The NCAA’s a joke in our town

If only MTV still played music, maybe I could turn the Brad Kelleher debacle into a video.

The first instinct upon Tuesday upon learning the long-rumored Brad Kelleher news was indeed true—the NCAA has ruled the Australian transfer, who was already declared ineligible last season for signing a professional contract in his native country but never playing in a game, must miss the first eight games of this season as well and that Hofstra’s exhibition games do not count towards his suspension—was to do nothing.

After all, who gives a crap? You can’t fight City Hall. The NCAA remains the biggest joke in an America with no shortage of laughingstocks. The year-plus that Hofstra spent exhausting all its options and appeals on Kelleher’s behalf is the latest proof that all the bellyaching and screaming won’t accomplish a damn thing. It is above the law and creating it all at the same time. It will do what it wants to do. Anyone paying even a whit of attention and not rooting for one of the BCS schools the NCAA serves recognizes what a joke the “governing body” has been for decades and will be for decades to come.

But that’s what the NCAA wants us to do. It wants to bludgeon us into apathy, to exhaust us into silence with its nonsensical explanations and lawyer-speak. It wants us to throw our hands up in the air, and maybe even throw up a little too, and to surrender and admit defeat, to stop fighting and rooting for the little guy and just sit there and smile as we watch a Final Four contested between the blue bloods and consume commercials paid for by corporate sponsors.

We won’t do that. Not today. Not on a day in which Kelleher, who should be the poster boy for all that is right about the NCAA—a foreign-born student parlaying his basketball skills into a good education and a great cultural experience—is instead the symbol of all that is wrong with a hypocritical and illogical “organization” which specializes in selective justice.

This is not to say Kelleher shouldn’t serve some sort of punishment. As honest a mistake as Kelleher made, and as stupid as the rule is that he supposedly broke, a small sentence would have been tolerable. Sure, we would have made the requisite jokes about Hofstra getting punished because Kentucky really went overboard. But we’ve been down this road before with Miklos Szabo and Greg Washington. This is just how it works.

At least Szabo missed just two games and at least Washington was able to redshirt his freshman year. But forcing Kelleher to the sidelines for a year-and-a-third when he only has two years of eligibility? For an offense that, by all accounts, was a clerical one? When far worse offenses go unpunished every single day at the higher levels of Division I?

When a Hofstra gets punished, it’s so easy to crack bitter jokes about Kentucky because Kentucky has been brazenly breaking the rules and mostly getting away with it for generations. Last year, shortly after Kentucky hired John Calipari—the only man to preside over two Final Four berths that did not happen—freshman phenom John Wall was suspended two games (one of which was an exhibition, honest to God, you can’t make this up) for receiving “travel benefits” from his AAU coach, who just happened to be a certified agent.

Kelleher will have missed 43 games, counting this year’s exhibition against Molloy College. So judging by the punishments meted out by the NCAA, Kelleher signing a contract with a professional team in Australia but never suiting up was 21.5 times worse than receiving benefits from a coach who also happens to be an agent. But of course the NCAA benefits from the exposure Wall provides before he bolts to the NBA and becomes the league’s top draft pick.

Hofstra will probably be in trouble again within the next year: Incoming Kentucky freshman Enes Kanter received $100,000 in cash and other benefits from the professional team he played for in his native Turkey. This news comes straight from his general manager. Who wants to wager Kanter’s punishment is much closer to Wall’s than Kelleher’s, even though Kanter both played for and was paid by a professional team?

It’s also impossible not to note the incongruity of the Kelleher news coming down the same day Reggie Bush gave back the Heisman Trophy he won in 2005. You can stake whatever fortune you have earned on the fact that Bush is nowhere near the only Heisman winner to receive illegal benefits during his award-winning season. As the eternally awesome Joe Posnanski put it on Twitter yesterday: “I hope every Heisman winner who got paid under the table while in college takes a moment tonight to polish their trophy.”

A very quick Google search, in fact, finds no fewer than seven other Heisman Trophy winners since 1987 who played for schools that were either on probation or were investigated by the NCAA for shenanigans that occurred during their collegiate careers.

Carson Palmer played for USC before Bush arrived but while the program was on probation. Matt Leinart, of course, played with Bush. Troy Smith won the Heisman in 2006, a year after he was suspended for accepting $500 from a booster.

Vinny Testaverde and Gino Torretta played for the University of Miami, which was such a renegade program in the 1980s and 1990s that Sports Illustrated called for the program to be eliminated (if only Stuart Rabinowitz was there at the time). Andre Ward won the Heisman in 1989, a year after Houston was placed on three years probation. Barry Sanders earned the award in 1988, mere weeks before Oklahoma State was placed on four years probation.

But now, just like with Kelleher, the NCAA can say it did something and punished somebody now that Bush has forfeited the Heisman, even if it looked the other way for decades, even if it took an expose by Yahoo! Sports to finally push the NCAA into action and even if the so-called adults within the USC program escaped unscathed. Pete Carroll, Bush’s head coach at USC, bolted the Trojans just before the cavalry arrived last winter and won his debut game with the Seattle Seahawks Sunday.

The Bush expose was authored, in part, by Yahoo! Sports’ Josh Peter—who, as a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2003, wrote a piece detailing the unusually nice car driven around campus by Duke star Chris Duhon and how the parents of Duhon and Carlos Boozer got high-paying jobs at companies operated by powerful Duke boosters.

Duke, of course, escaped without punishment or any sort of serious investigation—just as it did when it was revealed Corey Maggette was paid cash by an AAU coach shortly before he signed with Duke in 1997. And why not? We wouldn’t want that—wouldn’t want anyone watching the NCAA Tournament every March to think anything other than Duke is pure and perfect.

But if I were Brad Kelleher, I wouldn’t accept that offer of a bottle of water from a classmate in a hot classroom this afternoon. You know, just in case the NCAA once again gets the itch to prove how serious it is about enforcing the rules.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Bits and Bytes: Of optimism and injustices

William & Mary grad Chris Turk is thrilled to have tickets to the Flying Dutchmen-Tribe game tonight. Wait til he finds out that J.D. thought Turk was in charge of bringing the tickets, though.

If you’re anything like me—once again, I’m very sorry—then you saw the CAA schedule when it was released in August and figured one of the few sure things for the Flying Dutchmen during conference play was a pair of wins over the College of Bill Lawrence Jan. 2 and Jan. 16.

Everyone else seemed to agree with us, too, as the Fighting Lawrences were a consensus pick to finish last in the CAA. Except, of course, CBL has emerged as one of the nation’s surprise teams, compiling a top-10 RPI thanks to road wins over Wake Forest and Maryland and winning five of its first six conference games. Three of those wins have been by a single point, including a 48-47 win over the Dutchmen two weeks ago today in which CBL trailed for the first 39 minutes, which fuels the notion that this is finally The Year for CBL, which has never made the NCAA Tournament.

The Dutchmen, of course, are the anti-CBL. Like CBL, the Dutchmen played an upgraded non-conference schedule, but the type of wins that would have boosted the RPI and the Dutchmen’s at-large candidacy never materialized as they squandered second half leads against UConn, St. John’s and Charlotte. The Dutchmen have been similarly star-crossed during conference play: In addition to falling to CBL and George Mason by combined five points in consecutive games, they lost freshmen Chaz Williams and David Imes last week due to high ankle sprains and learned this week that Brad Kelleher is officially a poster boy for the NCAA’s skewered sense of justice.

As a result, the Dutchmen will likely take the court tonight with just seven scholarship players, though I wouldn’t be shocked if Williams manages to make it back. Regardless, being ice-cold and hexed and going on the road to visit red-hot and charmed is not the optimal situation for a team staring at the possibility of a 3-6 or 2-7 start in conference play.

Of course, we specialize in optimism here and in thinking of ways the Dutchmen can win, so we’ll spend the hours until game time figuring that Pecora has whipped his team into an us-against-the-world fury, that the Dutchmen are at their most dangerous when they are wounded—it was a year ago today that the reeling Dutchmen knocked off first-place Northeastern, which was just 12 days removed from a wire-to-wire thrashing of the Dutchmen in Boston—that this is a much better matchup for the undermanned Dutchmen than VCU was and that CBL’s run of incredibly good fortune has to come to an end some time.

Turns out your good friend and mine Mike Litos doesn’t think the concept of a Dutchmen win is so crazy, either. He predicts another narrow CBL win but lays out the ingredients for a Hofstra upset: A big night from Charles Jenkins and Nathaniel Lester’s return from witness protection. We’ve said it multiple times this month: When Lester is the Dutchmen’s second-best player—when he plays 30 minutes and gets himself to the foul line with regularity—they win far more often than not. But who knows which Lester will show up tonight?

I’ll add that as important as Lester is to the Dutchmen’s fortunes, they’ll also need Miklos Szabo’s recent resurgence to be a trend and not an aberration. He has played quite well the last three games (during which he has averaged 8.7 points and seven rebounds), avoided the foul trouble that plagued him earlier in the year and earned back his starting job.

If Pecora is grumpy and sparse with his praise late tonight, I’ll bet you it’s good news for the Dutchmen. After all, he didn’t complement the Dutchmen last year when they finally began playing up to their potential.

A win here and things will look a lot better. We’ll be tuning in—hopefully on the William & Mary website, unless it sucks like the Florida Atlantic one did—and live Tweeting throughout. Join us, won’t you? It’s much better than the NFL playoffs.

A couple other quick bits and bytes:

—In writing last night’s piece about the similarities between this year’s slow CAA start and last year’s slow start, I reconstructed the 2008-09 standings through six games. Worth a look as a reminder of how much things can change over the final two-thirds of the season.

2008-09: Through six

George Mason 6-0

Northeastern 6-0

VCU 5-1

James Madison 4-2

Old Dominion 3-3

Drexel 3-3

Hofstra 2-4

Georgia State 2-4

Towson 2-4

Delaware 1-5

UNCW 1-5

William & Mary 1-5

Final standings

VCU 14-4

George Mason 13-5

Northeastern 12-6

Old Dominion 12-6

Hofstra 11-7

Drexel 10-8

James Madison 9-9

Georgia State 8-10

Delaware 6-12

William & Mary 5-13

Towson 5-13

UNCW 3-15

—Injustice update No. 1: Save Hofstra Football is hosting a fundraiser tonight at Public House in Manhattan from 4-8. NFL memorabilia donated by the likes of Wayne Chrebet and Dave Fiore will be auctioned off, as well as golf outings to local courses. For more information, check out the Save Hofstra Football website. The group is also hosting a rally at Bar Social (the old Bogarts) Tuesday from 5-7 p.m., just before the basketball game against George Mason.

—Injustice update No. 2: The NCAA issued a statement in response to Tom Pecora’s comments in Friday’s Newsday in which he blistered the so-called governing body for declaring Brad Kelleher ineligible because he signed a contract with—but was never paid by—a professional team in his native Australia five years ago.

It boggles the mind to think of how many people were paid obscene amounts of money to drum up this crap: “Coach Pecora’s comments are both inappropriate and inaccurate. Brad Kelleher’s eligibility is not finally determined, but a Division I committee that includes Hofstra’s peers has sustained the finding that he signed a previous professional contract which makes him ineligible.

“Like any NCAA institution, Hofstra now has the opportunity to seek Mr. Kelleher’s reinstatement from the NCAA. This process starts with a review by NCAA staff, and the university can also appeal staff decisions to the Student-Athlete Reinstatement Committee, comprised of representatives from NCAA schools and conferences.”

So let’s get this straight: The NCAA has declared Kelleher ineligible, but it’s not a final decision and Hofstra can make an appeal to a committee comprised of the same people who already declared Kelleher ineligible. Oh. OK then. That’s fair. I’m sure the appeal will be a fruitful endeavor. I’m convinced Dilbert creator Scott Adams worked at the NCAA before turning to comics. And I’m convinced that Pecora’s comments only scratch the surface of how livid he is with those bureaucratic lowlifes.

But hey, Stuart Rabinowitz sent a letter to the NCAA. No word on whether he needed to conduct a secret “two-year study” before composing it, though.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Kelleher fiasco reaches predictable & inevitable conclusion

You'd be smiling, too, if you were John Wall and knew there would be no punishment coming forth from the NCAA.

The NCAA finally got off its ass and got around to settling the Brad Kelleher case this week, a mere four months after it had all the information it needed to make a decision, and to the surprise of nobody, declared the junior transfer ineligible because he signed a contract with a professional team in his native Australia five years ago.

Tom Pecora, recognizing the fine line between gritting one’s teeth and playing by rules designed to make life difficult for schools such as his and getting screwed, absolutely hammered the NCAA for its hypocrisy and unfairness in this Steve Marcus article at Newsday.com. Speaking of getting screwed, you won’t be able to read this article if you’re not a Cablevision victim, err, subscriber, so here’s a couple money quotes from a too-short article (hooray for postage stamp-sized newspapers!)

“There are kids playing in the Big East who had their own reality shows. There are kids in the Southeast Conference who admitted to taking money from agents, and my guy didn’t do anything. He completed an application to play in the league. It’s a league that everyone who lives in Australia plays in. They are trying to say by completing an application that application is a contract.”

“This kills us. We are dressing seven scholarship players. [If] we get this kid back, [then] there’s no rush with the other two. This guy was supposed to play 35 minutes a game for us. He was supposed to be a starting guard who would have had a tremendous amount of minutes. He’s a wonderful kid. He said, ‘Coach, I never took a penny from anyone. I had a full-time job when I was playing. They called me once in a while to play. I wasn’t a star, I was a kid.’”

“They are basically a non-profit organization that’s run amuck. They’ll do anything to take care of their BCS members who have a tremendous amount of power and juice. That is who they work for.”

Pecora is right, of course, and anyone foolish enough to call for his firing should be ashamed because you can’t measure the value of a head coach who will stand up for his program and speak the truth, even if it means putting a target on his own back and potentially ruining any chance he has at moving up to one of the schools that makes the rules by which everyone else has to live.

The entire world has known for years that there’s a pretty good chance Reggie Bush and O.J. Mayo were paid more at USC than they are by the New Orleans Saints and Memphis Grizzlies, respectively, yet the school remains unpunished by the NCAA just hired as its new head football coach Lane Kiffin, who was on the USC staff when Bush starred for the Trojans and who racked up plenty of “secondary violations” during his one year as the head coach at Tennessee.

And John Calipari is free to coach his third school to a vacated Final Four appearance, and free to coach John Wall, who played for an agent in summer ball. But don’t worry, the NCAA can toast itself this weekend and declare its sports clean, because it punished a foreign kid from Hofstra.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Bits and Bytes: Of Litos and Lester and Larry

For the Flying Dutchmen to succeed in March, Nat Lester needs to become the Brandon Walsh to Charles' Jenkins Nat Bussischio. I either tried too hard with that analogy or knocked it out of the park, not really sure which.

Your good friend and mine Mike Litos is at the top of his game today. His morning post absolutely nailed the joke that is the Brad Kelleher fiasco, reasonably questioning what has taken the NCAA so long to rule on the case—Kelleher played alongside professionals in his native Australia, which is apparently a worse crime than taking money from an agent—yet also subtly blasting holes in the entire process and the concept that anything about it is fair. Me, I would have spent 2,500 words calling the NCAA a bunch of morons, but Litos has the perspective and the distance to let the charade speak for itself.

One thing I will add: I have little doubt the NCAA is taking its sweet-ass time at least in part to punish Tom Pecora for daring to criticize it way back on Nov. 24, when Pecora unloaded on the NCAA after someone asked him for an update on Kelleher following the loss to Charlotte.

“We’re just waiting to hear from the NCAA,” Pecora said. “They’ve had everything since early September. But that’s what the NCAA does. Don’t get me started. It wouldn’t take this long if we were at Kentucky. And that’s got nothing to do with the people here. People here are busting their ass trying to get this thing done. But that’s just the way life is.”

This is what I mean when I declare that Hofstra fans don’t realize how good they have it with Pecora. He gets that life in Division I favors the big boys and expects the Dutchmen to win while competing by their ever-morphing rules, yet he’ll stand up for his team when it is being railroaded, consequences be damned.

Then this afternoon, Litos whipped up a post in which he called tonight’s Flying Dutchmen-VCU game not only the biggest of the season for both teams but the biggest of the season thus far in the CAA. The similarities between the teams make this a particularly compelling game: Both squads have younger players emerging as the core at the expense of veterans. And both teams are 2-3, so neither can afford a loss if they hope to earn a top-four finish and first-round bye.

Yet someone is going to end the night 2-4, unless Bud Selig takes over as CAA commissioner between now and 7 p.m. Further increasing the pressure tonight: Both teams are headed for long road trips Saturday—the Dutchmen to William & Mary and the Rams to Georgia State.

Litos writes that make-or-break time is nearing for Cornelius Vines and Greg Washington, but I’d say the player who really needs to emerge now or else is Nathaniel Lester. The Dutchmen can win with Vines and Washington as role players—Vines defending the opposition’s best player and occasionally nailing a 3-pointer, Washington providing a body and some blocks down low on defense and hitting 15-foot jumpers on offense—who play less than 25 minutes. It’d be nice to get more than that out of the 6-foot-10 Washington, but the emergence of Halil Kanacevic has lessened the demand for Washington to become the big man the Dutchmen have almost never had.

Lester is not in danger of losing his starting job, but the Dutchmen absolutely cannot get beyond Saturday in the CAA Tournament if he doesn’t emerge as their second-best player and second-most reliable veteran behind Charles Jenkins. He doesn’t have to produce a double-double every night, but he’s too good to be this inconsistent. Here are his points and rebounds over the last six games:

vs. Davidson: 2-5

vs. Florida Atlantic: 17-7

vs. William & Mary: 14-10

vs. George Mason: 9-9

vs. Towson: 8-4

vs. Old Dominion: 4-4

The Dutchmen are 7-4 when Lester plays 30 or more minutes and 2-4 when he does not. They are 6-2 when he goes to the line at least five times, and the two losses were to William & Mary and George Mason. He has to attack the rim and become the other indispensible member of the starting five. That simple.

If he does that tonight, the Dutchmen have a much better chance of winning this literal toss-up. The Dutchmen’s ability to turn a surefire rout into a competitive loss at Old Dominion is cause for encouragement, especially considering they did it against a team that has one of the CAA’s two best big men in Gerald Lee. VCU, of course, has the other in Larry Sanders. Washington and Miklos Szabo must limit his effectiveness.

Throw into the equation the home court advantage and the lack of internal strife and I like the Dutchmen in another nail-biter that goes down to the final minute. Either way, see you there. I’ll be the guy yelling about how much the NCAA Clearinghouse sucks.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.