Sampson makes his college exit

When you’re fighting for your reputation, it’s probably good symbolic karma to go in through the front door to plead your case.

So why was Kelvin Sampson taking the back-alley entrance into the Hotel Deca in Seattle on Friday morning?

Because he thinks he’s Britney Spears?

Because he was trying to avoid a panhandler working the door on NE 45th Street?

Because he wanted the inside dope on the hotel kitchen’s soup of the day?

Sheesh, Kelvin. Even mafia dons come out of court the front way, holding up a newspaper to shield their mugs from the prying lenses of photographers and minicams.

The NCAA Committee on Infractions called to order its June tribunal Friday to settle the case of just how Sampson spent his anytime minutes as head basketball coach at Indiana University – whether he once again blithely ignored the recruiting rules regarding telephone usage and then tried to give investigators the runaround. Seven hours of testimony took place with more today, and then the NCAA will make its ruling – though the final decree will not be issued for at least six weeks. Perhaps NCAA ramrod Myles Brand has dibs on the office typewriter until then while he pounds out his memoirs.

In any case, Sampson was in attendance at the session because he wants to confront the allegations head on.

By sneaking in the back way.

At this point, if you’re the infractions jury, don’t you just bang the gavel and declare the guy guilty? Everyone else – more than 40 in all, including Sampson assistants Rob Senderoff and Jeff Meyer, IU athletic director Rick Greenspan, current IU coach Tom Crean, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, enforcement czar David Price and layers of lawyers – toted their briefcases and towed in boxes of documents past a knot of reporters and photographers and through the double doors of the Edmond Meany Ballroom. It’s not much fun for any of them and surely no one feels good about the enterprise – and nothing was said beyond “no comment” – but no one was moved to take the service entrance.

At least Sampson came out the front door when the hearing adjourned.

“Hey, guys, how are you?” he said, encountering two reporters as he slid into a red van to be driven away.

His reaction to the day’s testimony?

“It’s a process,” he said. “It’s about what we expected. We’ll be back tomorrow.”

It’s not much, is it? If the point of this fight for Sampson is to restore what he thinks his reputation should be, then he’d have been better served staring bravely into those cameras and issue some strong words about integrity and premature judgments – or at least something along the lines of, “I’m confident the committee will take all the facts into consideration and render its best verdict” – even if he doesn’t believe it, which he doesn’t.

And, yes, reputation – that is, his notion of it – is the only point of this charade.

By now, people have pretty much made up their minds about Sampson. Even if you recall his tenure at Washington State fondly for the NCAA run of 1994 and his teams’ aggressive, entertaining approach, Sampson’s serial overdialing while coaching at Oklahoma is a pretty good indicator of his indifference to NCAA rules he considered Not Important. That the same transgressions would be uncovered within a year or so of his being hired at Indiana could be chalked up to stupidity, recklessness, disdain or chutzpah – or an obsession with using his rollover minutes – and reaffirmed the unnecessary risk taken by Greenspan, who really should be hiding his face.

The NCAA gumshoes have declared – and IU has seconded – that the violations are Sampson’s responsibility, and the committee is notoriously reluctant to back off on what its investigators turn up. Yet even if the NCAA softens on its charge that Sampson misled investigators and allows that the rule breaking may have been inadvertent, this second round before the committee is likely to result in a “show cause” order, which will make it difficult for a school to hire him.

But what college, really, is going to hire Sampson now?

Yes, he’ll win some ballgames. But at Oklahoma he proved himself indifferent to the rule book and now he’s trying to sell the idea that his current problems are a result of Indiana not policing him and his staff well enough. That’s quite the impression to make on a future employer.

And, yes, other cheaters have reformed and recovered. But this will make Sampson a two-time loser with the NCAA and so ugly did this become that the entire IU program has imploded – Crean has one scholarship player available to him in 2008.

Besides, Sampson has already made his transition into the NBA game as an assistant with the Milwaukee Bucks. No, that’s not the Milwaukee Eight Million Bucks, which is about what Sampson forfeited from IU with his overages. But the NBA has no silly rules about phone usage and, indeed, is more preoccupied with cheating referees than cheating coaches.

This is Kelvin Sampson’s world now – delivered.

And whether he’ll admit it or not, he showed himself the door. Front and back.