… if only for the ending.
In May 2012, news broke that Adams was about to announce his impending resignation as president. Vince Dooley was driving back from Atlanta when he got the word. His passenger said, “There’s something I have to do,” and she directed him to head not for Milledge Circle but for Broad Street. And that spring night, Barbara Dooley rang the chapel bell.
Now do Leebern.
The chafing dishes are open for business.
Damn, Kirby. I expect better from an alumnus.
The man who brought Jim Harrick and Son to Athens doesn’t have an everyday set of brass balls – nah, they’re brass balls with lead centers. Damned heavy suckers, if you get my drift.
BRAD WOLVERTON: So you’ve seen this rash of cases involving academic misconduct recently. You had Syracuse, you’ve got UNC under investigation. Not to comment on anyone in particular, but what do you think has contributed to that? Some people say it’s actually the tougher standards on the front end.
MICHAEL ADAMS: Well, those people and I would disagree. I think there are two things that are compelling to me. When I was chair of the executive committee of the NCAA in some of the last years of the late Myles Brand, who was a very close friend of mine, we put a lot of money into enforcement. I think that was a smart thing. So I think, on one hand, some of the cases that are coming forward now are because the NCAA is doing a better job investigation-wise and sort of ferreting out what’s going on. And then secondly, I think there are some coaches out there unfortunately — I’ve met some of them — who’ve decided that their way to success was to cheat. And I think without having deep animus toward them, which is sometimes hard, I do think the message has to be sent to them that the cost of cheating in the NCAA is not worth it. And I think until that messages is internalized, we may have some more cases like this.
Nary a word about administrative accountability there. Although at least he admits he’s met cheating coaches before, so he’s not as if he’s living in total denial.
The AJ-C reports that, at $676,931, Michael Adams was one of Georgia’s highest-paid university system employees in 2015.
Filed under Michael Adams Wants To Rule The World
If you wonder why I can’t wait for the door to finally close on the Michael Adams era in Athens, let me take you back to the man’s reminiscence of the Harrick hire.
“I said to coach Dooley, ‘Would you like for me to get Jim Harrick in the pool,” Adams said. “He said, ‘Yes. I think the better the pool, the better.’ We interviewed three finalists. Coach Dooley made a recommendation to me for whatever reasons. I think, and still think, that he and coach Harrick got along very well.”
Dooley’s first choice was then Delaware coach Mike Brey, who turned down the chance and eventually landed at Notre Dame. Harrick won the national title at UCLA in 1995 but was fired the next year over expense reports from a recruiting dinner that violated NCAA rules.
“Ultimately on decisions on the head basketball coach and the football coach, I make the decision only from the standpoint of that was my recommendation to the president,” Dooley said.
Adams said Dooley recommended Harrick twice, the second time after Harrick decided he wanted to stay at Rhode Island before changing his mind.
“I think the AD was involved in the hiring, he played the lead role in hiring Jim Harrick, not once but twice,” Adams said. “I think that I can document all that.”
Adams still calls Harrick “one of the best final-two-minute coaches that I’ve ever seen, and I know enough about basketball to know the difference. I regret what happened to him, but he made mistakes here at a level that would have made it impossible to stay whether I was making that decision or coach Dooley was making that decision. It was just obvious to both of us.”
That wasn’t the only obvious decision Adams and Dooley made about Harrick.
Now keep in mind that Harrick’s career wasn’t exactly a mystery at that time. He’d already been canned at UCLA – after winning a national title – for falsifying expense reports and asking others to lie about that and at Rhode Island managed to raise a few eyebrows by letting Lamar Odom on to the team after Odom’s departure from UNLV. But nobody at Georgia thought it was wise to pick up the phone and make a couple of calls to get some more background on the guy.
That’s basically how you wind up a few years later with an academic fraud scandal on your hands. Too bad nobody judged Adams by the same standard he judged Harrick.
Filed under Michael Adams Wants To Rule The World
Michael Adams wants you to know at heart he’s another Dawg fan, nothing more, nothing less.
“I don’t have many regrets,” Adams said during an interview in his north campus office in his final weeks as president before his retirement on June 30. “You want to know what my biggest regret is? Not getting the final five yards against Alabama. To have gone out in the national championship game, and I felt that night that was the national championship game and I think the following events proved me right. I’m not sure I’m over that one yet.”
See? That’s just like you or me or any other slob who didn’t preside over the hire of a man who would preside over an embarrassing academic scandal.
But in Adams’ mind, Harrick doesn’t count as his biggest regret because his hire wasn’t really Adams’ fault.
“I said to coach Dooley, ‘Would you like for me to get Jim Harrick in the pool,” Adams said. “He said, ‘Yes. I think the better the pool, the better.’ We interviewed three finalists. Coach Dooley made a recommendation to me for whatever reasons. I think, and still think, that he and coach Harrick got along very well.”
Dooley’s first choice was then Delaware coach Mike Brey, who turned down the chance and eventually landed at Notre Dame. Harrick won the national title at UCLA in 1995 but was fired the next year over expense reports from a recruiting dinner that violated NCAA rules.
“Ultimately on decisions on the head basketball coach and the football coach, I make the decision only from the standpoint of that was my recommendation to the president,” Dooley said.
Adams said Dooley recommended Harrick twice, the second time after Harrick decided he wanted to stay at Rhode Island before changing his mind.
“I think the AD was involved in the hiring, he played the lead role in hiring Jim Harrick, not once but twice,” Adams said. “I think that I can document all that.”
“I think that I can document all that.” ? Who in the hell talks like that in a beat writer interview?
The sad thing is that he probably did make an effort at the time to document it… just in case.
Weiszer wrote a fair piece, which means what you’d expect. But there is one uncontaminated bit of good news in it. We get a vacation.
Adams, who turned 65 in March on what he called his “Medicare birthday,” plans to take a year off from the university. He said he will spend time at his lake house and travel next year to Australia, New Zealand and California and may write books.
Don’t feel any need to rush back on our account.
Woo, what’s that smell? Oh, yeah, it’s the familiar odor of BS wafting from Michael Adams’ mouth.
“I think it [a nine-game conference schedule] could happen,” Adams said. “I know more and more conferences are going to that. The fans don’t like the games against some of the competition that we play, and I don’t blame them. It’s one of the reasons I voted against going from the 11th to the 12th game, because I thought it was going to do to us exactly what it has done…”
The fans, hunh…
This is the guy who thought nothing of passing money under the table to Jim Donnan, pushed Vince Dooley into hiring the Harricks and fashioned some of the most restrictive drug and arrest policies in the country for Georgia’s student-athletes, but we’re supposed to believe that Mr. Hands On couldn’t have come back from that meeting where he lost the vote on schedule expansion, picked up the phone and ordered his AD not to schedule another cupcake opponent with that extra game? Sorry, not buying that one.
And is he so caught up in giving the fans what they want that he’s ready to storm the Bastille and push for that ninth conference game? Hell, yea… wait, what?
Adams, whose tenure ends in June 30, will still be a voting member at SEC meetings later this month in Destin. He said he hasn’t decided how he personally feels between staying at eight or going to nine.
“But I think ultimately what will win out is fans are properly tired of seeing two or three really poor games per year,” he said.
No doubt ultimately he’ll take credit for the schedule change when it occurs long after he’s left office. Because he cares.
Filed under Michael Adams Wants To Rule The World
If you want a distillation of what makes Butts-Mehre run the way it does, look no further than Michael Adams’ explanation of why the guy running the most profitable athletic department in the country ranks twelfth in salary in the conference.
“I think there’s a fundamental issue there that we have to solve going forward,” Adams said. “I think Greg is great; I think we have to be cognizant of the market. Whether or not we have to be completely bound by the market is a decision that somebody else will make. Greg is basically a senior administrator. He now makes more money than any other senior administrator but me. How far do you go down that road and you’re speaking out of both sides of your mouth. You’re preaching unity with the body politic on one hand and you’re creating division on the other…” [Emphasis added.]
There you have it. It’s not a matter of how well you do your job. It’s a matter of how willing you are to subordinate yourself to Adams.
I’m really gonna miss that guy.
Filed under Michael Adams Wants To Rule The World
David Paschall gets the early jump on what I expect will turn into a torrent as we get closer to June 30th.
“I hope I’m remembered as someone who has helped to create proper balance,” Adams said. “The academic interests at Georgia come first, and I don’t think there is any doubt in anybody’s mind about that, given some of the decisions I’ve had to make through the years. I also hope I will be remembered as a supporter. I think that athletics, if done properly, brings significant advantages to a place of our size.”
Yes, it’s Mikey Adams playing the favorite game of retiring egotists everywhere, Spin My Legacy! Gah.
Paschall’s piece is pretty balanced. And I like the flow of these two paragraphs.
“You don’t have a physics section every day,” Adams said. “You have a sports section, and you’re usually writing about either football or basketball in large measure. I wanted people in those jobs who shared my values and who thought that protecting the name of the university and doing things right was important, and whose ethics were impeccable.”
The first prominent athletic hire Georgia made under Adams occurred in the spring of 1999, when Jim Harrick was tabbed as basketball coach to replace the fired Ron Jirsa. Adams recommended Harrick to Dooley, with Adams having worked as vice president of university affairs at Pepperdine from 1982 to ’88 while Harrick was coaching the Waves to four NCAA tournaments.
In a world where people at the top of the food chain are held accountable for their screw-ups – and make no mistake about it, the Harrick scandal was about as monumental a screw-up for somebody who claims to be all about making sure academic interests come first as you can get – we would have been looking back on Adams’ tenure at Georgia a long time ago. That we’re going to be subjected to three months of ass kissing over his legacy should tell you all you need to know about how serious Michael Adams and his supporters are about academic interests.
Filed under Michael Adams Wants To Rule The World
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