(Indianapolis Star/Matt Kryger)

After persuading my girlfriend to watch Saturday night’s Michigan State/IU game (something that was entirely too easy, which leads me to believe that I’ve made a trade of dubious quality for myself down the road), we settled in to watch the game. Of course, most of the discussion from ESPN’s talking heads centered around the NCAA allegations against Indiana head basketball coach Kelvin Sampson and what his future may or may not be come later this week. During the course of the game, I explained to my girlfriend what he had done and then explained my hardline stance on what had happened and what I thought should happen to our coach. Her reply was something that floored me, an emotion that I had never considered or entered into the equation.

“That’s sad,” she said.

I was stunned. I didn’t really know what to say. In my anger as an IU basketball fan and as someone who had embraced Sampson as the leader of my favorite team and my alma mater, I had never stopped to consider the human price in all of this. Here’s a guy who has one of the top 5 jobs in his entire profession and it appears that he’s thrown all of it away, leaving a once-brilliant career in total jeopardy. Make no mistake about it, sanctions or not, Kelvin Sampson is a heck of a basketball coach and as I watched him embrace his players and pump his fists, it did occur to me that the entire story was a little sad, as my girlfriend had originally emoted.

This was a guy who had put our much-beloved program back in the national spotlight and has now found himself in the cross hairs with seemingly no way out. All of the people that had originally loved him and praised the work he had done to land big-time recruits and put Indiana basketball back in the top 10, stood on Kirkwood Avenue in Bloomington with a microphone in their face and called for his job.

Come to think of it, that is pretty sad.

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