Thoughts on Indiana

A couple of thoughts on the NCAA's decision to drop the hammer on Kelvin Sampson, but less so on Indiana, particularly in sparing the Hoosiers from a post-season ban (of course, Indiana is not going to the post-season anytime soon, so the end result is the same).

The NCAA arguably directed punishment in the right place--the recidivist coach who blatantly and willfully broke the rules--rather than the current coach and players who played no role in the misconduct. The NCAA enforcement has been criticized for setting up a scheme in which a coach can cheat at one school, get out of town (often one step ahead of the NCAA posse) and into a new job, leaving his former school to pick up the pieces. But Sampson, not Tom Crean, is the guilty party, so it makes more sense for the NCAA to focus its sanctions on him. Of course, the penalty is largely meaningless. Sampson now is an NBA assistant and likely quite happy to stay there. And, penalty or not, no university president in her right mind would hire Sampson (certainly not within five years, when memories are fresh), because he is not that good a coach as to run the risk of dealing with his misbehavior.

The limit on the above point is that Indiana was not innocent in all of this; the NCAA found the university guilty of "failing to monitor," although not of the more serious "lack of institutional control." Indiana's most obvious failure was hiring Sampson in the first place, despite his being presently under sanctions for breaking NCAA rules.

This brings me to my second point. On ESPN last night, studio commentator Doug Gottlieb defended IU by saying, in essence, the school could not have predicted that Sampson would engage in the exact same misconduct because no one does that. Umm, Mr. Gottlieb, meet Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b). Under ordinary rules of evidence, "prior bad acts" cannot be used to prove current conduct (i.e., "A did X in the past, so you may find that A did Y now"). But FRE 404(b) does the use of prior acts to establish certain facts, such as knowledge, motive, or intent. Under FRE 404(b), the following line would work to prove failure to monitor: "Indiana knew that Sampson had committed these infractions in the past, so it had some knowledge that he might commit them again in the future, but it hired him anyway." But that line of inference would be permitted only if there was some degree of similarity between Sampson's past and current infractions. In other words, the law assumes that people will, in fact, engage in the exact same misconduct and the law allows its evidentiary use only if the misconduct is similar enough.

Finally, for sanctions against individual coaches to have real teeth, the NBA would have to come on board and agree to penalize coaches who cheated while coaching in college. As noted, Sampson does not care about a five-year ban on coaching in college because he probably is quite happy (and doing quite well) as an NBA assistant. Obviously this will not happen for a variety of reasons, some of them sounding in federal antitrust law. But how punished is Sampson if, less than a year after bringing down one of the storied and historically cleanest college programs, he is safely ensconced in a coveted coaching job?

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