PonyFans.com

During mid-January some posters on Ponyfans.com were promoting Mike Jarvis and Nolan Richardson as future SMU Basketball Head Coach candidates.

Like his results or not, Mike Dement has mostly coached with integrity.

Almost nothing else can damage a university's public reputation and institutional pride as quickly as athletics scandals.

SJU president faults Jarvis

By ROGER RUBIN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Sunday, February 8th, 2004

The word "blame" was avoided, never explicitly stated. In fact, ex-St. John's coach Mike Jarvis' name was never even spoken.

But the Rev. Donald J. Harrington, the university's president, left little doubt where he believes the blame lies for the Pittsburgh sex scandal and recent pattern of criminality that have tarnished the St. John's basketball program.

"I'm president of the university, but I don't go out and recruit the athletes," a stern and embarrassed Harrington said during an interview in his campus office yesterday. "My responsibility is to learn from this and shape a program where things like this don't happen. Obviously, this is not an isolated incident. Everyone knows the list. I know it and recognize it."

Harrington then added of the players who've been implicated in recent scandals: "It's not productive to discuss who recruited them. People know who recruited them."

Harrington cut short a fund-raising trip to return to New York and address the latest fiasco to rock the miserable program, the Thursday incident in which six members of the 10-player traveling contingent broke curfew to go to a strip joint - where three of them negotiated a price and brought a woman to their hotel room for sex.

The three players - Grady Reynolds, Abe Keita and Elijah Ingram - either have been expelled or are in the process of being so. Lamont Hamilton and Mohamed Diakite have been suspended, and Tyler Jones faces lesser discipline that will be determined by interim coach Kevin Clark.

But Harrington said he understood that the impact of the incident - in which the woman is accused of falsely alleging rape after the players refused to pay her - could be widespread.

Harrington said he was seeking a top-tier replacement for Jarvis, who was fired on Dec. 19, less than two weeks after forward Willie Shaw was dismissed from the team following a drug arrest, and he admitted many students and alumni had expressed embarrassment and anger at the recent incidents. "There were no different admission standards (for basketball recruits)," Harrington insisted. "It's not a matter of looking the other way with them.

"Cultures develop on a team - and I'm not talking about ethnic culture or religious culture. It's the way people interact and what they think is acceptable or not acceptable. I have grown increasingly concerned about the culture of the men's basketball program as I was beginning to experience it over the recent months.

"I think I've addressed that," Harrington added, apparently in reference to firing Jarvis.

During his five-plus seasons - four with at least 20 wins - Jarvis often preached about teaching character to his players. He was not happy with Harrington's assessment. "I don't have to defend my record and what I have done and what I stand for," Jarvis said yesterday. "I'm no less of a coach, no less of a teacher than I was a year ago."

The issue of character goes beyond the Pittsburgh incident and the Shaw drug bust.

Reynolds had been arrested and charged with assaulting a female student in the fall of 2002, before he'd even played a game for the Red Storm. Sharif Fordham, captain of the last NCAA Tournament team at St. John's in 2001-02, is serving a five-year sentence in Georgia for dealing crack cocaine. Erick Barkley brought an NCAA investigation onto campus for his associations with the representatives of professional sports agents.

"That's the culture in that program," Harrington said. "There also are some very good people on that team and I don't want to besmirch their reputations. A coach shapes the culture of the team. He is evaluated on not just wins and losses, but on the culture, the academic success and the behavior (of players). We've taken action based on what we've seen taking place and developing."

Jarvis hardly believes he is solely responsible for the mess at St. John's. "It's not about any one individual, it's about everybody," Jarvis said. "A coach is a parent. Take the name 'coach' out and substitute 'parent' and vice versa. If the kids do well, the kids get the credit. If the kids don't do well, the parents get the blame."

The search for a new coach is underway, but Harrington insisted that while the scandal would raise questions among potential candidates, it shouldn't prevent him from hiring "the right guy."

"The basketball program needs a coach who is an educator," Harrington said. "He has to be a good coach and recruiter, who has an established track record, who will be successful on the court and have a team of players that the university community can be proud of."

Added Harrington: "I guess that's a savior."

Is it over for (Saint John's) Johnnies?

By CHRISTIAN RED
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Thursday, February 12th, 2004

The president of St. John's University said yesterday he would recommend eliminating the school's storied men's basketball program unless it quickly regains respectability.

Asked what would happen if the program could not remain scandal-free, academically sound and competitive, the Rev. Donald Harrington said: "We will not do it."

Harrington's remarks to the Daily News editorial board came amid the fallout from last Thursday's incident in Pittsburgh, when three basketball players brought a woman back to the team's hotel for sex.

Harrington said he would be unbowed in the face of almost certain outcry from St. John's loyal fan base, including alumni who financially support the school because of its basketball heritage, which dates to 1907.

"I would go to the board [of trustees] and say, 'It's now my conviction we can't do it.' The university's values and mission are too important," Harrington said.

"If the question is, 'Would you sacrifice your principles rather than face fact?' the answer is no. We will not sacrifice our principles or our mission. Ultimately, that would be the decision of our trustees, but that would be my recommendation."

The Pittsburgh scandal led to a one-year suspension from the school for senior center Abe Keita, Harrington said yesterday. Senior forward Grady Reynolds already had been expelled and sophomore guard Elijah Ingram withdrew from the university.

Harrington said the search for a new coach will begin after the season's last game, on March 6.

"It can't take long," he said. "And when we go out looking, we'll make sure the coach we hire is consistent with what we believe at the university."

Harrington elaborated on comments he made over the weekend regarding Mike Jarvis, who was ousted as coach early in the season.

"Many say I'm blaming Mike Jarvis," he said. "I say this - Mike, when he was an employee at the university, had the same types of evaluation as everyone else. Mike's no longer here. There's no real point in trying to evaluate what Mike did or didn't do at this point."

In the weekend interview, Harrington blamed the basketball program's culture for its woes, a statement some found insensitive.

"I regret that my own statements had even increased the pain of some of our students," he said yesterday. "I was very careful to say that while I wished I could find a better word - the word I used was culture - I did not mean it in terms of ethnicity or religion, but rather the environment, the context, the expectations one of another."

What a granstander. I wonder if he would eliminate the Economics Department if three of its students were found in compromising positions with prostitutes.

Posted by Stallion:

What a granstander. I wonder if he would eliminate the Economics Department if three of its students were found in compromising positions with prostitutes.

The SJU president probably is grandstanding, but...

* The national/regional-public/media probably would not care if three non-athletes (economics majors) were identified as (off-campus) clients of a prostitute.

Some outsiders might pay attention and university administrators might take punitive action if the hypothetical non-athletes' act(s) occured in university owned/provided housing (especially at schools like BYU or West Point).

* Three regular students would have to do something much more serious to harm their school's reputation.

* Scholarship athletes are highly visible representatives of their institution. Like pro-athletes, they can live under the microscope and their known transgressions are reported to an interested public.

A university's reputation can dramatically benefit or be tarnished by athletes' behavior.

<small>[ 02-13-2004, 04:21 AM: Message edited by: Cheesesteak ]</small>

hey SMU has had 3 students charged with much more than these St John's students EVEN UNDER the "great" Ken Pye. He is simply an idiot for suggesting that the storied St John's BB program should be shut down because three students that happened to be athletes decided to hire some prostitutes. An academic Nerd! I betcha there is just about as much perverted things going on in his faculty than go on with students that happen to be athletes. Just like the great Ken Pye he will find the best way to create a postive athletic environment for the university is to hire people with personal integrity and morality rather than set up some kind of special rules and regulations that simply insure that athletics will be an embarrassment to the school.

<small>[ 02-12-2004, 11:45 AM: Message edited by: Stallion ]</small>