Notes Related To Calipari

Although Rob beat me to the general news story, a couple related thoughts:

• Retroactive “vacating” of anything less than a national championship indeed doesn’t strike me as much of a punishment. More to the point, allowing people in charge to escape sanction as long as they can make a point of not finding out what they’re supposed to know strikes me as an ineffective enforcement mechanism.
• While I wouldn’t say I condone Derrick Rose cheating on his SATs, exactly, it’s the kind of thing that’s going to happen as long as you have a such an indefensible system in place. It’s ridiculous that the NBA cartel forces athletes to attend college whether they want to or not. And, similarly, it’s hard to see much value in the NCAA, having agreed to become the cartel’s free player development system, putting nominal rules in place requiring that athletes put up the pretense of being students, so that the athletes can be denied fair compensation for their services.
• A similar point is implicit in Michael Lewis’s excellent book The Blind Side. Michael Oher — a left tackle selected 23rd overall by the Ravens in the 2009 draft — was able to go to college only because he was adopted by an affluent family who could coach him through prep school and standardized tests and pay to make up a ton of credits at expensive correspondence courses the average high school counselor wouldn’t even know about. He seemed to make it through Ole Miss without serious academic incident. But I’m not sure why similar opportunities should be denied young men and women who don’t hit a lottery like that. If universities are going to have some attendees who are primarily athletes, not students, I’m not sure that arbitrary SAT requirements accomplish much of anything. I doubt Rose’s year at Memphis would have been much more fulfilling if he had actually met the nominal SAT requirement somehow…