It’s a Crime to Penalize Uninvolved at Kansas

While admitting his guilt in the case of NCAA vs. Kansas U, former Kansas basketball coach Larry Brown has invoked the “grandmother defense.”

Larry’s program was found guilty of giving $1,244 worth of cash and inducements to a recruit, and the program was slapped with a 3-year probation.

The National Collegiate Athletic Assn. punishment means that the Jayhawks, who won the national title last season, will not be allowed to compete in the postseason tournament.

The baseball equivalent would be for the Dodgers to be ruled ineligible for postseason play until the next decade because Jay Howell used pine tar.

Larry Brown says he bought the young man in question an airline ticket so he could visit his gravely ill grandmother, who reared the lad and who died a short time after the illegally funded visit.

“I’d give it to anybody if they told me his grandmother was passing away,” Brown said.

Larry’s own personal suffering will be limited. In an incredibly fortunate bit of timing, Brown and his entire KU coaching staff transferred itself en masse to the San Antonio Spurs, a professional team not subject to NCAA jurisdiction. Larry will be paid $3.5 million over the next 5 years, and the Spurs are eligible for postseason play.

In fact, by beating the Lakers Saturday night to run their regular-season record to 1-0, the Spurs qualified for the National Basketball Assn. playoffs.

Meanwhile, the Kansas players, the new coaching staff and the student body are picking through the ruins of a basketball program, even though nobody currently residing within the state of Kansas has been found guilty of the teensiest infraction.

Clearly, some rethinking is in order.

The NCAA’s penalty schedule, for instance, has been exposed as inadequate.

The NCAA announced that it came very close to imposing its “death penalty” on Kansas basketball, shutting down the program for 1 year. This is after a 2-year, full-scale investigation turned up one breach of the rules, involving $1,244 and one young man who didn’t even enroll at the school.

If this level of criminal activity will put you on the brink of capital punishment, what should happen to a school that, say, illegally recruits two players, and buys each a new car? It is highly unlikely that any school would ever get that carried away. But you never know.

Just in case, the NCAA needs a Death-Plus plan, a graduated system of bonus penalties for frequent fudgers.

To administrate the plan, the NCAA would hire Shirley MacLaine as Commissioner of Reincarnation. She would rule on how soon a convicted team is eligible to return to life, and in what form.

Also, the NCAA must learn to pick its targets better. You can’t make a villain out of Larry Brown, the Charlie Chaplin of basketball.

Talk about reincarnation. Larry is Charlie with a better wardrobe. Brown has the wide, innocent eyes of a cuddly orphan. He never misses an opportunity to refer to his players, in his shy and soft spoken way, as “my kids.”

Gee willikers, is this a criminal?

The NCAA should have nailed a coach who looks old enough to shave, or tall enough to post up a cheerleader.

Lord knows there are enough cheating coaches out there. College athletics is the world’s biggest carnival midway, a colorful and brightly-lit aisle of illusions and deceptions.

Step right up, pal. See the pure athletic contest, played by eager children in return for nothing more than the glory of a college education.

We develop a sport like college basketball that generates hundreds of millions of dollars for advertisers, universities, coaches and gamblers. Then we expect the “kids” to donate their services.

We expect the coaches to run a clean program when doing so would cost many of them their careers.

Maybe in some other lifetime.

The solution to the deceit and hypocrisy is open college athletics, where a player is paid whatever he or she can command, with no restrictions or penalties.

History, however, tells us this would be a fatal course.

We all remember how the sport of tennis withered and died when cash prizes became legal. We remember the late, great sport of major league baseball, tragically wiped out by free agency. We lament the passing of the NBA, driven out of existence years ago by greedy players demanding huge contracts.

We mourn the late, great Olympic Games, which lost the interest of the public once professionals were allowed to contaminate the amateur purity.

Fortunately we still have college sports, where the bad guys are good guys, the kids play for fun and even death isn’t as bad as it seems.