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Golden parachute for
shameless Haskins

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Posted: Friday June 25, 1999 08:45 PM

Sports Illustrated staff writer Jon Wertheim co-wrote a recent Sports Illustrated special report on the academic scandal in the Minnesota basketball program. Wertheim filed this Viewpoint on the departure of coach Clem Haskins.

If a college basketball coach is axed in the middle of the summer, when no one is around to hear it, does he still fall?

Not too hard, it seems. With none of those pesky faculty or students on campus, a few hours before the decisive game of the NBA Finals, on a lazy Friday afternoon, nearly four months after his program was rocked by allegations of massive academic fraud, Clem Haskins finally resigned his position as University of Minnesota basketball coach. His parting gift for standing at the epicenter of, arguably, the worst cheating scandal in NCAA history? A buyout package worth more than $1.5 million, courtesy of the state's taxpayers. All things considered, not a bad day at the office.

More galling still, Haskins walks away with his reputation relatively unscathed. Despite an Everest-sized mountain of evidence against him and with NCAA investigators breathing down his neck, the embattled coach denied knowledge of any wrongdoing to the end. And listen to how the university's president, Marc Yudoff, the man whose job somehow seemed to be in greater jeopardy than Haskins' this spring, lionized the coach at his sendoff. "[Clem] has communicated to his players the goals of playing hard, working hard to achieve career goals, respecting others, and becoming honorable men," Yudoff said Friday. "He had an enviable record."

Presumably, Yudoff means wins and losses -- never mind the fact that the Gophers won barely half their games in Haskins' 13 years of service. But check out these records: Since taking over the program in 1986, Haskins graduated a whopping 23 percent of his players, far and away the lowest rate in the Big Ten. Of the 20 players linked to the current allegations of academic fraud -- that is, the players for whom tutor Jan Gangelhoff ghostwrote 400 papers and tests -- only one earned his degree. Semester after semester, the men's basketball team had the lowest GPA of any team in the Minnesota athletic department, dipping as low as 1.64, a solid D average, one term.

If the Minnesota investigation continues apace, dozens more embarrassing revelations will be linked to the Haskins regime. Just last month, for instance, it came out that Larry Anderson, a detective who twice investigated Gopher basketball players about a sexual assault and never presented prosecutors with evidence, also traveled with the team to road games.

By the time the whole mess gets sorted out and the Minnesota athletic department has paid the NCAA fiddler, the team will have a new coach (the rumor mill has already disgorged Tom Davis' squeaky-clean name) and Haskins will have long disappeared into the sunset. In that sense, Haskins -- leaving campus under the cover of darkness, replaced before anyone notices -- will resemble many of the 77 percent of his players that failed to graduate. But they, of course, departed without $1.5 million in their pockets.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.