Moving violation

Surely IU basketball fans are no strangers to NCAA violations and sanctions. Last year, much ado was made about the penalties incurred by first-year men’s coach Kelvin Sampson, because of violations he committed while coaching at the University of Oklahoma. Fans around the Big Ten – especially, no doubt, Purdue fans – reveled in our misery, but Sampson still bagged the top recruit in the country despite not being allowed to leave the campus.\nThe shoe is on the other foot now, though. Last week, Purdue’s women’s basketball program received NCAA sanctions stemming from academic and recruiting violations committed by then-assistant coach Katrina Merriweather during the 2005-2006 season. The infractions included more than 100 improper telephone calls to two recruits, as well as academic misconduct involving Merriweather typing, correcting and revising a paper for Cherelle George, who was the team’s point guard at the time. Anyone who hires Merriweather must appear before the infractions committee and George was declared permanently ineligible. Purdue’s women’s basketball program will spend two years on probation and lose two scholarships for the upcoming season.\nHere’s where the situation gets a bit hairy, though. The head coach at the time, Kristy Curry, is no longer at Purdue. In March 2006, she left the school to take the head coaching gig at Texas Tech. Though the NCAA was “troubled” by her role, Curry will go unpunished. \nThis may seem to make sense, since Curry was not the one to commit the infractions – it was her assistant, Merriweather. Curry, however, is not completely without blame. Twice before the situation went public, Curry was notified about the violations. Twice she kept them under wraps. She didn’t report the allegations to her superiors, though they eventually found out and reported them to the NCAA.\nIt sounds a bit fishy that Curry should go totally unpunished just because she found a job somewhere else, when she was not without blame in the Purdue violations. This is especially unnerving since Sampson’s punishment didn’t vanish when he left Sooner Nation for Bloomington.\nThe NCAA is supposedly an educational institution – though that’s hard to say with a straight face. It should take a much tougher stance on academic violations, especially such blatant banner cases as a coach writing a paper for a player. Perhaps since it was evidently an isolated incident, the punishment was limited. But it seems a tad on the light side. If it were up to us, the penalty would have involved, say, forfeiting the Oaken Bucket.\nIn addition, most of the time assistant coaches get their jobs at the behest of head coaches. When a head coach leaves a school, the assistants get cleaned out. Most of the time, assistants take orders directly from head coaches. If there’s no accountability for the head coach in situations like this, then what’s to stop coaches from using their assistants to commit all kinds of violations? The head coach should be held at least somewhat responsible for the actions of his or her assistants and not given just a verbal slap on the wrist.