NY TIMES: NCAA Investigating Bledsoe's Eligibility

N.C.A.A. Is Looking Into Former Kentucky Player

By PETE THAMEL and THAYER EVANS

Published: May 28, 2010

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Two years ago, Eric Bledsoe was a star point guard without the grades to meet the N.C.A.A.’s minimum standards and needing to find a new high school. He solved both problems by moving to A. H. Parker High School and now, after one season at the University of Kentucky, he is awaiting a lucrative payday in next month’s N.B.A. draft.

The dramatic changes in Bledsoe’s academic and athletic prospects have attracted the attention of the N.C.A.A., which has sent investigators to at least three places in Alabama to ask about him. The N.C.A.A. does not talk about its investigations so the scope of this one is not known.

But Bledsoe’s academic makeover and extra benefits he apparently received could be another blow to John Calipari, the celebrated coach at Kentucky who previously led teams at Massachusetts and Memphis that had their records and Final Four appearances expunged after rules violations were found under his watch.

Interviews with those connected with Bledsoe’s life in Birmingham revealed potential violations:

*Brenda Axle, the landlord for the house where Bledsoe and his mother moved for his senior year of high school, said that Bledsoe’s high school coach paid her at least three months’ rent, or $1,200. By moving there, Bledsoe was eligible to play for Parker, which he led to the Alabama Class 5A title game. Maurice Ford, the coach, denied paying the money.

*A copy of Bledsoe’s high school transcript from his first three years reveals that it would have taken an improbable academic makeover — a jump from about a 1.9 grade point average in core courses to just under a 2.5 during his senior year — for Bledsoe to achieve minimum N.C.A.A. standards to qualify for a scholarship.

*A college coach who recruited Bledsoe said that Ford explicitly told his coaching staff that he needed a specific amount of money to let Bledsoe sign with that university. The coach, who did not want to be named out of fear of repercussions when recruiting in Birmingham, said Ford told him and his staff that he was asking for money because he was helping pay rent for Bledsoe and his mother. Ford denied this, saying, “I don’t prostitute my kids.”

He said he had done nothing wrong, adding: “I’m a poor black man. And when one black man tries to help another black man, there’s always something wrong.”

Calipari did not return a telephone call and text message seeking comment. A Kentucky spokesman said he was tending his ill mother.

That Bledsoe — a 6-foot-1, 190-pound point guard — is on the cusp of living out his N.B.A. dream would have been hard to envision in the spring of 2008. Bledsoe had lived an itinerant life for much of his high school years, often staying with friends or relatives, while his mother held jobs like working at an adult book store and doing custodial work at a hospital.

By the end of his junior year, Bledsoe had attracted a solid list of college suitors, but the question of where he would play his senior year lingered.

Most of Bledsoe’s teammates at Carol W. Hayes High School, which was closing at the end of the school year, were transferring to Woodlawn, another local public school. But Steve Ward, his former coach at Hayes, had concerns about Bledsoe’s shaky grades and directed him to a local private school, Central Park Christian, where Ward thought Bledsoe would receive the academic attention he needed.

Bledsoe met with Levan Parker, the headmaster and former basketball coach, showed him a transcript and picked up an application. The next day, though, Bledsoe’s mother, Maureen Reddick, called Central Park and said her son was going to attend school in California. Not long after, he enrolled at Parker.

Initially, the Alabama High School Athletic Association ruled Bledsoe was ineligible to play at Parker, based on its transfer rule, but in November 2008 it cleared him to play, said Steve Savarese, the executive director of the A.H.S.A.A.

The A.H.S.A.A., the Birmingham City Schools Athletic Department and Ward were all asked about Bledsoe by the N.C.A.A. assistant directors of enforcement Kristen Matha and Abigail Grantstein. They asked about everything from Bledsoe’s grades to his car to the circumstances surrounding his transfer, according to those who were interviewed by the enforcement officers.

“Definitely it was suspicious,” Ward said of the transfer. “He was in Woodlawn’s zone when Hayes shut down. His mom is bouncing around because she doesn’t have a steady job, so he moves to Parker’s zone. Of course I think it was a little suspicious.”

The state athletic association did not know who was paying rent for Bledsoe and his mother at the house on Center Street South. Axle, the landlord, said that Reddick signed a one-year lease for $400 a month. But she said she never received any money from Reddick or Bledsoe. She said that Ford paid her for the rent three or four times in cash, usually while Axle volunteered at Parker High School.

“I never paid his mom’s rent,” Ford said.

Under N.C.A.A. rules, it is not permissible for a high school student’s family to receive rent money from a public school coach. It would be considered an impermissible benefit.

Efforts to reach Bledsoe and Reddick were not successful.

When the rent payments stopped being made in early 2009, Axle said that she asked Ford about it on occasion and that he told her he would call Reddick.

Bledsoe and his mother abandoned the house in May 2009, and, according to Axle, left it in poor condition. She said she had to call an exterminator.

“It was horrible,” Axle said.

When Axle last saw Reddick in June, she asked her who was going to pay the $3,200 she owed in rent.

“She said Maurice should have paid me,” Axle said.

Ford repeatedly denied Axle’s assertion that he paid rent for Bledsoe and his mother.

“If I paid his rent and I paid my rent out of my teacher’s salary, what are my kids going to eat?” Ford asked. “I don’t love basketball that much.”

As Bledsoe was blossoming into an elite player, top basketball programs poured into Birmingham to try to get a copy of his transcript.

But Ford, who described Bledsoe’s academic performance from his five semesters at Hayes as “awful,” would not give it up because, he said, it was his policy not to distribute his players’ transcripts unless the player was about to go on an official visit, which requires a copy of the student’s high school transcript.

The New York Times reviewed a copy of Bledsoe’s transcript following his junior year. A veteran compliance officer with no ties to a university involved in Bledsoe’s recruitment said that while it was not impossible for someone with a record like Bledsoe’s to qualify for a college scholarship, the reality was that he would need “an extraordinary senior year academically” to qualify. The compliance officer spoke on condition that he was not identified because he was not authorized to speak about Bledsoe’s transcript.

Bledsoe’s grade point average in core courses — subjects like math and English that the N.C.A.A. requires —hovered around 1.9 after his junior year, and that included two unusually high grades — an 86 and an 80 — he received during his half-semester at Parker as a junior.

Bledsoe failed to receive a B in a core course at Hayes. He had one B from a summer school class at Woodlawn that replaced a failing grade in English before he attended Parker.

To meet the N.C.A.A.’s minimum requirements, he would have needed to receive mostly A’s at Parker. Ford said that Bledsoe’s sum ACT score was a 69, which meant he needed to jump from about a 1.9 to a 2.475 in core courses, according to the N.C.A.A.’s sliding eligibility scale.

Ford defended the high grades that Bledsoe received at Parker, both late in his junior year and during his senior year. He said that at Hayes the only care was that Bledsoe was eligible to play basketball. Ford said that his guidance and discipline in forcing Bledsoe to attend class and do his work saved Bledsoe’s basketball career.

He said if Hayes had not shut down, no one would have heard “anything about Eric Bledsoe again because he would have never made it. Never made it. Everything happened for a reason. He was sent to me for a reason.”

Ford boasted about his academic track record with basketball players and said Bledsoe had told him that he could just show up in classes at Hayes, not do work and still receive D’s. But Doretta Harris, a teacher at Parker who taught Bledsoe, said that Ford never cared about academics.

“Just winning,” Harris said. “That’s all.”

Harris said she taught Bledsoe in economics for nine weeks.

“He was a C student at best,” she said.

On the court, things could not have gone better for Bledsoe and Ford, a successful veteran coach who left Parker after their one season together to take over at J. O. Johnson High School in Huntsville, Ala.

But off the court at Parker, the 2008-9 season was a tumultuous one. During the school year, the principal, Joseph Martin, was reassigned to a middle school and later retired. There was an eligibility scandal with Parker’s girls basketball team and an audit later revealed missing money and merchandise involving Martin.

Martin said Bledsoe’s grade turnaround at Parker “isn’t hard to do anywhere in Birmingham, Ala., if you make somebody put their feet to the fire.”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t a challenge,” he said. “He knew what he had to do at Parker.”

Martin said he never saw Bledsoe’s final transcript and said his grades were not altered or inflated while he was principal.

Martin, in an interview outside his house, praised the teachers at Parker and said that if a student needed help, “he was going to be with one of these teachers over here who was going to get him what he needed.”

By all accounts around Birmingham, Bledsoe is a shy and polite young man. And while people here are rooting for him to be selected high in the draft, the question lingers about the path that he took to Kentucky.

“The kid couldn’t have been nicer,” said Parker, the Central Park Christian headmaster. “That’s his reputation, a polite and mannerly kid.

“But he’s clearly been used.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 29, 2010, on page D1 of the New York edition.

I say if the NCAA finds wrong doing AFTER they cleared him to play last year since every player has to go through their little clearing house, I say we band together and file suit against them. They're idiocy knows no bounds apparently.

This is crazy, sounds like NCAA is on a witch hunt, Cal better get this solved very soon.

BestdamnUKfanperiod wrote:This is crazy, sounds like NCAA is on a witch hunt, Cal better get this solved very soon.

Nah, lawsuit is better because this will be twice the NCAA allowed a kid after passing him through the clearing house and then turning around to say no for whatever the kid allegedly did in High School and they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it like they did against Memphis.

Bledsoe could sue who ever gave up his transcripts, I just want UK to get this solved quick.

WTF? I am sick of the NCAA doing this to kids. Approve them through the clearinghouse and then come after a specific coach following the freshman year. I think Sandy Bell (UK compliance officer) has done her homework on this kid. She is one of the best. It appears the NCAA is penalizing the coaches who embrace the one and done kids. If anything, the NCAA and the NBA need to get together to solve this issue.

BK

The NCAA is so KMARTED. There is no such thing as double jeopardy in law because it is wrong. The NCAA needs to get there head out of their ass. After a kid is approved, that should be it. If they have any doubts, they should deal with them then, not the following year. I wonder if they will ever do anything to Duke or USC for the blatant violations they had with recruits. The NCAA has become a neo-nazi organization, and I'd love to see the major conferences start a new organization. MOFO the NCAA.

CoachCalbeliever wrote:The NCAA is so KMARTED. There is no such thing as double jeopardy in law because it is wrong. The NCAA needs to get there head out of their ass. After a kid is approved, that should be it. If they have any doubts, they should deal with them then, not the following year. I wonder if they will ever do anything to Duke or USC for the blatant violations they had with recruits. The NCAA has become a neo-nazi organization, and I'd love to see the major conferences start a new organization. MOFO the NCAA.

This is probably another reason why I say someone should rise up and file suit. I think Memphis should anyway going "OK NCAA, wanna deny our appeal and not do anything about Duke or USC Trojan Football when their violations are far worse, we'll see you in court where not only will we get our season back, but with having evidence on those schools' dirty hands, you'll have no choice but to act by court order" and I think there's enough evidence out there for the suit to win and get a court order for NCAA to act. Should it have to go that far, it shouldn't but, it wouldn't hurt my feelings if it did. Memphis got a raw deal.

I'm glad you brought Duke up on this topic. The hypocrisy of the NCAA knows no bounds especially concerning Duke. Corey Maggette accepted money from an agent which is one of the worst violations and the NCAA did nothing about it. How about stripping them of the 01 championship for using an ineligible player? They of course stripped Memphis for the Rose situation but looked the other way on Kansas the same year. Darrell Arthur had a similar jump on the SAT scores and they did nothing about it. This only proves the Nazi's at the NCAA has "selective punishment" for it's members.

Agent - Any Good Updates On the Little Agents? Baseball, Soccer, Hockey? Anything? Been a While.

It's one of the reasons why you haven't seen me much on here lately. Agent Jr just finished up the 7th grade and is playing soccer in the Louisville Soccer Alliance (travel team) and little league baseball, yes at the same time. Not to mention my two girls are dancing at my cousin's dance studio and the oldest plays fast pitch softball. One weekend we're in St Louis, then Evansville, Columbus, Indy, Cincinnati, and Orlando (for the girls dance competition). We're just a travelling bunch of Agents right now. Thankfully we have about a 3 week break before heading to Emerald Isle for vacation.

Agent jr scored two goals and had 3 assists in a tournament last weekend (here in louisville), then played baseball later on the 1st night. Had an RBI single but was thrown out trying to go to 2nd base. Also walked twice and scored a run. But he also struck out looking and had a throwing error which allowed a run to score. I can live with mistakes but striking out looking is a cardinal sin and he knows it. His last game was rained out and will play again tomorrow night.

Thanks for asking