TIPTON: Southern Cal a Cautionary Tale

Updated: 7:19 AM ET Sun, Jun. 13, 2010

UK basketball notebook: Southern Cal a cautionary tale
Attorney: Better to pay attention than look away

Jerry Tipton / Herald-Leader Staff Writer

Follow the money, that famous phrase from the Watergate political scandal, applies to college athletics. The pursuit of money guides the current seismic shift in college conferences.

It can also suggest how much — or how little — schools want to know about potential problems with coveted prospects.

AttorneyMichael L. Buckner, who earlier this spring said that Kentucky either knew or should have known about questions involving then prospect Eric Bledsoe, sees thorough research as preventative medicine. Learn all you can about a prospect in order to make an informed decision about whether to recruit the player. Or to be armed with answers should the NCAA come forward later with questions.

For fees ranging from $1,500 to $10,000 (tip money for an athletics program like Kentucky's), Buckner will give a school a thick file of information.

So how many schools have hired Buckner to look into a prospect's past before a program decides to recruit a questionable player?

"None have used me," he said.

Only after the NCAA starts sniffing do schools hire Buckner and the handful of firms around the country that do similar work.
Buckner saw the NCAA penalizing Southern California last week as a cautionary tale.

"Kentucky fans should look at the SC case as what not to do," he said. "The NCAA called out SC for not doing their due diligence in monitoring a prospect (O.J. Mayo) and an enrolled athlete (Reggie Bush)."

Southern Cal said it did not know about Bush and Mayo getting improper benefits. As John Calipari's Memphis program learned, plausible deniability (another famous phrase in political scandals) does not prevent sanctions. Memphis said it did not know about Derrick Rose's fraudulent college entrance exam. Maybe so, but the NCAA still ordered Memphis to vacate 38 victories and its 2008 Final Four appearance, plus return post-season monies.

Now with the conferences realigning to reap more money, does the prospect of fatter coffers make schools even less likely to want to know about potential problems?

"That's exactly what I think," Buckner said.

When Buckner said Kentucky should have known about red flags in Bledsoe's transcript and serious questions about his recruitment, he did not mean to denigrate UK's compliance efforts. Compliance offices are spread thin dealing with hundreds of athletes and an NCAA manual as thick as the IRS tax code, Buckner said.

More than one reader sent e-mail messages wanting to know more about this impertinent person who dared question UK.
Buckner, 39, lived in Louisville seven years, then left after his sophomore year at Male High School.

He graduated from Southern California, then law school at Florida State. Because of his love for sports, he specialized in college athletics when he launched his own Florida-based firm in 2003.

In 2009, Buckner made history in representing Alabama State in an infractions case. The NCAA Division I Infractions Appeals Committee reduced from five years to three years Alabama State's probation. Alabama State became the first (and so far only) NCAA member institution to obtain a penalty reduction since the NCAA made appeals more difficult to win in January 2008. Memphis was one of the schools that failed to win such an appeal.

Buckner worked for the NCAA in 2006. He helped the NCAA investigate prep schools to determine which legitimately educated students and which merely got athletes eligible by any means necessary.

That experience led Buckner to appreciate some prep schools and wonder if the NCAA's effort had flaws. He said the NCAA was "ignoring, intentionally I think, public schools because they don't want to deal with the politics involved."

Some athletes told Buckner that some public schools gave athletes good grades so they could play.

"It's a lot easier to pick on private schools than to pick on a state board of education or state government," he said.
From Buckner's experience, decisions based on a thorough investigation of prospects help a school avoid NCAA problems.