UT to discipline Pearl

Jus saw Brucie on the tv sobbing and apologizing.

http://www.wbir.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=133625&catid=2

Love It!!

I have been telling anyone that would listen that this would happen. I have known the way he runs things since his days at D II University of Southern Indiana. This was bound to happen. It took a little longer than I thought, however it has vindicated me to some of my UT fan buddies.

Pearl comes clean … and pays for it



By Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports 2 hours, 3 minutes ago


That honesty is the best policy is a long-held philosophy. In the case of Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl, it now has a price tag: A whopping $1.5 million, which could increase to $2 million if he doesn’t remain the Volunteers coach through 2015.
Bruce Pearl admitted he lied to NCAA investigators and Tennessee decided to cut his pay.


Pearl was cited for “misleading” the NCAA enforcement staff during an investigation into what can generally be called excessive phone calls to recruits. Pearl admitted he didn’t tell the truth in a June interview. He said he regretted it immediately and came clean about it to his boss, athletic director Mike Hamilton, in July. Hamilton confirmed the story.

“I’m truly sorry,” Pearl said Friday before, comically and perhaps ironically, a fire alarm interrupted him.

The delayed honesty didn’t stop Tennessee from taking the unusual, and dramatic, route of hitting the coach up where it counts.

It’s commonplace for schools facing an NCAA investigation to apply self-sanctions in an effort to appease the Association, which can still hand down additional penalties. So UT cut the number of official visits recruits can make, curbed recruiting possibilities by the coaching staff and even prohibited Pearl from recruiting off campus from Sept. 24, 2010 until Sept. 23, 2011.

If UT stopped there, this was a serious response. Going after Pearl’s salary took it to a new level – one that might make coaches everywhere think twice about their compliance in NCAA matters.

Pearl’s contract reportedly averages $2.3 million through fiscal 2015. He was set to earn $1.9 million this fiscal year, which ends on June 30, 2011.

He will now receive $500,000 less in fiscal 2011, $600,000 less in fiscal 2012, $200,000 less in fiscal 2013 and $100,000 less in fiscal 2014 and 2015. A $500,000 retention bonus he was to receive if he was still UT’s coach in November of 2012 will now be pushed back to 2015.

Three of Pearl’s assistant coaches were also hit with 25 percent reductions in pay and banned from recruiting off campus for between three months and one year.

The recruiting sanctions alone are serious. The bad publicity doesn’t help. It stands to reason these are less than ideal conditions for this weekend’s visit by top recruits Adonis Thomas, a star power forward from Memphis, and verbally committed guard Kevin Ware of Georgia.

Still, those kinds of recruiting penalties have been handed down for years.

It’s the monetary hit that got the attention of some of Pearl’s peers.

“[UT] whacked him where it hurts,” said one Big Ten coach via text message.

Pearl isn’t going to the poor house – he’ll still earn a reported $1.4 million in fiscal 2011. Still, a million-dollar-plus loss is a million-dollar-plus loss.

The Tennessee case aside, in general one of the inherent difficulties of keeping college sports “clean” (adhering to the NCAA’s definition of amateurism and fair play) through the years is that crime pays.

Becoming a successful in coach in major college sports will make you a multi-millionaire. The quickest route there is to acquire the best players possible. The easiest way to do that is to go beyond the NCAA’s recruiting limits.

While there was cheating in college athletics long before coaches were making piles of cash, now winning isn’t the only motivation. Setting yourself and your family up financially for life is attainable also. Money corrupts.

People of all walks of life knowingly break the law and risk incarceration for the far less than what major basketball coaches make.

And the “cheating” is pretty easy to justify. Making extra phone calls isn’t exactly the stuff of Bernie Madoff.

In college sports even the most egregious cheating scandals feature acts that would be applauded in any other world – getting a poor kid extra money, helping a disinterested student gain a second chance at a college degree, etc.

The NCAA rules are not the law. Nor are they a definitive moral judgment on a man.

While Pearl was clearly embarrassed Friday in a remorseful press conference, no coach is going to face criminal charges for calling a high school recruit more than once a week and then lying about it to NCAA investigators as they pore through your phone records. Pearl said it was a one-time mistake and promised redemption, “I will not let you down again.”

Pearl is still going to get paid. He’s just going to get less. In the past colleges have continued to compensate coaches caught breaking rules at full salary. Even coaches dismissed for cheating received rich buyouts. Some have continued to garner raises, earn new contracts or be hired by other schools.

In their wake, the university is stuck paying law firms to battle the NCAA. Those bills routinely reach $1 million.

With five consecutive NCAA tournament appearances, he’s arguably the most successful coach in the history of Volunteer basketball (men’s, of course). He’s also a winning, and popular, ambassador for the university. So you can understand why he was able to keep his job. UT’s chancellor declared him “family.”

That didn’t stop the Volunteers from finding a creative way to punish him directly though. And it may not stop other schools from following their lead.

I'm sorry, but the way UT fans ridicule Calipari constantly has me lol'n big time. Wonder what those UT fans have to say now??

When whistleblowers go bad: A sad tale
September, 10, 2010 Sep 106:46PM ETEmail Print Comments By Dana O'NeilHe did the right thing, that was Bruce Pearl's mantra. When his peers labeled him a rat and a snitch and ostracized him within his profession for nearly 15 years because he turned in Illinois, Pearl held fast to his strongest defense -- that he did the right thing.

And so to hear a teary-eyed Pearl admit that he did the wrong thing, that he misled NCAA investigators, it was both deliciously ironic and depressingly eye-opening.

This is what we've come to, apparently. Even the one who suffered for his principles has been sucked into the vortex of anything for survival.

I shouldn't be surprised.

From what I heard from 20 head coaches this summer, no program is clean. It's just a matter of what you consider dirty. Rules are broken every day by every coach. Some do it intentionally and deliberately, others tripped up by the convoluted nature of the rulebook.

[+] EnlargeAP Photo/Knoxville News Sentinel, Michael Patrick
Vols coach Bruce Pearl admitted that he made "serious mistakes" in attempting to deceive the NCAA.But no one is perfect.

I'm not naive enough to consider Bruce Pearl or any other coach a paragon of virtue, but I have to admit this one surprised me.

Twenty years ago, Pearl was an assistant at Iowa when the Hawkeyes and Illinois were recruiting top high school prospect Deon Thomas. Pearl recorded Thomas, who by then had committed to Illinois, admitting that he had received a car from an Illinois assistant and turned the tape over to the NCAA.

Though the NCAA never was able to back up Pearl’s claim, the subsequent investigation revealed other violations and Illinois was handed a one-year postseason ban.

Pearl, in the meantime, learned that college coaches can be as strict as the Amish when it comes to shunning.

It took Pearl three years to get a job, and even then it was at Division II Southern Indiana. He took the dormant program to two national title games, and by 1995 he won the whole thing. That’s about the time some bigger school usually swoops in to steal away the savvy coach, but not so for Pearl.

He was still the coach with cooties. No one would hire him, not as a head coach, not as an assistant.

In hoops, no good deed goes unpunished.

Finally, after nine years at Southern Indiana and a 231-46 record, he got a Division I offer -– from mid-major Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Three successful seasons later, Tennessee lifted the de facto ban and hired Pearl .

It took him 14 years of hard labor to get back in and only six to learn how to play the game.

Once an example of seemingly moral righteousness, Pearl now merely jumps on the laundry heap of coaches whose reputations have been muddied. The Tennessee violations revolve around excessive phone calls to recruits and use of unauthorized phones, the same mistakes that cost Kelvin Sampson his job and reputation.

Pearl’s salary has been slashed by $1.5 million and he cannot recruit on the road for a year, serious punishments that imply the violations were plentiful and that Pearl, rather than just being a victim of a staff gone amok, was complicit in the wrongdoing.

But it’s more than the phone calls; it’s the apparent misinformation Pearl supplied to the NCAA that is so galling.

The NCAA is like a parent. It gets mad at the misdeed, but downright irate at the lying to cover up the misdeed. In an NCAA investigation, a coach is supposed to do one thing -– fall on his sword and come clean.

And yet Pearl, a man who once was disgusted enough with purported wrongdoing in his profession that he made like a private investigator, not only did the wrong, he tried to cover his tracks.

If that’s not a testimony to the state of the game, I’m not sure what is.

"It’s serious what we did,’’ Pearl said at Friday's news conference. “It’s worse how we handled it.’’

Just as he did 20 years ago, Bruce Pearl knew what was right.

He just chose to do wrong.

BigBlueCats86 wrote:I'm sorry, but the way UT fans ridicule Calipari constantly has me lol'n big time. Wonder what those UT fans have to say now??

Same things they always say. "Why are they picking on Bruce when Calipari is doing much worse", "I'll bet Calipari turned him in", "This is a result of Lane Kiffin drawing the attention of the NCAA", or "Every successful program cheats a little".

It's really been a fun weekend for me!