Bless their hearts. On day No. 1,863 since incriminating news broke pertaining to Kansas men’s basketball via the FBI, the school got around to acknowledging that, gosh, maybe it has some NCAA culpability here. Maybe the victimhood play had run its course.
Maybe head coach Bill “Just Gotta Get A Couple Real Guys” Self was more than just a naive sap hoodwinked by Adidas in the federal investigation of corruption in college basketball. Maybe assistant coach Kurtis Townsend—heard on an FBI wiretap saying, “We’re going to have to do it some way,” in response to a list of impermissible benefits allegedly being sought by Zion Williamson—has some NCAA rule exposure as well. Maybe enlisting bagman T.J. Gassnola and sneaker execs James Gatto and Merl Code to help with recruiting could have some consequences. Maybe Gassnola paying player Billy Preston’s mom $89,000 could be a problem the school has to answer for.
Maybe, after five years of being anything but accountable, Kansas was sufficiently cornered that it has to do something with a head coach who was charged with one of five Level I violation levied at the Jayhawks. Not a lot, of course. But something.
On Wednesday, Kansas announced that Self and Townsend—each facing allegations of Level I NCAA rules violations—are suspended for the first four games of this 2022-23 season. The two also are prohibited from off-campus recruiting for four months. The school is reducing its scholarships by three over the next three years, implementing a six-week ban on recruiting communicates and unofficial visits and reducing permissible recruiting days by 13 during the 22-23 calendar year.
In reality, Self is missing one big game: Duke in the Champions Classic on Nov. 15 in Indianapolis. Kansas could pull a rando out of the Allen Fieldhouse stands to coach against the other three opponents—Nebraska Omaha, North Dakota State and Southern Utah—without risk of losing. A loss to the Blue Devils won’t be harmful come March. This will have precious little effect on the Jayhawks’ season.
As minuscule as these self-imposed sanctions are, they follow a reported school decision to keep Self and Townsend off the road recruiting during the summer. Combining these two developments indicates that this interminable infractions case will have some bite at the end—which is projected to be sometime in 2023—and Kansas knows it. The school has been so shamelessly opposed to accepting any blame, and so slavishly supportive of Self, that this signals a shift.
Remember, this is the school that embraced the phony “victim” status accorded to it by the feds, who built their corruption case around the absurd premise that the involved schools were actually being defrauded by the people who were helping them buy recruits. Kansas then let Self coach every game from 2017-18 through 2021-22, which just so happened to end with the Jayhawks winning the national championship as the investigation dawdled. And along the way, Kansas gave the ultimate middle finger to the NCAA and the rest of college basketball by awarding Self a so-called “lifetime contract” in April 2021—a rolling five-year deal that automatically adds a year after every season.
Kansas has already defiantly played the system and won, big time. The IARP’s inability to move this case along any faster gave the Jayhawks the window to win a title, which they will gladly take in exchange for whatever’s coming in ’23.
Self may incur a heavier penalty from the IARP’s investigation, but for now, he gets off mighty easy.
Bob Donnan/USA TODAY Sports
But a reckoning does indeed seem to be coming. The school that once declared the NCAA’s accusations against it “baseless” is no longer behaving as if that’s the truth. Its attempt to come to a negotiated resolution via the IARP last year was rebuffed. Then it applied recruiting sanctions to Self and Townsend in the summer, and now these game suspensions.
Although the IARP hasn’t shown an appetite to apply postseason bans—both North Carolina State and Memphis escaped that hammer, with Louisville set to learn its fate Thursday—Kansas is facing a lack of institutional control charge. That’s the most serious in the NCAA violation hierarchy, so you never know what the IARP might come up with there.
Even if the IARP has been unwilling to penalize innocent players with postseason bans, there is growing precedent for going after involved coaches. And Self was involved here. In one FBI-intercepted text from him to Gassnola during the recruitment of a potential star, the coach said that Kansas “just needed to get a couple real guys,” and Gassnola obsequiously pledged to help.
The Level I charge against Self can carry up to a one-year suspension, per the NCAA penalty matrix. Kansas might be partially successful in mitigating any penalty coming to Self with this four-game benching, but it also might not. If the infractions review panel throws the book at Bill, he theoretically could miss the entire 2023-24 season. (Depending on the timeline of the case, of course. This is under the assumption that the entirety of this upcoming season will be played before a Kansas ruling is handed down.)
Would a year-long ban cost Self his job? Not likely. Kansas is so invested in their two-time national champion coach that it would probably bite that bullet and carry on. The school president, Douglas Girod, couldn’t even get out an official statement of the four-game suspension Wednesday without bowing and scraping at Self’s feet.
“I want to reiterate our unwavering support of Coach Self and our Men’s Basketball Program,” Girod said in a statement that offers zero words to explain the suspension.
No need to reiterate your fealty, prez. It’s been plainly clear for five years that Kansas was going to rally around Bill Self no matter what. But it’s impressive that the school could, at this very late date, with another championship trophy secured, admit this profound revelation about its victim status and perhaps accept a little responsibility for NCAA violations.
Big step, Jayhawks. Way to go.
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