Today, in doing it for the kids

The NCAA suspended DePaul’s men’s basketball head coach for this:

In 2016, the associate head coach instructed the assistant operations director to travel out of state and live with the team prospect, who was a top recruit who had already graduated high school but had not met the NCAA’s academic requirements.

DePaul had aggressively wooed the recruit, who in April 2016 signed a letter of intent to play for the university. But the associate head coach was worried the prospect wouldn’t complete the online course work that was necessary for him to be eligible to play. The recruit needed to complete 16 to 20 assignments, as well as prepare for midterms and final exams in a single month, but around the time he signed his letter, he had only finished one or two of the assignments. He also had “several distractions” around the house that reduced his productivity, the NCAA report states.

The assistant operations director lived with the recruit for nearly two weeks, limiting his extracurricular activities and making sure he finished his assignments.

Note that he didn’t do the kid’s work.  He just stayed on top of things and made sure the kid did the work.  In other words, exactly would have happened once the kid was already enrolled at DePaul, in order to maintain eligibility.  Or, if the kid’s parents had the resources to hire a tutor, exactly what would have happened in that setting.  Neither of which would have run afoul of the NCAA.

And when I say afoul, I mean afoul.  In addition to Leitao’s suspension, here’s the rest of what the NCAA dished out:

… the former associate head coach was slapped with a three-year show-cause order, which essentially makes him unemployable with an NCAA member institution. The games in which the recruit played will be vacated and not be considered part of the team’s record. University officials said they will make public at a later date the number of games affected.

The NCAA also levied a $5,000 fine, plus 1 percent of the men’s basketball program budget on the university. DePaul had already self-imposed recruiting-related sanctions, eliminating six men’s basketball recruiting days in the 2017-18 academic year and six more in April. Institutions are only allowed a certain number of days to recruit athletes.

All for making sure a high-schooler buckled down on his academics.  Nice to see they’ve got their priorities straight.

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