The Floyd Street Tribune: Decision Day finally appears to be here after five years of waiting
Inside: No matter what comes out Thursday, Louisville's harshest punishment was the five-year wait for any definitive answers on the FBI's 2017 allegations.
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The morning of Sept. 27, 2017, I sat in John L. Smith’s office at Kentucky State University, talking about why he took a D2 football coaching job in Frankfort. My phone, which I use to record interviews via voice memos, would not stop buzzing on Smith’s desk. Finally, mostly out of concern that my house was on fire or something along those lines, I asked Smith if he minded if I check my phone. No problem, he said.
About 10 minutes later, I was in a Starbucks parking lot. I had Brian Bowen’s mom on the other end of a call, flabbergasted not only that she actually answered the phone but also that she seemingly had no clue about the FBI’s announcement that morning that it had been investigating college basketball recruiting and very clearly detailed her son’s recruitment process in laying out allegedly nefarious recruiting behavior that no one could believe rose to the level of a federal crime. She’d need to call her husband and son, she said, and politely said goodbye. I never heard from her or her family again, but over the next few months, the Bowens and so many others were caught up in what we thought was going to be a scandal that changed college basketball forever.
Instead, five years and more than a month later, the infractions decision regarding Louisville’s alleged involvement in the case is finally coming down via the IARP, per Pat Forde’s reporting for Sports Illustrated, and it just doesn’t feel like the bombshell it was once expected to be. Those findings will be released in a drastically different college sports environment from 2017, a landscape that, well, quite frankly has moved on from the moral outrage that surrounded a lot of the FBI’s findings. They will be released long after the arrival of NIL, which essentially makes all the FBI’s findings look silly in retrospect. They will be released in a period when respect for the NCAA’s authority on just about anything is somehow even lower than it was five years ago. Most of all, they will be released so long after anyone really cared about the potential infractions that perhaps the biggest punishment — five years of a cloud hanging over a few of college basketball’s most influential programs — has already been doled out.