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Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Lehigh offers forfeits
According to Andre Williams in this morning's Morning Call, Lehigh is offering to forfeit 13 game Joe Knight played in last season. The move would leave the Mountain Hawks with a 1-28 record, the lone win coming in a game in which Knight did not play due to a knee injury.

Frankly, that is hardly a fitting punishment. It would add to Knight's punishment by wiping out his 45-point league record game against Colgate in the league tournament, but it would not punish the school, which is were the blame belongs.

Knight only did what athletic department types told him to. He is not the one still trying to spin it as an innocent mistake. That would be Lehigh AD Joe Sterrett, who continues to try to spin this as an innocent mistake.
Sterrett disputes the NCAA claim that Knight was not eligible to play, saying Lehigh believed he was making progress toward his degree even though he didn't have the applicable credits when he entered the university.

"He has never been ineligible," Sterrett said. "He has only taken whatever people told him he should take. We certified him through our normal process."
Making progress without the credits? In that case, we are well on our way to a doctorate here.

The league's punishment must punish the school, not Knight. The kid has already paid a heavy price -- 16 missed games in his final season -- for someone else's mistake.

Anything less than taking away at least one scholarship and probationary status for Lehigh would allow the folks who actually made the mistake to get away with no repercussions.

The Morning Call was all over this story this morning, tossing a Gordie Jones column into the mix as well.

Jones wrote:
That's not his fault. He trusted people on the administrative level to do their jobs, and they failed him. Either they bungled their interpretation of an NCAA rule regarding the transfer of credits — which remains the official explanation — or they were guilty of something more sinister.

Rest assured that there is a perception out there that the latter is the case. And that will always be so, no matter how often someone in the Lehigh hierarchy says it was nothing more than an honest mistake. Just go online sometime, and read all about it.
Interesting to see Jones suggest people go online to read about the Knight story, since that is the only place it was covered as it played out. While online journalists were busy digging into the situation, Jones' paper, which purportedly covers Lehigh, was content to go with the "injury" explanation for weeks and has yet to ask how Lehigh could misterpret a rule that is pretty simple and straight forward.

Maybe if Lehigh had been open and upfront from the start, people would be more willing to buy the "official explanation." And maybe if the "mainstream media' had done its job when Knight was first suspended, people would not have had to read about it online.
Published at 7:27 AM by Hoop Time.
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