June 05, 2009

Toledo's point-shaving scandal dwarfs the headaches being felt in Memphis right now.

By Matt Sussman

The huge story of the college "rev-sport" offseason has been ex-Memphis basketball player Derrick Rose's SAT test allegedly being done by another person. It's a serious violation, if true. But, jeez, it's by no means the worst transgression that has surfaced this spring.
But Rose plays for the Chicago Bulls! Memphis played in the NCAA basketball championship game! What could possibly be bigger than that?
If you focus on the accomplishments and accolades of the program, then yes, the Memphis allegations are probably going to stand out the worst. Academic fraud is the cornerstone of plagiarism, and such dishonesty undermines the integrity of the "student" portion of student-athlete, or something.
The athlete quotient, on the other hand, remains untouched.
But what if both components of the word were tarnished? Why, then you'd be talking about the scandal at the University of Toledo.
Point shaving. It's the brand of cheating that affects the student, the athlete, the coach, the team, the University, and its fans.
It happened not at a major program like Memphis or Michigan, but rather at the most prominent and visible program in the Mid-American Conference.
I guess this point is debatable, but I say this for two reasons: UT has probably had more success in its football and both basketball teams in the past two decades than any other team. On top of that, no other full MAC member is located in a larger city. Buffalo and Akron are close, but the breadth of their sports teams' accomplishments -- and especially their attendance -- don't weigh up historically to the Rockets.
But it's definitely a program with tons of interest from boosters, alumni, fans, and college football junkies who need to know everything about every team. It's for this reason that the university was the perfect target.
The short and bittersweet synopsis of the events in Toledo are such: a couple of gamblers contacted football players and basketball players in an attempt to persuade athletes to alter their performance in such a way that the team may not necessarily lose or win the game, but aim for the margin on which of victory to fall on the right side of the spread they wagered. In return, the gamblers gave the players money and gifts. Ghazi "Gary" Manni and Mitchell Karam are accused of wagering over $400,000 on UT basketball games over a 13-month span between 2005 and 2006.
If you saw that kind of cash being put down on Eastern Michigan games, wouldn't you be suspicious? And if you try laying that sort of dough on a program like Michigan, where the number of reporters on that beat far outweigh that of UT, don't you think someone would notice?
The Detroit-based gamblers found a perfect balance of interest and obscurity by hitting up the Rockets. And for the two years crime festered within the university, the basketball team did not live up to expectations. Now, underperforming of thing happens all the time in sports, and whenever it happens, it's a damn shame. There are all kinds of factors. Complacency. Coaching  mistakes. Lack of preparation. Poor scouting. Bad luck. To that list we can add "listening to the advice of desperate men."
Let's pretend that allegations arose of one Memphis basketball bench-rider accepting gifts in exchange for convincing his teammates to underperform in an unimportant nonconference game. (Or, you know, the Conference USA game, which are always unimportant to Memphis.) You wouldn't be hearing the end of it on SportsCenter. Andy Katz would be given a Code Red assignment to shadow John Calipari at all times. Skip Bayless would have to be administered a rabies shot to ensure he doesn't foam at the mouth too much while on TV.
Now imagine if that happened for two full seasons at Memphis. Nancy Grace would have to be injected with barbituates at every commercial break just so the studio wouldn't explode.
The story never really picked up in the mainstream other than a little blip when six former Rockets players were indicted by a federal court with conspiracy to commit sports bribery. Six athletes! SIX! In two different sports! This might be unprecedented in terms of cheating in collegiate athletics.
Both of UT's then-coaches in basketball and football, Stan Joplin and Tom Amstutz, were dismissed from their positions for poor performance. For Amstutz, it might have just been a disappointing job as coaching overall, since one of the alleged football games fixed turned out to be a 30-point win in a bowl game. Once gamblers found out that trying to tap the third-string running back in a game where 11 men are on the field for the team, they looked to the basketball team to try and get a better fix, since corrupting one player out of five starters is immediately more than twice as effective than football.
But they allegedly got to four players with the hoops program. Anton Currie, Keith Triplett, Kashif Payne, and Sammy Villegas have all been indicted. Villegas has already pled guilty and will be sentenced next month. They were all teammates on the 2004-05 team. All except Payne were regular starters. They combined to score 47 percent of the team's points that season. Now that's how to fix a sports team.
Dozens of other questions remain, and will probably remain unsolved. Were other players involved? Was the whole team in on it? Did the coaches have any idea what was happening? Did other players transfer away as a result of this?
The SAT is a standardized test that, although egregious if taken by someone else, many people have said "doesn't really matter." The test of faith that fans put in the hands of those Rockets athletes who cooperated with the gamblers, however, was failed miserably.