The school released the notice of allegation letter Friday following a 15-month investigation into the recruiting of former player Nate Miles. The eight alleged violations include improper phone calls and text messages to recruits, giving recruits improper benefits and improperly distributing free tickets to high school coaches and others. Coach Jim Calhoun was cited for failing to promote an atmosphere of compliance.

"It's not exactly, certainly anywhere near the high point of my career, as a matter of fact it's certainly one of the lowest points at any time that you are accused of doing something," said Calhoun, who has led the Huskies since 1986 and twice guided them to national championships. "It's a very serious matter."

UConn is to appear before the governing body on Oct. 15 to respond. Attorney Rick Evrard, an outside counsel who advises UConn on NCAA-related matters, said the school likely will spend the next three months reviewing the allegations. He said if the school confirms them, it is obligated to impose its own sanctions. Penalties could vary widely, depending on what UConn finds in its review.

Continue Reading...

And ruin, sadly enough, is the near-certain fate of what for a quarter-century has stood as one of the sports world’s last pillars of unspoiled perfection: the NCAA basketball tournament. As this year’s edition of March Madness climaxes in Indianapolis, it has become clear that the NCAA will junk the current tournament format and expand to a 96-team field starting next season.

A few days ago, the NCAA released a blueprint for its beefed-up bracket, laughably claiming that it was all theoretical and that no decisions had yet been made. Don’t be fooled. It was only the latest step in a tightly scripted rollout that began a year ago. Soon, the NCAA will sever its tournament contract with CBS and ratify the new postseason format. Then the bidding will begin.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

President Barack Obama predicts Kansas and Kansas State to reach the men's basketball Final Four this season, along with Kentucky and Villanova.

He's picking the Jayhawks to defeat Kentucky for the title.

Obama filled out a bracket for ESPN for the second straight year Wednesday, along with one for the women's tournament. He selected Connecticut, Notre Dame, Stanford and Tennessee to reach the Final Four in that tournament.

Last year, Obama correctly picked North Carolina to win the national championship. His bracket ranked 903,125th overall, just above the 80th percentile in the ESPN's online contest.

Continue Reading...

Not much in the way of upsets so far. I refuse to consider a 9-over-8 an upset, so Texas A&M over BYU doesn't count. Tenth-seed Maryland beat No. 7 Cal, which is officially an upset but didn't much look like one, and 10-over-7 usually isn't really one anyway.

I can drag out my well-worn theory here that a difference of three or four seeds in the middle of the bracket, a 7 vs. a 10 or an 8 vs. a 12, that sort of thing, is nothing. It has more to do with the biases of the Selection Committee and the small sample size of a season than the actual quality of the teams.

But I'm not going to do that.

The evening games offer some upset chances. A lot of people have Western Kentucky over Illinois in the South as their token 12-over-5 upset, and a few have No. 13 Akron, also in the South, over No. 4 Gonzaga.

Continue Reading...

But for most of 2008, living through it, even as housing prices fell and the recession gathered, the sports year didn't feel like the Year of the Crash. Most of 2008 seemed to be about big sports stories actually living up to their hype.

It started with the New England Patriots chasing an undefeated season. They'd ended 2007 by winning an epic regular-season finale over the New York Giants, and a month later lined up as heavy favorites in the Super Bowl against the same team. Giants quarterback Eli Manning engineered a late touchdown drive that gave New York a stunning victory.

Continue Reading...

Faced with the NBA rule that rookies must be 19 years old and a year removed from high school, Jennings is thinking about playing pro ball in Europe next season.

Jennings is an 18-year-old Angeleno who has been going to the basketball factory Oak Hill Academy in Virginia for two years. He's considering attending the University of Arizona if his test scores are good enough, but even if they're up to snuff, he says he might go to Europe. He sounds very mature and smart as he explains his thinking on the matter, which he traces to the day he heard youth basketball guru and former shoe executive Sonny Vaccaro talking about overseas ball on the radio.

"I think people just develop better over there," Rhoden quotes Jennings saying. "You're playing professional ball for a year, you're playing against guys who are older than you. I'll constantly be playing basketball 24-7. I don't have to worry about school and things like that."

Continue Reading...

USA Today quotes ESPN's star college hoops analyst as he turns all kinds of colors over reports that USC freshman phenom O.J. Mayo -- I hope you're sitting down, because this is shocking -- accepted cash and other gifts for three years as a high schooler and in his one season at Southern Cal.

Those gifts would be against the rules of both high school athletics and the NCAA, of course. Mayo has announced he'll skip his sophomore season, not to mention the second semester of his freshman year, to enter the NBA draft.

Continue Reading...

The APR program tracks each team's performance at keeping athletes in school and academically eligible as well as its graduation rate. The idea is that if you're going to field a team of jocks who never go near a classroom, you're going to get dinged by the APR, whose penalties are ultimately as serious as those for NCAA rules violations.

Continue Reading...

The ads usually have moody shots of athletes in action, then end up with the same athletes in work clothes.

This year's crop has injected some laughs. They're up to the high standards of the campaign. They're funny. But the very nature of the central joke in them highlights what a bogus idea it is that forms the foundation of the NCAA. I and others call it the Big Lie, that big-time college sports are purely amateur, mere extracurricular activities, and the athletes who play them are students just like any others on campus.

Continue Reading...

Wonderful system the NCAA has going here.

Hoosiers men's basketball coach Kelvin Sampson stepped down Friday amid a scandal involving illegal phone calls to recruits. What a coincidence: That's the very violation he was on probation for having committed at Oklahoma when Indiana hired him. What are the odds he'd -- allegedly -- do the same thing again? And then lie about it to university and NCAA investigators.

Sampson took a $750,000 buyout, equal to a year and a half's salary. That let the university put a quick end to the matter of his continued employment while protecting itself from the kind of unlawful-termination lawsuit that universities have been losing lately. Sampson also agreed to cooperate with any investigations and not to interfere with the team.

Continue Reading...

Later that New Year's Day at the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Ariz., Boise State beat Oklahoma 43-42 in overtime. The ridiculously thrilling upset -- which featured three touchdowns in the last 86 seconds, a hook-and-ladder play and, on the game-winning two-point conversion, a Statue of Liberty play -- was one of the greatest college football games ever played.

So it goes? Good with the bad. Cycle of life. A rainbow for every storm-cloud and a birth for every death.

If only.

How many great games and thrilling moments would have been needed to make up for all of 2007's tragedies? More than any year can provide. There were some nice moments in 2007, but it was a year of death and a steady rain of scandal.

Continue Reading...

It would have been the Game of the Season most seasons, though this year it doesn't have quite the same pregame buildup as the Week 9 Game of the Century between the New England Patriots and Indianapolis Colts, both undefeated at the time.

The big difference between that game and this one is that just about everyone in the United States could watch that one from their living room couch. Only people in greater Cleveland or Houston or without working televisions were shut out.

This time around, people who want to watch the game and who live in the 75 million or so households without the NFL Network are going to have to find their way to sports bars or pretend they like their neighbors who have it.

Continue Reading...

None, according to the NCAA's current legal dictates. College athletes are given five years of eligibility, but the NCAA allows for "a one-year extension of the five-year period of eligibility for a female student for reasons of pregnancy," according to USA Today. Butler took a year off for the birth of his daughter, and then was denied eligibility for an additional year. NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson told USA Today that "the pregnancy exception is explicitly written for female students whose physical condition due to pregnancy prevents their participation in intercollegiate athletics."

Continue Reading...

Except for Reggie Bush. The Heisman Trophy-winning tailback from USC was so spectacular that even this hat-in-hand, nose-to-the-grindstone annum couldn't dim his luster.

Maybe the sports world was chastened by the Brawl of Palace Hills in November 2004, the consequences of which were felt well into '05.

Maybe it was the prospect of playing games in the face of a wave of worldwide disasters, of tsunami aftermath and earthquake, war and, especially, Hurricane Katrina, that injected a note of humility to the proceedings and had athletes, coaches and the commentariat talking again and again about "perspective."

Continue Reading...

And then there was BALCO. There were chairs and fists flying in the stands, an entire sport shutting down in a labor war and a transcendent NBA superstar shuttling between playoff games and a courtroom where he was facing rape charges. And there was the incessant drumbeat of corruption, deceit and exploitation that is big-time college sports.

Those are the things sports are good at showing us too. Best of times and worst, thrill and agony. Sometimes, especially during the Olympics, there was all of it in one day, in one second. In the end 2004 was just another year, only more so.

The NFL offered up the first, best vision of how sports oughta be, serving up a Super Bowl between a pair of blue-collar teams devoid of superstars and their attendant egos.

Continue Reading...

No more watching weak lame-o's like Carmelo Anthony of Syracuse and T.J. Ford of Texas, boobs like Dwyane Wade of Marquette -- and don't even get me started on those two clods from Kansas, Nick Collison and Kirk Hinrich! Those guys are seniors! If they could play they'd be in the NBA, right?

It looks like the good people of the NBA are going to be coming to the rescue of college basketball soon by creating a minimum age of 20 for entry into the league. This brings up a question for me as Anthony, Ford and company prepare to lead their teams into action in the NCAA Tournament semifinals Saturday night at the Superdome in New Orleans.

What is it about Craig Kilborn that fills me with loathing?

Wait, that's not the question. Here's the question: Why does anyone who doesn't own an NBA team think this is a good plan?

The idea behind the minimum age is that players turning pro out of high school or after only a year of college is somehow a bad thing.

Continue Reading...

Myles Brand, the new president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, says, "Academic reform in athletics is now a (college) presidential issue. Presidents are leading the way in making the decisions." John Walda, the chairman of the board of directors of the Association of Governing Boards, says, "We can't say 'Leave it to the athletic directors to fix' because it has been years and years and they haven't been fixed." And as we go to press, California state Sen. Kevin Murray, D-Los Angeles, announced that on April 9 he will be holding an "International Hearing on College Athletics" which will feature representatives from not only the NCAA but, dig this, the recently formed College Athletes Coalition. The winds of change are in the air.

If the academic folk within the NCAA are serious about making reforms in college sports, let them consider going all the way. There's one sweeping measure that is simple, fair and economically advantageous: Do away with athletic scholarships. And while we're at it, do away with special athletic dorms designed to set athletes apart from the rest of college life.

Continue Reading...

Confused? Don't be. I'm just using NCAA logic.

As the NCAA sees it, I should get credit for being an author for the ages because I used to write for the San Francisco Examiner where, 85 years earlier, Jack London had done the same thing. Today's UTEP Miners can tell their grandkids about being national champs -- who can forget the scoring of current players Giovanni St. Amant and John Tofi! The rebounding of Justino Victoriano! -- because Texas-El Paso, then known as Texas Western, won the NCAA Tournament in 1966. And they did it with an all-black starting lineup, by the way, a big milestone in race relations. Way to go, St. Amant and Co.

This is the logic the NCAA uses when it punishes today's kids for the sins of those who came before them. The University of Michigan, for example, is ineligible for the postseason because of a scandal involving illegal payments to players 10 years ago, when today's players were in elementary school. The only person involved in that scandal who's still under the NCAA's control is the Wolverines' former coach, Steve Fisher, now the coach of San Diego State. His punishment is that he won't get to go to the NCAA Tournament unless his Aztecs win the Mountain West tourney, which was to start Thursday night.

Continue Reading...

St. Bonaventure players boycotted the last two games of the season after one of them was declared ineligible because he'd received a welding certificate, not a degree, from his junior college. The transfer had been personally approved by the president of the university, who overruled the school official charged with complying with NCAA rules.

That was the news from college basketball this week.

It's not hard to conclude that big-time college sports are in trouble. Cheating, fraud and academic improprieties are rampant. The only thing surprising about this week's flurry of scandals is that nobody seems to be surprised by them. It's business as usual.

Continue Reading...