Source: Sampson's status game to game....

Aw crap. I guess this means I stand corrected, or sort of. So the only source Rhoden goes to for his Sampson piece is an IU Afro-American Studies professor with no connection whatsoever to the athletic department or story? Well, of course, where else is any good journalist gonna get the true inside scoop. Rhoden is nothing if not predictable.

 

Truly amazing.

Yeah, NOW he's learned his lesson. The previous hundreds of violations and subsequent sanctions and penalties weren't enough, but NOW he knows better.

One thing's sure: if Sampson could coach against el-foldo lie-down-and-die Michigan State every game, he'd be safe forever.

: :

 

That paragraph was ridiculous. Sampson gets busted for making over 500 improper calls at OU; in response, a specific clause is put in his IU contract that he's subject to immediate termination if he ever cheats again and IU hires a law firm to internally monitor his phone call activity for any improprieties. Despite this, Sampson soon starts making illegal calls again. Would you not think that, if a guy's gonna keep breaking the rules under those circumstances, he's gonna do it under any circumstances?

Yet Rhoden is dead certain that it would never ever happen again. The reason he gives: "Trust me."

 

Indiana was uncommonly stupid for hiring Samson when he had the cloud over his coaching tenure at Oklahoma. What they're doing is having him dangling on the edge of the plank by keeping his status day-to-day. They should just push his ample posterior off the plank so the sharks can get him.

As someone told me once before, Bobby Knight holds grudges. I doubt seriously he'd even consider going back to coach at Indiana, especially if he was as tired as the people around him at Texas Tech would have you believe.

 

And nobody at Indiana would invite him back. The Knight talk is just baseless rumormongering, there's zero chance of that at both ends.

 

If you're heading to Vegas, you may want to plunk down some money on Indiana in the tournament. This just reeks of a scenario where a team goes deep, deep into the tourney either a) playing to try and save their coach's job or b) overcoming adversity and losing their coach (if he gets fired within the next week) and having an assistant fill in to guide them.

If they don't let him go before the tournament, would the president/administration be hoping for an early exit? The longer the Hoosiers last, the hard it might be to let him go--especially if they run it to the final four perhaps?

 

Have you seen them play?

 

Especially if D.J. White's knee injury is serious.

 

I don't like using absolutes. Even if I feel 100 percent certain, I don't like saying it for that .00001 percent chance I'm proven wrong.

Once upon a time, I thought the chances that Joe Gibbs would return to coach the Washington Redskins were less than zero. Before you know it, in 2004 he's introduced as team president and ... head coach.

 

There's an apples to oranges comparison if I've ever seen one. Gibbs left the skins on diametrically opposite circumstances as Knight left IU, and when he was gone, the folks in the skins organization felt completely differently about Gibbs than the folks currently running IU do about Knight. That is an utterly flawed analogy.

 

I wasn't using that to make an analogy to the circumstances of their departures. Simply to the chances that either one would come back.

Look, I know Gibbs was welcomed back with open arms. I also know Knight wouldn't be. But the point behind my post was to point out the dangers of saying never.

Unless Knight gets run over with the bus he threw some of his former players under, I don't like saying never.

 

Sampson isn't being "dangled." He'll be whacked the day the "internal probe" gives IU the authority to do it.

IU is just guarding against a repeat of the absurd Ohio State/Jim O'Brien situation, in which a fucking idiot judge ruled that OSU did not have the right to summarily terminate O'Brien's contract, even though he had flagrantly violated one of the most fundamental NCAA rules -- giving money directly to a player.