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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 2984997, member: 289"] Our dry spell in the mid-1990s included a trip to the 1996 championship game. It was during this period that JB's rep changed from a coach who could recruit but just rolled the ball out there and let his players play to a coach who could get the most out of lesser talent. Then we started complaining about the recruiting until Weaver and Hopkins turned it around. Our sins, (from memory- feel free to correct me if my memory is faulty)- 1990: - We employed a street agent named Rob Johnson whose job it was to steer recruits toward schools by establishing himself as a sort of mentor and buying stuff for the kid. Johnson also worked for other schools, (he convinced Tony Scott to transfer from SU after the University had cut him off) and virtually every school had to work through Johnson or someone like him to recruit the kids at all. The only things that were ever proven about Johnson, as I recall was that he pretended to be SU assistant Rob Murphy, which was noted in the book "Raw Recruits" and inspired the Post Standard to do it's series on SU; that he bought Conrad McRae some SU sneakers and tickets to a game, which Conrad later paid him back for and that Johnson was seen sitting in the VIP seats behind the SU bench at the Dome. - The Post Standard series, instead of investigating what it took to maintain an elite college sports program with SU as an example, simply quoted the NCAA rule book and identified anything by any interpretation at all could be construed as a violation, making it look like SU was a miscreant in an otherwise uncorrupted world. - Billy Owens decided to attend SU during his official visit and celebrated finally making his decision by dunking a basketball. The paper suggested that might be an illegal "try-out" under NCAA rules. Billy was the #1 recruit in America at the time. - A patient on leave from Hutchings Psychiatric Center showed up at practice and challenge Stevie Thompson to a one-on-one contest. They gave him a shot for laughs and Stevie toasted him. That too, was an illegal try-out according to the paper. - Bill Rapp put a 50 dollar bill in the player's lockers at Christmastime and employed some players during the summer to paint the same wall over and over again to give them employment - An SU player was living with a booster family and got the family's daughter pregnant. Living with a booster family was illegal under NCAA rules at the time of the article and there was an implication of statutory rape. The thing is, living with a booster family was not against the rules at the time of the incident and SU had ended that program as soon as the NCAA made a rule against it. And the player was underage as well, so it wasn't stautory rape, either. - The paper found out that Leroy Ellis, the father of LeRon Ellis, who had transferred to SU from Kentucky after the Wildcats went on probation, was employed, they said, by George Hicker, JB's former teammate from the 60's, who was now a successful businessman in California. It was implied that Hicker had hired Ellis to get his son to transfer to SU from Kentucky. The truth was that Ellis was employed a security firm that Hicker employed but was not assigned to any of Hicker's buildings and Hicker wasn't even aware that he worked for the firm - and had been doing so for nine years. Hicker called the paper several times to explain this but his calls were never returned so he had to take out an ad in the paper to explain this. - Rodney Walker, a player who had left the program disgruntled with his playing time, alleged that a grade had been changed "by a female professor" to keep him eligible. A check revealed that no grade was changed and he had no female professors. Based on this, the NCAA initiated an investigation that went on for two years and put us on probation for " "a lack of institutional control", which one source said that's what they use when they really hadn't found much of anything but felt they had to impose some penalty to justify the time they had spent investigating the school. Thus ended the golden era when we were pulling in some of the top players in the country each year. We not only suffered the controversy and the probation but had to walk on eggshells to recruit for years afterwards so we didn't get in trouble again. 2015: - The NCAA began investigating our drug policy a decade before, after we suspended some players for using marijuana. They took so long to do it, (indicating a lack of priority), that two other things happened that spiked their interest and all three unrelated things got rolled together in their findings. - The NCAA has no drug policy but requires their institutions, if they have one, to apply it equally to athletes and non-athletes. A couple of players were found to be using marijuana once. It was decided not to suspend them but to warn them and not tell their parents since it was a first offense and not repeated. The NCAA insisted that we should have suspended them and told the parents and didn't because they were athletes and we wanted them to be able to play. SU said the policy was intended to be flexible and have tiers of punishment based on the seriousness of the violation and if it was repeated. - Several players were enrolled in a "family services" course that involved some field work with kids through a YMCA. A YMCA official was supposed to keep track of their work and did not report the failure of some of them to complete assignments or the fact that he employed some of them to help with charity events and provided them with free transportation. - Fab Melo, who came here from Brazil and had trouble with English, had to write his own biography to complete a course. It was supposed to include footnotes and didn't so a secretary in the athletic department wrote the footnotes for him. For that we lost three scholarships and over 100 victories and JB was suspended for 9 games and we are back recruiting on eggshells. Our great period of the early 2010's ended and we are a perennial bubble team or close to it. You can make your own comparisons to how other programs were treated for their sins. [MEDIA=youtube]9FM9F6ChszQ[/MEDIA] (Warning: profanity) [/QUOTE]

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