By John Feinstein
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, March 10, 2008 6:32 PM

Ever since Kelvin Sampson was forced to resign in disgrace as Indiana's basketball coach a couple of week ago, people have wondered how Rick Greenspan has kept his job as IU's athletic director. Apparently Greenspan is going to survive because Indiana has another one of those gutless presidents that litter the college basketball landscape.

And yet, what has happened at Indiana this winter doesn't even come close to being the saddest story in college basketball this season. That dubious honor belongs to Harvard.

Yes, Harvard.

A week ago Sunday, Pete Thamel, the New York Times' outstanding college basketball writer, wrote the story that had been whispered about ever since Harvard received commitments this fall from six players whose basketball pedigree is far higher than that of past Harvard players. The same, apparently, could not be said of their academic pedigree. Thamel chronicled in detail Harvard's decision to lower its academic standards for basketball players and some recruiting tactics by new Coach Tommy Amaker and his staff that appear to be, at best, questionable.

The real culprit in this story, though, is the athletic director ¿ just like at Indiana. Bob Scalise has a lot in common with Greenspan: He's arrogant and self-righteous and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.

A year ago, Scalise fired Frank Sullivan, who had been Harvard's coach for 16 years. Every coach in the Ivy League will tell you that Sullivan, in spite of working with one hand tied behind his back, did a remarkable job at Harvard. The school's academic standards for basketball players were a good deal higher than the other seven schools in the league. There was almost no financial support for the program; in fact, it was such a low priority that the team's media guide was almost never ready before the start of the season. Harvard had no basketball secretary and, in an era when most teams have at least three and often four assistants, Harvard had two.

Football mattered at Harvard. Hockey mattered. Basketball just didn't matter.

All of that said, Sullivan won more games in one season (17) than any coach in Harvard history. He finished second in the Ivy League once and was in the top half of the league at one point for five straight seasons. One year his team was 10-5 when his best player -- a senior, no less -- flunked out of school. The Crimson finished 12-15.

Last year, because of an arcane rule that only Harvard would invoke involving fifth-year seniors, Sullivan's leading scorer and rebounder couldn't play the last 10 games of the season even though he had a 3.2 grade-point average as a pre-med student. The Crimson were 10-7 with him, 2-8 without him. There is no margin for error at Harvard. One key player can make that big a difference.

Even though he knew that Sullivan had conducted himself at all times in a manner that made everyone at Harvard proud, Scalise fired him. If you want to know what kind of person Sullivan is, consider this: he was told he was being fired before Harvard's last two games of the season. He never told his players. After they had won their final game, he still said nothing, because he wanted the evening to be about the team's seniors and about the entire group finding a way to win their finale.

The next day, he went through the Harvard dorms, finding each player to tell them individually what had happened.

"My relationships with them started one-on-one when I recruited them," he said. "I wanted to end the same way."

Scalise hired Amaker and promptly changed the rules for him. Players with academic records that Sullivan couldn't touch were now recruitable. This happens often at big-time jock schools: People get sick of losing so they hire a coach with name recognition and pay him big money, build him new facilities, triple his recruiting budget and give him 'flexibility' in admissions.

Scalise admitted to Thamel that Harvard had changed its standards for Amaker: "It's also a willingness to basically say, 'Okay, maybe we need to accept a few more kids and maybe we need to go after a few more kids in the initial years when Tommy is trying to change the culture of the program," Scalise said. "It's a willingness to say that we really do want to compete for the Ivy championship."

Okay, fine. Schools decide all the time to lower academic standards in the name of winning games. It happens at every level of college sports. But why was Sullivan not given the chance to "change the culture," (a lovely euphemism, no?) with looser academic standards? Why wasn't he given the budget Amaker has been given or the support he's been given?

Scalise claims that Amaker has been able to attract higher caliber players this year because of his "contacts and charisma." Amaker certainly has both, but if he was playing by the same rules Sullivan played under, all the contacts and all the charisma in the world wouldn't have landed this group of players. In fact, he couldn't have gone anywhere near most of them.

Now, having been outed by the Times, Harvard is trying to back-pedal, claiming the players haven't actually been admitted yet even though several have received what Harvard calls "likely letters," telling them they are almost certain to be admitted when admissions letter go out in April. All of them have clearly been told that as long as they meet the Ivy League's minimum for Academic Index -- the AI is a combination of SAT scores and GPA -- they will be admitted. The league minimum is 171. Under Sullivan, the team had to average an AI of 202 and no one under 195 could be admitted.

A Harvard flak named Alan J. Stone told Thamel: "We can say that any statement about someone being admitted to Harvard who is not qualified would be absolutely inaccurate, as is any suggestion that standards have been lowered for basketball. Harvard's admissions criteria are -- and remain -- very high. They have not changed at all."

Stone's last sentence must be a lie -- unless Scalise was lying when he told Thamel that Harvard was willing to lower academic standards for Amaker.

Harvard forced Sullivan to agree to a gag order in return for a buyout. But it didn't offer anything to his assistants, Lamar Reddicks and Bill Holden. Both told Thamel what Harvard's academic standards were when they were recruiting for Sullivan. Like Sullivan, both men put in long hours trying to make Harvard basketball better. And yet, Scalise, showing absolutely no class, tried to claim that they were, "jealous" of the new regime.

He's probably right about that. No doubt Reddicks and Holden and Sullivan would have loved to have enjoyed the benefits Amaker and his staff are now enjoying.

There's also the matter of coloring outside or very near to the lines when it comes to the NCAA's rules on recruiting. According to Thamel, Kenny Blakeney, now a Harvard assistant, played pickup basketball with two different recruits during a period when contact with recruits was not allowed. Blakeney said he wasn't on the Harvard staff yet when he worked out with the two players, which may be technically true but still strains credibility to say the least.

Let's give Blakeney the benefit of the doubt and go along with his story that his working out with the two rising high school seniors was pure coincidence. If that's the case, Amaker should have done one of two things: not hired Blakeney because he had been involved with the two kids or not recruited the two kids after he hired Blakeney. There was also an accusation made by Les Rosen, the father of Zack Rosen, a player who chose not to commit to Harvard, that Amaker had illegally "bumped" him in a grocery store during a basketball camp last summer by saying, "we need to get Zack up to Harvard."

That's a nit-pick. Coaches who encounter recruits or their families always make some comment that's probably outside the "no bump" rules. Rosen thought Amaker running into him was more than a coincidence. Perhaps. But it can't be proven. The Blakeney "workouts" are a different story. Scalise conceded to Thamel that he had sat down with Amaker after learning of them for a "teaching moment" last November.

Tommy Amaker doesn't need to be taught what's right from wrong from Scalise or anyone else. He learned about college basketball and college basketball recruiting from Mike Krzyzewski when he played for him and coached under him at Duke. He has been a head coach for 11 years (four years at Seton Hall; six at Michigan) and he knows what is allowed and what isn't allowed. Beyond that he knows you don't go into gray areas -- especially at Harvard.

Amaker didn't speak to Thamel. He hid behind a statement, which is embarrassing. One wonders if Scalise ordered him not to speak to Thamel because if anyone can speak for himself, it is Amaker.

But let's get back to the point here: Frank Sullivan never should have been fired. If Harvard wanted to go down the slippery slope of lowering academic standards, it should have offered him the chance to go that route. He had put in 16 years pushing Sisyphus's rock up the mountain and was never given the chance to find out what life was like recruiting on something approaching a level playing field.

Harvard now has a choice to make: it can renege on the promises it clearly made to Amaker and not admit the players he has recruited in order to preserve its pristine image. Or, it can admit the players. But if it does, it will have to put aside the self-righteousness and the euphemisms and admit the truth: it wants to win more basketball games.

There's nothing wrong with that. Harvard has loosened academic standards for football players and hockey players for years. If it wants to do the same for basketball, that is its right -- as with the rest of its Ivy League brethren and just about everyone else in college athletics.

But let's tell the truth here. Harvard fired a good man without just cause. The school trying to claim it is still "Harvard," when clearly it is not. It is rolling in the mud with everyone else in college athletics. And right now, it is not a pretty sight.