ORD_Buckeye;1938729; said:
I think that was in reference to having forwarded the emails to Pryor's life coach in Penn. If JT had told Smith, I guess I could understand him playing along at the time. Now, having been forced out and being made the focal point for all wrongdoing by the still-employed Smith, JT would have to be some kind of stooge to not speak out.
I think that there's likely truthiness to both sides of that story. With (obviously) no inside information, my beliefs are:
1) JT did communicate the events up the chain. The communications, I would guess, were verbal in an effort to end a paper trail.
2) Smith and quite a few others, perhaps including EGG, likely knew what was going on. My belief is that they attempted to keep it quiet hoping that the mass of the problem would be leaving school soon and that most of the problems would be going with them when they left. They just didn't realize that the fuse on this powder keg was a hell of a lot shorter than they thought.
3) JT, for all the good that he did, gave us many clues as to how he handled things with the team. Specifically, the lack of straight answers that he gave (name your topic) was most telling. I think that he was on top of the situations and believed that he (too) could handle things until the problems were out the door.
4) JT, in my best estimation, was likely told that he was not to admit to communicating the information regarding the inco-cinco up stream. They put a sock in his mouth and he followed orders. For as much a leader JT may be, I think that he's a good soldier here too. This does not remove responsibility on his part, but it does implicate others... as it should.
5) Smith, by virtue of seeing one of his top coaches and programs go through this, needs to be taken to the guillotine too. He clearly was not doing what he needed to do to protect the University. The buck does not stop with JT, regardless if JT didn't communicate these issues with Smith. The fact of the matter is the AD needs to assume that there are things that are not filtering up to him and he needed (and this goes for the future AD) to have processes in place to check the balance of a head coach who had (and likely will have in the future) the kind of backing that JT had.
In the end, I guess it's that last issue that pisses me off most. We had an AD who did not do what needed to be done to ensure that the program was clean. We had an AD who put his head in the sand and palyed the game as though no news really meant no news. He has a responsibilty to go out there and find the news before the likes of Yahoo, SI, ESPiN and the others. This was his greatest failing. I realize that this pits the AD against the coaches on some levels, but if the coaches understand that the AD has a responsibity to uphold the rules and a responsibility for the performance of the programs AS WELL AS compliance of those programs, the coaches would fall in...
I'm sad that a man who had as much potential to continue to do great things as JT had his time cut short. I'm sad that he made the decisions that he made... but there's still a part of me that believes that the decisions could have partially been made for him... To that end, I wish that we would really find out what happened. I don't think for a second that JT would ever cross that line, and sadly, I think that of anyone in the program who has the potential to come clean and be honest about all the dealings that went on... it was JT. He loves the place too much to take it down, yet I'm sure there's a part of him that thinks that coming clean would be best. Not for his reputation, but perhaps, for the best of the the program which he loves. So a stooge? I'm not sure that I'd go there. I'm sure that he's highly conflicted over all of this.
But what do I know, right?
