We’ve all seen Jeopardy. We know that at the end of the show, during Final Jeopardy, a cute little theme song becomes ominous for three players. That song lasts for about 30 seconds and at the end, contestants have to give an answer. Depending on whether or not their answer is correct, the player wins or loses an amount of money that they’ve gambled.
That theme song has been playing in the Illini Athletic Department since the spring.
First, the Simon Cvijanovic incident on Mother’s Day. A few weeks later the accusations against Matt Bollant and Mike Divilbiss. Then an accusation about the mishandling of a concussion against the Women’s Soccer program.
Athletic Director Mike Thomas made a wager when Cvijanovic went public. The wager was that the University could carefully deconstruct his arguments and push it to the side. An “organic” hashtag — #ProudIllini — showed up on Twitter from current players to help push the University’s agenda and spin some positive PR around the culture of Illini Athletics. Mike Thomas then went on the media circuit and talked about accountability and how these allegations are taken seriously. So seriously, in fact, that there was going to be an investigation. According to the Chicago Tribune, it would be an investigation with results that would not be released publicly:
Thomas declined to provide a timeline or say who would be interviewed. He added that he did not plan to make the findings of the internal investigation public.
Typically, that kind of investigation is in line with protecting the nest. Thomas and his crew might find some unsightly things and figure out ways to make necessary changes in the programs involved without that information going public. That information might damage the reputation of Illini Athletics even more and make it difficult to recruit. It makes sense.
Unfortunately, those allegations weren’t related to academic fraud and cheating in the classroom — not that those are okay — but they were related to the health and well-being of players. If you want to run an internal investigation to find out which professors and TAs are lax on checking attendance and helping students write papers, fine. The public probably doesn’t care too much about who’s shilling for kids that don’t have time to study and don’t get compensated properly to play professional, I mean amateur, sports.
But publicly disclosing the results of an investigation and outing of those who might be responsible for mishandling the bodies of the athletes that generate big bucks for the University is a no-brainer. You clean up your house in plain sight so that the new recruits, their parents, fans, and donors know that you’re serious about making Illinois the best it can be.
Mike Thomas did not do that with the Cvijanovic case and he is really not ready to do that with the monster allegations against the Women’s Basketball program. The abuse allegations against Bollant and Divilbiss was met with a “mutual understanding” departure for Divilbiss. Not even a public firing.
Now the University has hired outside law firms to investigate these claims. Tribune reporter Shannon Ryan, doing the Lord’s work, reported:
An internal review by the university’s office of diversity, equity and access initially found no violation of “applicable law, NCAA rules or university policy,” but athletic director Mike Thomas and Chancellor Phyllis Wise “have decided to contract with an external firm to continue and finalize that preliminary review,” a university spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Nothing to see here, folks. Just finalizing an internal review is all.
That was back in May, and as far as anyone else knows, none of the results of these investigations are going to be made public either. But that doesn’t matter to Thomas and Chancellor Wise. What matters here is optics. It LOOKS like they’re doing something, so they must be doing something.
But that’s apparently not the case. As these stories have gone on, the women who made the allegations against Bollant and Divilbiss have filed a lawsuit against the University and national news outlets are starting to poke around.
Sara Ganim is a brilliant reporter. She stuck her neck out in Happy Valley in 2011 to help unearth and break the story of child molestation happening at Penn State. She broke the story in Chapel Hill about North Carolina basketball players reading at or below 8th grade levels — anyone with a computer probably knew this about Tyler “Psycho T” Hansbrough in 2010.
She’s now focusing on the University of Illinois. Ganim wouldn’t waste her time on a story this big if it was a dead end. She got 7 of 8 of the women involved in the lawsuit to speak to CNN and has started to uncover details that Wise and Thomas would like to downplay. We’ve described them all before on Smile Politely and it’s fruitless to rehash it all in this column. That’s not the purpose of this.
The purpose is to ask what the hell is taking so long for the University to take any action? According to Ryan’s report with the Tribune, the steps to sort all of this bad behavior out and to make corrections are these:
hiring a consultant to identify potential risks related to workplace misconduct and mistreatment of athletes; having the university’s executive director of ethics and compliance speak at the annual athlete orientation; creating an ombudsman position to serve athletes; implementing a “conduct expectation for coaches” document; increasing training for coaches; reviewing the athletic department structure to ensure proper oversight; and establishing a leadership council.
Just now, in 20-freaking-15, is the Athletic Department coming up with a “conduct expectation for coaches” document? Really? Bobby Knight slapped a kid at Texas Tech in the early aughts and choked Neil Reed in 1997. How every school in America didn’t come up with a conduct expectation for their coaches right afterwards is mind-blowing.
And what’s a “review of the athletic department structure” even mean? Mike Thomas, the DIRECTOR, can’t oversee his department? That sounds like someone who should not be the Athletic Director. If you need to say publicly that you’re not capable of overseeing your department, you should get fired. You should especially get fired if your revenue producing sports stink. You should especially, especially get fired if you do both of those things AND people allege abuse in three different sports.
But here we are. We’re watching a CNN reporter come to town and make the Athletic Department at Illinois look even worse. It’s remarkable that Thomas had the audacity to utter these words:
“Our program is known for integrity, and we must ensure that our stated commitment to our student-athletes is truly beyond reproach.”
The program is no longer known for integrity. It’s a social media world. You can’t sell us on Red Grange and Dick Butkus and Dee Brown and Deron Williams and Rashard Mendenhall anymore. Today, Illinois is known as the school that abuses players and fails to be transparent in its actions to make positive change.
The song’s almost up. If the University truly cares, we’ll find out soon if Thomas gets it right and how much he wagered. If not, Sara Ganim will be around to force their hand.