Kansas has begun utilizing a cadre of senior citizens to make sure its basketball players are in class when they should be.
If you’re a KU baller and you want to sleep in, you’re going to hear from your designated senior citizen hired by the Student-Athlete Support Services office, according to the report we read at Fox Sports/MSN. And if you’re planning on going to class, signing in with your senior citizen shadow, and then taking a powder on, say, that 8:00 AM Poli-Sci lecture or French recitation just a few moments after it starts, you can forget about it. The enlisted monitors patrol the halls several minutes after class looking for shiners who think they can show up, stay for a couple of minutes, and then skitter back to their dorm rooms and their waiting beds. These Social Security-collecting Big Brothers even glower at you through classroom door windows to make sure you haven’t absconded into the morning Phog.
There’s a blurb in the linked article about how sometimes players will try to skate by bribing their overseers with game tickets, but we’re not touching that. We’ll let you read the Fox Sports story for that information. Knowing the value of KU hoops tickets, though, we wouldn’t be surprised if Tom Brokaw mentions this if he writes a follow-up.
[Note: We mean that title all in good fun, but the guy who runs this group is a former cop and Marine, and therefore we’d bet he could probably still torch us like Rachel Alexandra in a 6 AM five mile run.]