What happens when the NCAA vacates your season....a trip to UMASS

This past weekend I took my daughter to accepted students weekend at UMASS where she'll be attending next fall. It's a great school, a good fit for her, and there are a lot of similarities between Amherst and Lawrence.

At the start of the day, they filed a few thousand of us into the Mullins Center, their fully modern basketball/hockey arena for welcoming remarks from the Chancellor and a few other honchos.

As I went through the building and then looked around inside the arena, I noted (as I often do) the banners celebrating their team's accomplishments and it always seems like a stark contrast to what's hanging in AFH. For example, just appearing in an NCAA tournament doesn't necessarily warrant a banner, much less a standalone one. Ditto for conference championships.

What really struck me, however, is that they still have a banner commemorating their only final four appearance in 1996, the year that Marcus Camby got busted for taking money (and cars and jewelry and hookers) from agents under the keen tutelage of John "Who Me?" Calipari.

Not only is the 1996 banner proudly displayed as the program's crowning achievement, Camby's number is retired and hangs in the rafters and there were several pictures around the stadium of him since he's in the UMASS Athletic Hall of Fame.

Kind of makes you wonder how KU would handle such a thing. I'd like to think that you'd take down the banner, and certainly wouldn't celebrate the kid (or coach) who got you in trouble. Ironically, with all the 1996 and Camby stuff, I didn't see a single photo or other mention of who the coach was at that time.

"Kind of makes you wonder how KU would handle such a thing. I'd like to think that you'd take down the banner, and certainly wouldn't celebrate the kid (or coach) who got you in trouble."

We still hail Larry Brown as a KU great. He even traveled with the team to this year's F4. I was at KU during Brown's tenure. Lots of stories of bad behavior, paying players, and we know what happened after he left. But time heals a lot.

Good point, but I think we're talking about several orders of magnitude of difference here. I was around for Brown's last two seasons and heard rumors too, but nothing official ever came out, so they remain rumors. I admit that hiring Danny's dad to get Danny was a little shifty, but he kept Ed Manning on his payroll for several other stops along his career afterward, so maybe he wasn't such a bad assistant coach after all.

In the end, Brown got busted for buying a kid a plane ticket to attend a family member's funeral. As violations go, that's pretty tame, and to this day a lot of people don't have any problem with it. Moreover, the NCAA came down on us, but didn't vacate any wins or full seasons.

At UMASS it was a clear case of a kid getting thousands of dollars, along with cars and hookers to play basketball. The damage was significant enough to have a season negated.

I would think that at the very least, our rivals and other blue bloods would cry foul if we kept a banner hanging for something that was no longer legitimate in the eyes of the NCAA. We already hear some folks claim that our 2 Helms Foundation National Championships don't count. Could you imagine what they'd say if we had to vacate our 2008 season but kept claiming credit for a NC?

Who knows, maybe you keep the banner up in respect to the guys on the team who didn't cheat, but you'd think that you'd probably tone it down in regard to the player who brought the program down.

NotO, I must say, your hypothetical question had a resounding and what seemed to me to be as clear and black and white an answer as can possibly be. If you take the exact same situation with Camby and put it at Kansas (which seems like a complete impossibility to me) I simply cannot imagine in this or 10,000 lifetimes that the treatment would be anything other than complete erasure. There would be no banner, there would be no jersey retirement, there would be no picture or video in any way of this person. He would simply virtually fail to exist other than he would still be a Jayhawk just not worthy of any mention whatsoever. Is it even reasonable to see a Jersey of a Marcus Camby hanging alongside a jersey of Danny Manning or Jo Jo White or Ray Evans or Wilt? I might break into Allen Fieldhouse and tear it down myself. Again, I would not support revoking his Jayhawkness, but I would not support in any way glorifying or highlighting any basketball accomplishments.

I think you made the exact point Corpus, that KU would not honor that mess. But, I think as you point out it's because we have no idea what it's like to be a school that has only one "shining moment" in their history. We can easily erase one bad actor, and still have history back to the beginning of the game. We can take one player's jersey down to protect the integrity of those hanging with him - because we have other hall of famers actually hanging with him. We can take one championship banner down, because we have so many others that it doesn't hurt as bad. I think it would be hard in UMAS's case to erase the only achievement you've ever had, even though a school of that academic caliber should have more pride than to cling to Cal and Camby.

And for what it's worth, Brown's actions went well beyond buying one ticket for one kid. No school gets the penalties we got because of one plane ticket. I personally saw several players with "benefits". Just saying that KU hasn't always been the pinnacle of NCAA compliance, and certainly not under Brown.

Valid points all around. Clearly KU's history and UMASS' history are vastly different, so it's hard to make an apples to apples comparison.

Looking at the wikipedia page on them, Camby did return something like $150k in revenue that they had to return to the NCAA after the tournament was vacated, and did so out of his own pocket. He also went back and got his degree when he was done playing. Nevertheless there were people at UMASS that didn't want him recognized.

Uhh. excuse me? Did someone say “hookers”?

This exact conversation was just playing out on a certain radio station today. The idea was brought up that taking the banners down was really up to the school. While I agree the NCAA and possibly even the FBI has no authority, legal or otherwise, to say what can or can’t hang in your gym I would think it would be like a black eye that won’t go away. Surely even the purists at whatever university would have to feel some remorse about it and would not want to constantly be reminded of it. Sadly, that is not the case. Win, at all costs is the mantra. It would appear in this particular case no national champioship banner is in question. There could however be a group of nine or so schools that might want to rethink who won their league in ‘17-‘18. That friends and neighbors, could get messy.

When I posed this question on Monday it was purely hypothetical. Sadly, I'm now concerned that we might have to deal with how we answer this in the real world. Ugh.