Jon Miller - please reply to this post above that I quoted...
Here's how things went down...Just going to say this once and leave it alone as it is very obvious we all have our own opinion.
Colvin made a mistake towards the team.
Mac talked to the team and they all said, punish him, but don't kick him off.
Mac suspends Colvin and talks to the press - we all know what he said...Mac needed to know if Colvin was serious about wanting to be part of the team.
Situation changes
Mac talks to the team and they all say, we need him.
Should we question the whole team's integrity? Should the team not be involved in a mistake made against them?
Also, I caught a bit of the show this morning. One thing I just could not understand that Deace kept saying is "why not cheat in recruiting? Why not practice more than NCAA allows? why not pay players?" ...he kept referencing very illegal things. "If Mac is going to go against his principal here, why just do this and that too!?" He kept referencing cheating. He was referencing violations of College Basketball. NONE of those things is related to what Mac did. Mac suspended Colvin because of what he did to the team. Not an NCAA rule. The suspension had literally NOTHING to do with the NCAA or violations towards the NCAA. What Deace was referring to were blatant, dirty, violations of the NCAA rules.
Don't give me this crap that "rules are rules no matter what." There's a big, big, BIG difference between suspending a player for a bad attitude and blatantly cheating. What Greg did in this Colvin situation had NOTHING TO DO WITH CHEATING, so please tell that tubby buddy Steve of yours to get that through his head. It was so annoying, I had to turn the station.
If you don't agree with what Greg did, fine, that's your opinion. But do not equate it to cheating. If you want to go with the whole "doing what it takes to win at all costs" thing, fine, but again, stay away from the cheating part but Mac simply hasn't done it. And he hasn't lied to the media either the past 4 seasons, so why is it so hard to believe he truly felt he was playing Colvin so he wouldn't punish the other scholarship players? Is his reasoning THAT far fetched?
As I said this morning, Mac probably made a big mistake by publicly giving a term for Colvin's suspension...by saying he wouldnt play til February. If he said he was indefinitely suspended, and that the date of his return would be at Mac's discretion, there would be little to no flare up.
The problem is, is that Greg has brought this totally onto himself with his comments related to the suspension, that he got into this line of work because he loves the game and loves the kids and to teach them and if it every just turns into something about the wins, then its time to leave, how its Ok if the decision costs him some wins....
And then last night saying he felt horrible about it, said that it went against things he believed in, etc.
Why did he feel horrible about it, is the first question I ask...why? I think Greg knows...or he wouldnt have said it.
Listen, I still like Greg McDermott. He'd be a great neighbor and from everything I have heard, a very good friend that you can trust and count on. I still think he does like the game because of the kids, and that's a big part of it for him. Totally believe it.
But he's also just like a lot of the other guys in the industry....winning regardless of some of the costs... I think it was a desperate decision. So in the coaching sense, he's just another guy, less than two weeks after taking an admirable stand, and one that was universally applauded here...and I totally understood why that was
I remember rolling on Ron Zook when he suspended some Florida players for the first game of the season against no name state....that game got pushed back to the end of the year because of a Hurricane...so the first game Florida actually played that year was against a solid team...and Zook said the suspension would be served at the end of the year when no name State came back on the schedule, because that was the game they were scheduled for.
Which illustrated his suspension was meaningless....which is one of the reasons why schools have a no name state right out of the chute to begin with, IMO...or one of the unspoken benefits...you can suspend players and not lose a game.
Yes, Iowa's State's team situation changed with Lucca leaving. And apparently, the Colvin suspension went from having nothing to do with wins and losses, which is what Greg's original words certainly implied, to "“I hated to do it, but given the choice I had, it was the only choice.”
If it was the only choice, and if Colvin had atoned for his transgressions as some have said, then why feel horrible about it and why did he hate doing it?
That's the question to ask yourself. Why did Greg hate to play Colvin last night?