying to get him to admit to NCAA violations. Then when Thomas went to Illinois anyway, Pearl gave a six-minute tape of a 14-minute phone call to the NCAA with the rest edited out. But that part was always conveniently left out when the story got retold because he was charismatic and painted his chest and knew how to work the media. But give Pearl credit; he was given a free pass and got lot of mileage out it. I always found it curious that in 2008 his team got to No. 1 in late February and then went into a complete dysfunctional tailspin and hardly a word was written about how poorly he managed that situation. He also got off pretty easy for the New Year’s Day 2010 incident when four of his players were pulled over in a car with guns and drugs. If that had been Bill Self’s team flaming out, the narrative would have been that he’s a crappy coach. If that had been John Calipari’s players in a car with guns and drugs, the narrative would have been that he recruits thugs. I’m glad the Bruce Pearl myth has finally been laid to rest.