Rush The Court

Weekend kibbles n’ bits…

• Bruce Pearl booted UT guard Ramar Smith and forward Duke Crews off the team, reportedly for failing drug tests.
• New Hoosier head man Tom Crean refused to allow Armon Bassett and Jamarcus Ellis back onto the team, while kicking DeAndre Thomas off the squad as well. This all occurred one day after the bizarre transfer of Eli Holman, leaving Indiana with only seven scholarship players for 2008-09.
• Missisippi State’s Ben Hansbrough (little bro of Psycho-T) will transfer to Notre Dame next year, ostensibly because he didn’t like the MSU offense.
• Speaking of impact transfers, Georgetown’s Vernon Macklin will end up at Florida.
• Ohio State’s Kosta Koufos is one-and-done – he signed with an agent.
• Coaching News – Bob Huggins got a raise ($1.5M) and an 11-year extension at WVU – guess he impressed them this year, eh? Their former coach, John Beilein, made the first payment on the $1.5M he owes WVU for breaking his contract last year when he left for Michigan. In a similar vein, former Ohio St. coach Jim O’Brien was paid $2.74M in back pay for being fired by the university even though he admitted to cheating. And Wazzu’s Tony Bennett got an extension through 2015 and a $200K raise, totaling his annual compensation to $1M per year (but no increase in his buyout clause).
• Next year’s Thanksgiving-week Old Spice Classic will include Tennessee, Michigan St., Gonzaga, Maryland, Georgetown, Oklahoma St., Siena and Wichita St. In other words, loaded.
• Here are some early entry analyses from Andy Katz and Jeff Goodman.
• Dana O’Neil writes a compelling article on the uncertainty that programs must endure during the next six weeks of “testing the waters.“

We didn’t go to b-school, but we did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.  While there we ran into our old friend Jim O’Brien, formerly the head coach at Ohio State and currently sitting on his ass at home banned from the NCAA until 2009 due to recruiting violations during his tenure in Columbus.

He informed us that today the Franklin County (Ohio) Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision requiring THE Ohio State University to pay O’Brien over $2.4M in back-pay stemming from his termination as the head coach there in June 2004.  This case derives from a situation involving a Serbian player in 1998:

Ohio State University and O’Brien both had appealed the ruling by the Ohio Court of Claims last year. Judge Joseph T. Clark ruled in August that although O’Brien acted improperly, he was fired without cause in a breach-of-contract lawsuit.  The Court of Claims said it was not a material breach of O’Brien’s contract when he gave $6,000 to the mother of Alexander Radojevic, a 7-foot-3-inch Serbian basketball recruit in 1998, and for concealing the payment for five years.

If any AD presiding over a college program read this today, it probably sent a quick debilitating shudder down his spine.  Not.  A.  Material.  Breach.  Of.  Contract.  Wow. 

What this essentially means is that a coach of a sports program (any sports program!) can flagrantly violate the rules of amateurism by providing at least one sizable loan to a recruit or player, and he will not be in material breach of his contract for doing so.  In other words, he cannot be fired for doing this, which provides an even greater incentive to cheat than already existed.  Sure, the NCAA could get involved, but in its typically arbitrary and capricious manner, a coach is just as likely to get a slap on the wrist as he is to get suspended.   

Now, keep in mind this decision by the Ohio court isn’t binding on other jurisdictions outside of that state.  BUT, it is damn persuasive (assuming the Ohio Supreme Court upholds it), and courts around the country could cite this case as authoritative justification to do the same elsewhere.  ADs have a difficult enough job keeping an eye on their coaches and expecting them to do the right thing.  With the knowledge that the O’Briens of the world get one “free pass”  on a recruit or player, their jobs just got precipitously tougher.

Oh, and as for the O’Brien math:    

Plug $2,400,000 into the numerator, and $6000 into the denominator, and see what you get… (hint: he’ll be fine until 2009)

• Slow week in college hoops news, so let’s all review recruiting lists for fun!  USA Today (2007), Scout (2008) and Rivals (2008) all have new top 100s out this week (login required for Scout and Rivals). 
• As everyone suspected, Greg Oden is actually 33 years old. 
• Jim O’Brien is eligible to destroy your team’s program in 2009 now rather than 2011.
• We’ve lost patience with this.  ESPN’s most overrated and underrated programs of the last decade are now out.  It seems that ESPN was actually asking/answering two different questions (overrated isn’t the same as underachieving, and vice versa, but we digress), but if we define the rating system as performing above or below your talent level, no question that Cincinnati is a major omission from the overrated list, and likewise Utah from the underrated list.