FratHouseSports

Jim Calhoun is the man. Here he is having just committed a handful of major recruiting violations and instead of firing him the school is going to axe athletic director Jeff Hathaway… and this is a man that has won three women’s NCAA Basketball Championships, two men’s and had a football team in the 2011 Fiesta Bowl. You can’t get a better resume than that.

But despite his track record, Hathaway will be hitting the unemployment lines in a couple of weeks… as soon as the school reaches buyout terms with him. So what is the reason the school is giving us for his ouster (other than the real reason, which is Jim Calhoun hated his guts and UConn’s top donors can’t stand him)?

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Jim Calhoun said he had “as much basketball ability” as anyone he had ever recruited. He was even a more highly regaurded recruit than his former campus roommate at UConn, Kemba Walker. But while Walker and Calhoun are preparing to face Butler in the National Championship tomorrow, Nate Miles is somewhere in Toledo homeless.

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UPDATE: The NCAA suspended Calhoun for the first 3 Big East games next season and basically gave UConn an added a year of punishment to the sanctions they self imposed before the season began. So they’ll only have 12 scholarships through 2013 and will be limited to just five official paid recruiting visits a year until after the 2012-13 school year.

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News of this broke on Friday, but we were so into football that we’re just now getting to it. But basically UConn finally admitted to what we already knew, the basketball team committed major violations. In all the NCAA has found during investigation of the program that Jim Calhoun and his staff committed a total of eight violations ranging from making almost 400 impermissible phone calls and text to paying for a recruit to visit the school.

But the most serious of the charges filed by the NCAA is that both Jim Calhoun and the university “failed to promote an atmosphere of compliance and to adequately monitor the program“. And for the violations UConn will still self imposing some sanctions that will: reducing the number of scholarships (from 13 to 12 for the next 2 years) and the amount of time the staff can recruit…but I doubt that will satisfy the NCAA Infractions Committee.

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Someone didn’t want to make headlines today. In a odd move UConn announced tonight that they’ll be holding a news conference to update all of us on the NCAA’s investigation into the recruiting violations they committed….o, and two assistant coach Patrick Sellers and the director of basketball operations Beau Archibald are resigning.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going on here. Just as Yahoo!Sports reported UConn has committed major violations while recruiting Nate Miles (they paid for his hotel, transportation, food and called him too much).

Everyone in the basketball program was involved, but instead of tarnishing the “The Great” Jim Calhoun’s legacy, they’ve pegged these two as the fall guys. I’m sure they will be well taken care of behind the scenes. The man that takes the charge for the team so the boss can walk away scotch free always does. They’re some real standup guys.

Even though it has been widely reported that UConn committed major recruiting violations and are soon to be stomped down on by the NCAA, UConn is going to stick with Jim Calhoun as the head coach through the storm. Today they signed him to a 5 year $13 million contract that will keep him coaching the Huskies until he is 73 years old.

UConn did however put a loophole in the contract just in case they want to fire him later on. The contract states: the coach can be removed from his job if he knew there was a violation and failed to act to correct it within 10 days. The only reason we can figure as to why UConn would risk signing him with sanctions coming is because it takes the NCAA so long to investigate he’ll probably be dead by the time they do.

In a double dose of wow, the WSJ is reporting that the UConn basketball coach Jim Calhoun could be on his way out as coach not because he just had his worst season at UConn since 1986 nor the mysterious illness that caused him to miss 7 games…but because the program is about to be taken down by the NCAA for recruiting violations.

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