Subscribe
Jobs
Cars
Real Estate
Apts
Classifieds
Shop
BLOOMINGTON – And so the rumor mill churns, as we knew it would. Kelvin Sampson is gone. No, not yet. He’s been suspended pending dismissal; no, he’s still in his office, going walleyed watching Northwestern tape.
What a fine, fine mess. And who can say Indiana doesn’t deserve every bit of it?
Oh, the fans don’t, because the fans are the ones who get how damaging all this is to their school, have always gotten it. It’s why they boo Sampson now at home games, or at the very least greet him with the limpest ovation since opera night at Miller’s Merry Manor.
It’s why their wariness was palpable even on the day Adam Herbert and Rick Greenspan unveiled their fresh hire, who was already damaged goods.
And the players?
No, they don’t deserve this either. They have played their hearts out for Sampson, finding shelter from the storm this past week in jump shots and rebounds and putbacks.
What’s it say about this team that, with their coach a lame duck and uncertainty swirling around them, they put up two stellar performances back to back the last five days to stay in lockstep with the Big Ten leaders?
More to the point, what’s it say about Sampson?
Indiana hired him to win and he has won, and if all of this was only about what happens between the lines, Herbert wouldn’t be ducking pesky reporters and Greenspan wouldn’t be so plainly trying to distance himself from his signature hire. Because, listen, the man can coach. He got D.J. White to stay and then turned him into the player he always should have been. He brought in Eric Gordon and as talented a cast of young players as Bloomington’s seen in 15 years, and then he made a team out of them.
Indiana is right back where it should be, on the high side of 20 wins and ranked in the top 15 and a caught breath away from first place in the Big Ten. But what’s it had to pay to get all that?
It’s had to pay with rumors and tongue lashings from Dickie V and the embarrassment of having its good name linked to words such as “NCAA,” “investigations” and “sanctions,” a foreign language in these parts until Herbert and Greenspan pulled the trigger on the Sampson hire. It’s been asked numerous times before in the last week, but it bears repeating: What were they thinking? How could a school with Indiana’s reputation knowingly hire a coach already under sanction by the NCAA?
Was success on the floor so paramount it was worth squandering that reputation? And now that it’s all blown up so mightily in everyone’s face, can anyone who cares anything at all about the school honestly say that the 20 wins and Eric Gordon and national merit have been worth it?
Gone already or not, dismissed or suspended or bought out of his contract or not, Sampson is a nightmare from which Indiana cannot wake up fast enough.
Because how it proceeds will determine not only whether it winds up in court forking over millions (as Ohio State has been forced to do with former coach Jim O’Brien), but whether Indiana basketball truly deserves to be regarded anymore as something greater than just another win-at-all-costs program.
It’s a quandary for which Indiana has no one but itself to blame. And one from which only Indiana can extricate itself.
“Let him up,” an elderly caller admonished me the other day, taking issue with my stance that Sampson had to go for the good of the players and the program and the school. “Let him up. He’s bleedin’.”
Someone’s bleedin’ here, surely. But it isn’t Kelvin Sampson.
