STRIP SLEAZE
Louisville scandal more evidence college sports all about the bottom line
A LL we can do is draw upon our own experiences. Thus, if I had the same response to a punishment as did Louisville interim President Greg Postel, my old man would’ve docked me an additional week.
Louisville was socked Tuesday with an NCAA punishment of lasting, wellearned shame for serving its basketball team much like a street pimp.
While recruits and new signees — full-scholarship student-athletes — are often shown around campus, especially the gym and whatever luxurious lounge attachments that can excite an 18-year-old, a top Louisville athletic deptartment operative determined he’d invite strippers and hookers into a dorm exclusively housing athletes to do what hookers and strippers are paid to do.
The cost? Katrina Powell, self-described Louisvillearea “Escort Queen,” alleges she was paid $10,000 by former Louisville player, assistant coach and then director of basketball operations, Andre McGee, over a four-year period to provide the “entertainment.”
Who knows, perhaps that money came from the athletic department’s petty cash drawer.
The NCAA’s punishment, which named ex-coach Rick Pitino as culpable for his inability to monitor his team and former athletic department functionary Brandon Williams for refusing to cooperate in the investigation, is also loaded with strippers:
Louisville was stripped of its 2013 NCAA Championship, stripped of 123 wins (2012-2015) and stripped of $600,000, a fine reflecting money paid for NCAA Tournament appearances.
President Postel: “I cannot say this strongly enough: We believe the NCAA is simply wrong.”
Postel’s position isn’t that the NCAA is wrong in its findings, but too severe in its punishment.
After all, Postel argued, Louisville preempted the NCAA rulings with “self-imposed” penalties, including a reduction in scholarships and the voluntarily surrender of postseason play in 2016.
As “self-imposed” penalties go, that was strong — so strong that one can logically surmise Louisville was in big, big trouble and knew it.
“From Day One the university has admitted that the actions of the former operations director and any others involved under previous leadership were offensive and inexcusable,” Postel said. “That is why we apologized immediately, cooperated fully with the NCAA, self imposed penalties that were appropriate to the offenses and made significant changes to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.
“Under the NCAA’s own rules, this cooperation should have been a factor in the punishment. Instead, it was ignored.”
What Postel seems to be claiming is that a preemp- tive plea of guilty over “incidents” that are both “offensive and inexcusable” — including the paid presence of a hooker-summoning basketball chieftain — and some self-flagellation was all it should have taken to beat a bigger rap.
Louis Brandeis, the famous jurist born, raised and high-school educated in Louisville, might have explained to Postel that an admission of guilt and some self-spankings based on the full presumption that one will be found guilty does not absolve one of the crime or its punishments.
And it’s not as if Louisville is entitled to first-time offender status.
Honestly, how does President Postel figure that Louisville, among others, annually remains a basketball powerhouse if not by steady compromise of entry standards and sign-here induce- ments that fail stink tests? From there, he must know, it becomes a matter of how far and how low you choose to go to get to the top — and remain there.
Or are the presidents of big-time football and basketball colleges hired to not know what’s going on, paid to not know what’s going on, then paid to play the aggrieved parties when the clock inevitably strikes midnight?
How is it that NCAA investigators (and in Louisville’s case, there also is another case, brought by the FBI) are forced to act on the absence of integrity within athletic departments while the universities’ presidents miss it all, including farflung road trips over consecutive academic semesters?
We return to the Bud Selig steroids question: How did Louisville expect to keep the lid on this?
But big conference college presidents know that running clean, genuine studentathletics programs is anathema to winning games, selling tickets and being paid to play on TV.
Beyond that, the alleged scene of several of the “incidents” is an athletes-only dorm. Such housing carries both suspicion and a stench, as if calculated to protect the students from the athletes, while preventing the athletes from showing the students what really goes on.
After all, the initial whistle-blower in this “incident” wasn’t a student, a professor, a disgruntled ex-employee or an ex-player who didn’t get his promised “minutes.” And it wasn’t the NCAA or the FBI. It was a sex-for-sale college dorm basketball team “Escort Queen.”
And we ask how it’s possible they leave college worse than when they entered.