Harvard Basketball in Trouble, and Remarkably, Not for Grade Inflation

When I first heard that Harvard basketball was suspected of recruiting infractions, my first reaction was: why couldn’t Tommy Amaker have tried to pull that stuff in Ann Arbor? Michigan basketball is built on a solid foundation of awesome teams built on shady recruiting tactics. I know the Fab Five technically didn’t exist, but still, they were the most important college basketball team of the past two decades. Now Michigan has irrelevant teams that are squeaky clean. It’s much less interesting, but whatever. Anyways, Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel had a different reaction, one much less Michigan-centric.

So alleges The New York Times, which Sunday unveiled one of the most unlikely, telling and, at least to some of us, humorous potential college basketball scandals by bringing to light a number of questionable practices by no less than Harvard Basketball.

Yes, Harvard.

The school that regularly produces presidents, Supreme Court justices and Nobel prize winners – but never before a compliance controversy – is suddenly dealing with multiple allegations less than a year into coach Tommy Amaker’s tenure.

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And, again, this is Harvard. This is the Ivy League, of all places. These are supposed to be the standard bearers of what is right about college sports, not places trotting out the old, “Hey, everyone else is doing it” defense.

This isn’t necessarily about what was being done as much as where it was being done.

Indeed, the where is the most important part of the story. At most schools, it is the athletic programs that are dirty while the universities remain relatively clean. At Harvard, this is just athletics catching up with the rest of the university, home of rampant grade inflation and wholesale plagiarism.