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Message: [QUOTE="champs99and04, post: 2677250, member: 488"] Something is clearly terribly wrong there and if it results in cleaning out the entire athletic department, so be it. But it's also too strange for me to think there's a simple problem. We're talking about a walk-on here. Obviously, they can be bad people, too, but to the extent that he was completely and utterly unimportant to the program is inconsistent with the emerging narrative that Tom Izzo willingly covered up sexual assault to win basketball games. He's also a basketball coach and assault rises to the sort of heinous level that transcends any relationship there may be between a coach and the conduct of his player. "You see, I never really liked Tom Izzo, his players kept assaulting women..." doesn't really compute to me, provided the absence of any direct evidence to implicate him in enabling that behavior. And if he was enabling that behavior, well, he shouldn't have been given the chance to. He is, again, a basketball coach. Even if you want to make the broader argument that he "failed to create a culture where women were respected," what does that entail? Do you have to tell a player not to grope a women or punch her in the face? Is that even something that is remotely on your radar? Perhaps he was guilty of overlooking red flags during the recruiting process, but again, he is a basketball coach and not a sheriff or psychologist. There's firing a coach who symbolizes a rotten culture and then there is scapegoating someone to account for a pervasive, institutional problem. I have no particular inclination to defend Tom Izzo, but the whole thing is weird to me. Which coach would you say is the GOAT when it comes to preventing sexual assault? Do you have a top 25? It's just something so far removed from any competitive context that the adrenaline of public court feels especially dangerous right now. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach