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Crean: sending a message or opening up schollies?

HawkNorth

HR All-State
Nov 24, 2003
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from the Indy Star:

Devin Davis, Hanner Mosquera-Perea kicked off team after marijuana incident
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Knuckleheads are gonna knucklehead, but not on the Indiana basketball team. Not any more. That was the message IU delivered Thursday when it kicked off its latest headline-makers, Devin Davis and Hanner Mosquera-Perea.

Better late than never, Indiana finally put some tough into its tough love. To now, coach Tom Crean and athletics director Fred Glass have handled the team's rising list of off-court transgressions in minimalist fashion, disciplining players with something approaching the smallest possible penalty. The last time IU players got in trouble, Stanford Robinson and Troy Williams failed a drug test and were suspended in November for four games. That was one more than the minimum 10 percent of the season — three games — mandated by the IU student-athlete handbook.

At the time, Crean said Indiana was getting "sterner." Given that two of those four games were exhibitions, it didn't seem all that stern to me.

This did.

"I certainly hoped this day would never come," Crean told me Thursday night, "where we'd run out of time to help them grow up."

You could argue, though I would not, that Indiana erred on the side of being overly punitive. In Davis, IU kicked off a player who was nearly killed late on Oct. 31 when he was struck by a car driven by teammate Emmitt Holt, and in Mosquera-Perea it jettisoned a player who wasn't even cited in the latest incident.


INDIANAPOLIS STAR

IU dismisses 2 players after marijuana incident


The incident? Responding to a complaint Monday night about the odor of marijuana coming from a dorm room, IUPD tracked the smell to a room with Davis and Mosquera-Perea — and found a baggie of pot in Davis' backpack. He was cited for marijuana possession.

Mosquera-Perea was not cited, or even named in the police report, but IU volunteered his name in a press release. Being overly giving of negative information isn't like the school at all. If you want to be cynical, you could note that IU began this week at the scholarship limit, and that placing the underachieving Mosquera-Perea in the same room with the smell of marijuana gave the school cover to kick him off the team — along with Davis — the next day.

If you wanted to get really ugly about it, you could note that the Hoosiers are still recruiting high school seniors even though they had scholarships committed to the maximum 13 players for next season — and that this new-found tough love was as much a roster reduction as it was an act of discipline.

Me, I can't tell you the motivations of Crean and Glass here. But I can tell you this:

The precedent has been set. Indiana has backed itself into a corner, albeit a corner it should have found last fall, when the Hoosiers needed to kick Stanford Robinson off the team for his second issue in four months.

My thing, whether it's Indiana basketball with its run of discipline issues or Florida football several years ago under Urban Meyer, is this: When player after player embarrasses the program, the punishment has to be so severe — like, kicking a guy off the team for something as innocuous as drinking beer at age 20 — that everyone else on the team is scared straight.

College athletes are big and strong, adults physically, and yet emotionally and mentally they're not that far removed from adolescence. My oldest is 19. He's a young man, bigger and stronger than I am, but he's 19. He's a kid, and like most kids he screws up. You know what works on him? The fear of god works on him. And so I've disciplined that kid, my kid, so seriously that he says, "I'm not doing that again."
 
He had no choice but to make this move, and the locals here in Indy had no problems with it happening.
I understand the reaction to the drug issues. But it's pretty obvious this is just another Creaning episode. If 5* players would have been involved, somehow they would have been given another chance.
 
I am sure the punishment would have been the same if it were Yogi and Blackmon.

Getting booted off the team just for being in the room with no possession seems pretty extreme.
Considering that Blackmon hasn't been in trouble while at IU and Yogi has had one incident, prolly not. HMP had an OWI and a few other incidents while at IU, Davis had two incidents in the last 8 months revolving alcohol and drugs.
 
Considering that Blackmon hasn't been in trouble while at IU and Yogi has had one incident, prolly not. HMP had an OWI and a few other incidents while at IU, Davis had two incidents in the last 8 months revolving alcohol and drugs.

Spot on. Cream is already in a world of hurt here. Had Yogi been dumb enough, and he seems like a good kid, to pull this crap Clappy would have had to let him go.
 
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