FBI/Adidas Update: Reactions From NC, Kansas Papers

Ed Hardin ripped State a new one over the FBI/Adidas allegations. By North Carolina standards, this is a major rip job, on par with former Durham Herald-Sun columnist Frank Dascenzo’s column about Chris Washburn leaving NC State for the NBA. Headline: GOOD RIDDANCE.

He takes a whack at UNC and Duke here too.

The recent FBI news also included Kansas and the reaction to that news continues to build.

On the one hand there’s this Yahoo column from Pat Forde about the general derision in the basketball world of the idea as Kansas as victim.

As Forde points out, questions have been raised about Cliff Alexander, Josh Jackson, Billy Preston and Silvio DeSousa. It’s not like it’s just one guy.

Dan Dakich, who alternately annoys and amuses, said this: “It should raise concern — it has to raise concern. Bill has to ask some tough questions of whoever is below him, and the bosses have to have real sit-down conversations with Bill Self and his staff. You have to ask, ‘What do you know? And you better tell me the truth.’ You can’t just say you’re the victim.

“Four players in a short period of time? Lucy, you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

The tone in the Lawrence Journal-World is considerably different.

Bill Self, not surprisingly, has minimized it, saying “I haven’t read the entire information or whatnot; I’ve seen parts of it. It came out right before the banquet so I haven’t had a chance to really study it. What I do understand is that the University of Kansas was listed (and) there was some wrongdoing that occurred that was affiliated with Kansas. I did not see anywhere, nor do I believe that we were thought of to be anything other than a victim in the situation.”

The Chancellor concurs, more or less, saying he doesn’t see a need for an independent investigation.

Columnist Tom Keegan gets to be the contrarian here and here.

Finally, there’s this column where the paper interviews a former prosecutor, Stephen Hill Jr. who we’ve actually heard from here once or twice, who says KU has an argument. The paper points to the Myron Piggie case as a possible cause for optimism:

“In the case from two decades ago, Piggie was sentenced to 37 months in prison, three years supervised release and ordered to pay more than $320,000 in restitution. And some of the schools who had players involved did face NCAA penalties. But one also did not. Duke largely avoided NCAA penalties because it successfully was able to prove to the NCAA that it did not know of the illegal payments made to one star player.“

We’ll see.

Hill also says that the feds are clearly holding back information and who knows what that is?