Bramble Tamble

So, my wife got a jury duty notice in the mail this week. And holy cow, was she pissed. I tried to be sympathetic, but I think I failed in that regard. I tried to use the "that's the price we pay for living in a free country instead of one where death squads roam the countryside to pass judgment without the benefit of a trial" argument, but its impact was lessened by the fact that that was essentially one of the same arguments used in the notice. And she hates authority, so that rendered my argument impotent.

Anyway, after her howls of protest about the meager jury duty pay, the sheer inconvenience that the assignment generates and the inherent unfairness of it all – after all, this is the fifth or sixth time she's been tapped for possible jury duty, which even I think is excessive - she dutifully completed the questionnaire that came with it and mailed it back in. (An aside: Did you know that potential jurors are now asked if they watch shows like "CSI," "Cold Case" and the like?) So, her name is in the jury duty pool for the next year. If she'd ignored the notice, or even forgotten to mail it in, she could have been nailed for contempt of court, fined and/or even imprisoned.

I bring this up not to give you a rare peek behind the curtain of my life, but to illustrate a point about something else entirely:

The violations that have cast a long shadow over Kelvin Sampson's soon-to-be-terminated tenure as Indiana University's head basketball coach are petty. The rule about limiting phone calls to recruits is a stupid, stupid, stupid rule, and any punishments that come about due to its violation are not unlike the rule itself: draconian and extreme.

But.

It's still a rule, one of the roughly 7.8 trillion or so included in the NCAA's rulebook. It's easy for a school or a coach to stumble every once in awhile because they don't know the rulebook backwards and forwards – but in this case, ignorance is no excuse for Sampson, seeing as how these are the same types of violations that followed him from Oklahoma. Seeing as how these are the same types of violations that Sampson lied about when introduced at the press conference announcing his hiring at Indiana in 2006, following the end of the Mike Davis Error.

Which is the part that slays me.

I'd be more willing to give Sampson the benefit of the doubt if this were a new allegation, although even the shadow of an accusation on the face of a historically clean program is a little bit troublesome. The fact that IU's administration brought Sampson on board in spite of the issues he'd had at Oklahoma, yet continue to be shocked and disappointed at his continued flouting of the rulebook, speaks volumes to their ignorance of the Snake Rule:

When you pick up a snake, try not to act surprised when it bites you.

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