“We have your playbook.” — William Sweeney of the FBI’s New York field office, Sept. 26, 2017.
Those words laced with false bravado launched a six-year stumble down a college basketball rabbit hole to nowhere. We have finally emerged, dumber for the experience—or at least far more cynical. The feds led us on a futile trek that wasted time and wrecked lives and—as usual—let the powerful skate while a few mid-level lieutenants got pinched. By the time it was finally over, the “crimes” themselves had become an anachronism in a changing college athletics world.
They had the playbook, all right. Then they barely opened it before tossing it to the NCAA and its incompetent Frankenstein creation, the IARP, which bumbled and dawdled its way to a series of low-impact rulings before being run out of business on account of its own monumental inefficiency. This was the IARP’s final act, issuing a Kansas infractions case ruling Wednesday that downgraded the charges against the program and predictably gave the blueblood Jayhawks a complete pass, with nothing more substantive than three years of probation. This wasn’t even a slap on the wrist; it was a pat on the back.
