Analyst: Bruce Pearl and Kelvin Sampson have ‘absence of integrity’
The New York Post’s Phil Mushnick pulled no punches when discussing Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl and Houston’s Kelvin Sampson as their teams buoyed some of the most notable matchups of the opening rounds of the 2023 March Madness tournament.
Mushnick called out Paramount Global’s announce team (Jim Nantz, Bill Raftery, and Grant Hill) for not speaking about Pearl and Sampson’s various recruiting violations throughout their careers.
“The opposing coaches, Auburn’s Bruce Pearl and Houston’s Kelvin Sampson, in wink-and-nod tribute to how hideously low big-time, big-money, big-TV-revenue college basketball has eroded, are among the most sternly sanctioned and condemned in NCAA history,” Mushnick wrote. “Yet there they were Saturday night, as if both had been rewarded for cheating, thus the question: Were they hired in spite of their absence of integrity or because of it? Do the spoils always go to the spoilers?”
Auburn attacked for Bruce Pearl hiring
The snark was laid on heavy by Mushnick, who essentially mocked Pearl’s outgoing personality and implied that Auburn hired the Boston native because of his scandals.
“Auburn’s personable, corned beef-on-rye, good-time guy Bruce Pearl, now in his fourth head-coaching gig, has been in the center of recruiting scandals throughout his career,” Mushnick wrote. “He lied to NCAA investigators as per flagrantly illegal inducements to recruits. Tennessee was forced to fire him. For the next four seasons he essentially was blackballed-for-cause from a college head-coaching job until Auburn in 2014 found him irrevocably stained but still irresistible. Must’ve been his résumé.”
Mushnick would then outline Sampson’s recruiting issues and NCAA violations for lying to investigators after his stints at Oklahoma and Indiana and as head of the National Association of Basketball Coaches committee on ethics.
Ultimately, the New York Post columnist’s ire was aimed towards Paramount Global for not highlighting any of these issues during its broadcast of Houston’s 81-64 victory over Auburn.
“Saturday night, none of the above was worth as much as a mention on TV during Houston-Auburn,” he wrote. “The schools came away in better financial shape, no attempt to embarrass either with the truth.”