Three Strikes and You’re Out for Larry Brown?

Another program, another scandal for longtime basketball coach Larry Brown. This time, the NCAA should make sure he never has the opportunity to cheat again.

“In the collegiate model of sports, the young men and women competing on the field or court are students first, athletes second,” the NCAA’s official website states.

And yet, columnists and sports fans alike can recognize that despite the risk of sanctions, hiring a coach like Brown who can return a program to national prominence is worth the risk of NCAA sanctions.

One could also argue that the hire wasn’t a risk at all, as Brown’s SMU basketball program is still — even post-sanctions — vastly improved from it’s woeful state before the Brown era.

ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt asked the question: “Is this bump in the road worth it? I’d guess they say ‘yes.’”

Of course Van Pelt cites SMU’s run of success since Brown’s hire.

Since Brown stepped foot on campus at SMU in April of 2012, the program has won the American Athletic Conference regular season and tournament titles and made an appearance in the NCAA tournament.

Brown has taken the SMU program to new heights — just as he did with the UCLA Bruins in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the Kansas Jayhawks in the 1980s.

During all three stops for Brown, the NCAA mandated sanctions against his programs that forced the universities to vacate wins and forfeit the right to play in the NCAA tournament.

SMU was fully apprised of Brown’s history before hiring him. They did not hire Brown because of his integrity in college athletics. They did not hire Brown to uphold the NCAA’s regurgitated stance of “students first, athletes second.”

They hired Brown to win and resurrect a stagnant program. And until the NCAA elects to ban coaches like Brown from collegiate athletics, most fading programs will elect to take a chance on a coach like Brown.

As we’ve seen so many times, the will to win trumps just about everything else in collegiate athletics until the NCAA takes an abrupt stand to correct it.

And as long time college basketball analyst Dick Vitale put it: “Larry Brown is 3-for-3 in getting schools sanctioned. That should equal a ban from coaching on the collegiate level.”