Stop me if you've heard this one before......

NCAA bans SMU Mustangs for 2016 postseason, suspends Larry Brown for 30 percent of team's games

Unreal.

 

Did you expect the leopard to change his spots?

 

Carolina chortles.

 

Tarkanian gets a stiffy.

 

Larry Brown is a tremendous basketball coach. He's also one of the nicest people I have ever met.

But any college that hires him to run its basketball program expecting him to follow NCAA rules deserves everything it gets.

 

Once a cheat, always a cheat.
He's been a proven cheater in 3 different decades.
It's kind of sad really.

 

I'll kick-start this side of the discussion -- I don't care about the NCAA rules as they pertain to basketball and so it naturally follows that I don't care who breaks them.

 

Every analyst will call him a great basketball mind and coach with no mention of this in a couple years. Then Stephen A. Smith will go on an A.I. rant.

 

Yeah, I've long since given up on the idea that running afoul of NCAA regulations necessarily makes you a bad person.

 

Yeah, the NCAA's always so focused on ticky-tack stuff. Arranging for a secretary to take an online class for a player so that player can be eligible? Who in his right mind would consider that to be a serious breach?

 

dq, I'll give you that the academic fraud stuff is worse than the garden-variety recruiting violations. But if any of that fraud mattered to the NCAA -- hell, if academics mattered to the NCAA -- three-quarters of Division I programs would be ineligible for the tournament.