I don’t mean to go on too much of a rant on this but everybody got screwed on this except the coaches and the players involved. The players were long gone and the coach got a 1.5 million dollar buyout to leave which he had to return half of. Sure… it was a bad deal and it does not reflect the values of anyone here on Gopherhole but the recovery has taken 20 years to a basketball team and fans that had no part in it.
In typical Minnesota nice fashion we imposed a Post season ban 99-00, reduction of three scholarships for that year and 4 schollys until 2004 (seriously, from laps that happened in 97 by people who were no longer with the program?). This was on ourselves!!!
Then the NCAA piled on another 3 years of probation and more scholarships until 2004 among a host of other penalties.
Mark Yudof, Mckinley Bosten, and Mark Deinhart self imposed the worse possible scenario and didn’t even flinch when the NCAA upped the penalty in a big way. The best high school players in the state then played at WI and Michigan State and along with their own instate talent helped create long term institutions at those schools that are only now showing signs of weakness.
The NCAA should only be imposing monetary penalties on Universities and management in addition the people directly involved NOT penalizing future players and fans – its madness!
Also, consider that the university could have negotiated and/or threatened legal action to mitigate some of the penalties (there are a lot of other situations where the schools get away with murder without a major disruption to the program) because they have good counsel and solid leadership at the schools.
Haskins, Ganglehoff, and the players involved clearly failed.
Yudof, Bosten, and Deinhart also failed in a big way.
The NCAA also failed us.
Me? What did I do? We the fans and Minnesota basketball players were directly penalized for 20 years and only now things are starting to shift back to normal. We didn’t deserve any of this – what did we do?
The NCAA is a flawed monopoly and bully. Someday I would like to see a university stand up to them and punch them in the nose to set them strait. Clearly it won’t be the U of M. </end rant>