Thursday Thoughts: Michigan Basketball — Standing Tall
Michigan head coach John Beilein was recently named the cleanest coach in the country in a vote of his peers, and in a landslide. But don’t expect him to take a victory lap to celebrate the FBI’s takedown of college basketball’s dirtiest.
How apropos is it, though, that the nation’s cleanest coach took down what’s alleged to be one of the dirtiest in the latter’s last game at Louisville? Michigan’s 73-69, second round win last year didn’t exactly make up for the NCAA title game loss in 2013 (which, it should be pointed out, is being vacated by another dirty Rick Pitino team), but it’s sweet in its own right.
When informed he’d earned the highest respect of his peers — his 26.6 percent of the vote was more than the next three on the list combined — Beilein simply shrugged and responded, ‘doesn’t everyone do it that way?’
The former head of the NCAA Ethics Committee wasn’t being callous or smug, just purposely naïve to what was going on around him. He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know.
ESPN analyst Dan Dakich though, has made the rounds on radio shows, including his own, singing Beilein’s praises for doing things the right way, while calling out some of the biggest of the big boys for their silence.
And make no mistake … many of them are sweating bullets today.
And yes, some of them would (will) probably surprise you.
If the FBI does its job right and gathers enough evidence — and this is the FBI here — there are going to be guys exposed as hypocrites. The excuses will be rolling in for them — ‘he only did it because he saw Team X, Y and Z were doing it and wanted to win a championship, level the playing field,’ etc., or ‘it was his assistant … he didn’t know about it.’
And it will all be as big a load of garbage as Pitino’s statement issued through his attorneys.
“Coach Pitino stands by his previous statement – and that of the U.S. Attorney’s Office – that named and unnamed people perpetrated a fraudulent scheme on the University and its basketball program. The information disclosed thus far in the investigation is clearly insufficient to implicate Coach Pitino in any type of misconduct or other activity that would violate the terms of his contract. In sum, Coach Pitino has done nothing wrong and there is no evidence to suggest otherwise. The rush to judgment is regrettable.”
Let’s be clear here, though. He’s not alone, and this first of many layers isn’t a revelation as much as someone finally having the power (and the desire … hello, NCAA) to do something about it.
This has been going on for years, and it’s been college basketball’s worst kept secret, regardless how many people didn’t want to believe it. We heard story after story from impeccable sources … the kid who took $50,000 to turn a regional program into a national force, souped-up cars with school-issued credit cards to put gas in them, and yes, the $100,000 backroom deal as the result of a bidding war, etc. etc.
We’re supposed to believe that guys like ESPN analyst Dick Vitale, Jay Bilas didn’t, while they sang the praises of the frauds — or as Dakich put it, 'pimped them' — week in and week out?
College basketball coaching has become a profession in which you get a gold star for being ‘cleaner than most.’ For that reason, we’ve often come to Beilein’s defense when the fan base questioned his recruiting ability and methods (crazy in itself given his track record for sending players to the NBA, but that’s another subject for another day).
Today he stands tall as the guy who has had success and won titles despite swimming with the sharks. He’s who many thought Lance Armstrong was before the cyclist was exposed as a fraud … a guy who was so much better than his peers that he was able to overcome.
Many, including CBSsports.com’s Gary Parrish, didn't think it possible.
“I didn't think a by-the-book coach was a good fit at Michigan — a place that historically needs to recruit Detroit to be successful, a place that once enrolled and celebrated the Fab Five,” he wrote. “I knew Beilein was great. I just didn't think he was a great fit at Michigan ...
“But it doesn't matter. Because he's been terrific while leading the Wolverines to seven of the past nine NCAA Tournaments — a run that includes three Sweet 16s, two Elite Eights and an appearance in the 2013 national title game. … And that's just about the greatest compliment he could receive — that he's flourished without changing and won big without cheating.”
“John Beilein is a by-the-book, letter-of-the-law guy. LETTER-OF-THE-LAW,” one coach told CBS. “You get two hours to work out guys for the week. If he works out a kid and, say, they go one hour and one minute, he's going to start the next time with 59 minutes on the clock and go 59 minutes. That's the truth."
Today, Beilein stands tall as the guy who overcame the cesspool and never caved to the pressure of the position, or sacrificed his principles. He’ll go about his business while others change the way they do theirs (at least temporarily), and if there are enough parents who care about doing things right and setting an example, they should be lining up, as Beilein puts it, to 'break the doors down to get to Michigan' or other schools that do things right.
If this scandal is as big as we think it is, and investigated the way it should be (and let’s be clear again … this isn’t the spineless, toothless NCAA these programs are dealing with anymore, rather what some have called 'the most prestigious U.S. Attorney’s office in the country — the Southern District of New York'), programs like Michigan and other clean ones could become the powers they might have been, probably should have been.
In hindsight, they’ve been some of the best recruiters in the country all along.
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