Latest Sampson rebuttal shows coach’s weakness

While the IU men’s basketball team was losing an absolute heartbreaker this weekend at Penn State, many in the Hoosier nation were digesting the words of former coach Kelvin Sampson.

In case you aren’t aware, Sampson granted Mike DeCourcy of Sporting News an interview that included his wife and covered a range of topics.

Chiefly among them was the question (in not so many words) “Was the NCAA fair in dealing with you?”

“I think they were unfair,” Sampson said. “I think they were unfair to IU, too. I don’t think anybody got treated fairly in this.”

Now that’s probably the sound bite of the interview, and DeCourcy was kind enough to present it in question-and-answer format.

But it’s what followed that really caught my eye.

“This thing got hit in the media. It got sensationalized,” Sampson said to DeCourcy.
Sampson is a man who spent precious little of his time at IU speaking with the media.
General wisdom was, he disdained most of either what we did or how we did it.

He refused to take most questions on the stories orbiting around his recruiting indiscretions, even to the bitterest of ends.

But oddly enough, since being stamped with a five-year show-cause penalty – having essentially been blackballed from the college game for the next half-decade – Sampson has had little trouble finding the microphone.

He defended himself in a piece published last November by Sports Illustrated writer and Bloomington native L. Jon Wertheim about the state of IU basketball.

He defended himself while discussing his appeal of the NCAA’s decision as the Milwaukee Bucks, for whom he is now an assistant, played in Indianapolis.

And now he defends himself here, in his first pure interview about a season lost after everything fell apart.

A season “sensationalized,” as he said to DeCourcy, in – or maybe by – the media he could so readily do without.

“It just took on a life of its own,” he said.

But did it? Did it really take on a life of its own?

The IU Athletics Department, a cradle of NCAA cleanliness for a half-century, is flagged – by its own hand – for the commission of violations by a men’s basketball coach whose wrists only months earlier had been slapped for doing the same at his last job.

This came at the worst possible time, as the once-storied program was about to set out on its most promising season since its last national championship game appearance. A time of transcendence was turned into a season of distrust.

Everything quiets, until the NCAA hands down a decision that in no small language says the coach’s actions were impermissibly shameful – that committing the same crime twice constitutes a brash disregard of the rules.

Five major violations led to the coach’s resignation in the middle of a season that began with fans and pundits talking about national titles.

Players revolted, grades plummeted and the team spiraled to a quick and decisive NCAA tournament end and disintegrated like sand through a child’s hands, leaving years of rebuilding to be done.

Now that, I grant you, is certainly sensational. But it’s also all true, meaning the story never “took on a life of its own.”

The life it had was plenty.

College coaches in today’s world – where sports, business and entertainment collide all too frequently – need to be master marketers who know how to use the media.
There’s a movie I love, “The American President,” during which the incumbent president tells a room full of reporters it isn’t that his opponent, a podium shouter who goes for the flashy quote, “doesn’t get it.”

He just “can’t sell it,” the president declares.

The truth is, I’m not quite that enlightened.

I don’t know Sampson the man well enough to discern whether the version of this dark fairy tale is the truth in his mind or just a bill of goods.

But one thing remains: Sampson either doesn’t get it, or he can’t sell it.
Either way, his pleas are falling on uniformly deaf ears.