Cal Poly’s Punishment & Jerry Stackhouse’s Rise

You may have heard that the NCAA, in its infinite wisdom, has put Cal Poly on probation.

So here’s what we’re supposed to accept: UNC can push athletes through paper classes setup in the AFAM department for a couple of decades and not get punished but Cal Poly gives kids too much money for books and gets hit with two years probation?

It’s a perverted twist on Jerry Tarkanian’s old joke about how the NCAA got so mad at Kentucky that they hit Cleveland State with probation.

We know that the ruling in the UNC case was that the NCAA didn’t have jurisdiction over academic fraud but it’s ironic that it is punishing a school for potentially too much academic support and not for academic fraud.

Again, we know that the issue in the Cal Poly case is that the money probably didn’t go to books. Even so, it must seem grossly unfair to Cal Poly.

Speaking of UNC, we listened to Jeff Goodman’s Good n Plenty podcast a bit since the tournament started and he had new Vanderbilt coach Jerry Stackhouse coach on this week.

The first thing we have to say is that Stackhouse needs to work on his coach speak. For instance at one point when talking about his AAU players (he’s been running his own team), he said that one of his goals is helping them to get paid more, which of course implies that they’re being paid now. Goodman made a weird noise when he said it. It’s hard to say what he was thinking.

At other times Stackhouse just said stuff that wasn’t very coach-like and may not go over well at image-conscious Vanderbilt.

It’s really a strange podcast in several ways.

At one point, Goodman gets into some interesting territory but doesn’t follow through. He mentions that Stackhouse was an AFAM major and talks about college academics but didn’t ask him about any personal knowledge of the UNC scandal.

It would have been a good question which leads to another: is his degree legitimate? Or did he just get free classes like some of his fellow UNC athletes?

This is the legacy of that scandal - you never know who you can take at face value.