Iowa had a huge scandal in bb because they got a commitment from Malik Perry and the de-committed,and ended up qualifying at Ball St and is on track to graduate there? If that constitutes a scandal,we are the cleanest bb program in the history of the game....the guy ultimately qualified at a Div 1 institution,for gods sakes.
If those educators are shocked because Iowa recruited a kid who ultimately qualified at a div 1 institution and appears to be on track to graduate...they have lost sight of the University of Iowa's mission....educate and graduate young worthy student athletes.
As far as I know Malik Perry was the only commitment Iowa ever got from a ''diploma mill'' type of institution. He qualified at Ball St....where is the scandal?
If we rule out any recruits from prep schools...like the top 50 pg that Brian Gregory has coming from Oak Hill...it will be another ''five year plan''...
Good grief, how could anyone get it more wrong than this. The poster is clueless about why it was a scandal that got the University of Iowa humiliated in extensive SERIES of expose stories in the nation's leading newspapers.
And while Malik Perry's name appears priminently in those stories the scandal WAS NOT ABOUT HIM.
Perry was an inner-city Philly kid, went to the same HS as Wilt Chamberlain, finished without coming close to having the core course requirements of the NCAA, let alone the higher number mandated as an absolute mimimum at Iowa public universities by the State Board of Regents. Perry seems to have been a naive kid who fell prey to a Philly hustler who told him that for a few thousand bucks he could provide him all the credentials he needed to get past the NCAA Clearing House on Initial Eligibility. So Perry's family paid the money and he was "enrolled" in a "prep academy" with no classrooms, no teachers, no attempt to get certification of any kind, paying outrageous rent to the hustler to live in a unheated slum building unfit for human occupancy--all the facts that were printed i the NY Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Philaddelphia Inquier, always coupled with emphasis upon the fact that Perry was nonetheless being offered a schollie at Iowa by Alford & Neal (even though they had to be aware that even if the Clearinghouse didn't turn him down, there was zero chance that he would be accepted by the Iowa Office of Admissions).
The scandal was NOT that Perry was too unaware that he could not bypass the basic requirements of eligibility to pay college athletics by taking part in a scam operation. Indeed, the kid paid a price, not just in the money the family threw away being conned by the Philly street hustler, but also in wasting a year of his life. To his credit, after the scandal, the kid enrolled in an honest juco program, made up the deficience in his academic record, and eventually qualified under NCAA eligibility rules.
That does NOT mean that Perry was not involved in the scandal or that Iowa was unfairly tarnished by the embarassing publicity about the wilingness of the Iowa coaches to deal KNOWINGLY with this crooked program AND other phony academies where Neal actively was trying to win recruits.
That Perry was the first to give Alford & Neal his "commitment" is only a small part of the scandalous behavior of Alford &Neal--who made a number of reported offers to other unqualified players in similar phony "academies".
The scandal did not center on Perry; it centered on the highly-paid employees of the University of Iowa who deliberately chose not to find out the most basic facts (one simple phone call was all that was needed to find out that the "academy" did not exist) so that Neal could pretend that he didn't know the facts--never visited the non-existent school, never talked to the coach, never checked on anything, just talked to Perry and the street hustler (and never bothered to check his identity and credentials either).
Everyone involved at Iowa knows that when the scandal broke the same weekend in the NY Times & Washington Post, the distinguished former President of the U of Iowa, Sandy Boyd, who was serving an interim President after Dave Skorton left for Cornell University, was furious and that he was determined that Alford & Neal were to be removed ASAP; and everyone close to the program knows that it was Boyd's directive to Barta that was the reason behind the obvious ploy Barta selects to force Alford out: both Barta & Alford knew that the next season was going to be worse than the one just ended, and that there wasn't the proverbial snowball's chance in Hades that Alford's team could meet Barta's ultimatium--make it back to the NCAA tournament next season, or I will have to remove you.
Clearly. from your post, it is evident that you aren't familiar with either the major players at the U of Iowa, or the extent to which the Pierce & recruiting scandals were instrumental in the selection of Lickliter three years ago or how they set the parameters for the search now.
As I've mentioned many times previously on internet boards, the essential fact underlying the place of intercollegiate athletics at the University of Iowa is that athletic programs amount to less than 5 % of the overall University budget, less than 10 % of the funds from research grants, contracts, patents etc. The compelling priority, dwarfing all other considerations, for Iowa is to maintain and extend its reputation and prestige as a major academic & research institution. The leadership of the university, the regents, state officials are ambitious to raise Iowa's rank among the major universities; and they are acutely aware of the damage that football or basketball programs scandals can do.
Schools that are not major research universities--those like Memphis, UNLV, El Paso...or Auburn, Alabama, Oklahoma, Mizzou, Nebraska--either depend upon booster dollars & soldout arenas to pay the costs of their total athletic programs or, in the later category, feel they have to win and don't have that much research funding to jeopardize anyway. Others--like the BT's Michigan & Illinois, are positioned so well in their standing as major academic & research universities that they have been willing to gamble, to tolerate excesses in their programs without enough oversight. But Iowa is not (yet) a university that has acquired such lofty status--not even in its own mind. Hence its leaders believe they must be more sensitive about & more concerned to avoid more scandals.
