While there has been a ton of wild speculation and poor reporting by most news agencies not directly familiar with the Indiana program (Pat Forde, Andy Katz), CBS’s Gary Parrish has decided to throw his hat in the speculative ring. He is quoting sources familiar with last night’s meeting that Indiana AD Rick Greenspan had with Indiana players. Players supposedly told Greenspan that if Sampson was fired, they’d walk too. Those players, reportedly, included Eric Gordon, D.J. White, Super Walk-On Kyle Taber and Lance Stemler.

“According to the sources, after Greenspan informed five selected players — namely D.J. White, Eric Gordon, Kyle Taber, Lance Stemler and Adam Ahlfeld — of his decision to replace Sampson he called a meeting with the entire team in an attempt to “prepare” them for Friday’s official announcement that Sampson would either be suspended or terminated in time for the Hoosiers’ weekend game at Northwestern. But before Greenspan finished his speech, the sources said an unidentified player stood up and insisted “if Sampson ain’t coaching, we ain’t playing.”

According to Parrish’s story, Greenspan rhetorically asked if he should just cancel the whole season and the player reportedly told the AD “We don’t care what you do. But if Sampson ain’t coaching, we ain’t playing.’ And then they just walked out.”

If this is true, I commend the players for doing what they believe to be right while all of the adults around them try to figure out how not to get hit by the shrapnel. I don’t think any of them would actually go through with it, save maybe Eric Gordon who is going to the NBA next year anyway. Could this be a Jimmy Chitwood/Norman Dale type of situation? “I play, coach stays. If he goes, I go.”

We’ll see what Greenspan has to say at a 2 p.m. ET press conference that has been scheduled at Assembly Hall.

It is safe to assume that whatever recommendation Indiana athletic director Rick Greenspan has for IU president Michael McRobbie, he will issue early tomorrow morning. The Indianapolis Star’s Terry Hutchens reports tonight:

“Indiana University athletic director Rick Greenspan is expected to announce his decision Friday regarding the fate of embattled basketball coach Kelvin Sampson.

It was unclear whether Greenspan told the basketball players who gathered at his Assembly Hall office late Thursday whether they will have a new coach for Saturday’s game at Northwestern. The players walked past reporters without commenting.”

Hutchens reported that the players emerged from Greenspan’s office at 7:43 p.m.

You have to assume at this point that Greenspan’s recommendation will be to either terminate or indefinitely suspend Sampson, otherwise a conversation with the players wouldn’t necessarily be prudent.

Even my girlfriend will know not to call me tonight from 6:00 to about 8:30 unless it’s to talk about how much Matt Painter looks like a ferret or how stupid of a nickname Boilermakers is. For those two and a half hours, I will have worked myself into a nearly rabid frenzy because, simply, it doesn’t get much bigger than tonight’s Purdue/Indiana game.

Forget that with a win my Indiana Hoosiers could claim a piece of the Big Ten title coming down the homestretch of the regular season, forget that this is the best Purdue has been in the past ten years, forget that it’s likely Kelvin Sampson’s last game as Indiana basketball head coach. This is about a rivalry. A basketball game that will be filled from the opening tip with, if I might borrow an SEC phrase, “Clean, old fashioned hate.”

For Purdue and their fans, (I’m really exercising every ounce of restraint that I have not to make any number of amusing cracks about West Lafayette and/or Purdue Students), this is a game about respect. For certain, Matt Painter’s Boilermakers are the surprise of the year in the Big Ten and maybe in all of college basketball but no one’s paying attention. Instead, all anyone can talk about is Indiana. Indiana’s season, Indiana’s super freshman Eric Gordon and most recently, Indiana’s coach and Indiana’s recruiting violation. Tonight, Purdue plays not to be the New York Islanders of Indiana state sports.

For IU, tonight’s win is a chance to knock Purdue back down to their rightful place as a second-tier Big Ten program and most importantly, the end to a perfect sports year. As an IU fan, I can think of nothing better than a year in which we upset Purdue on a last-second field goal in the Bucket game and then beat their brains out at home, snatching a piece of the Big Ten regular season title.

How big is this game? My girlfriend told me she might “catch a couple plays.” That’s big.

(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.

Indiana mens basketball players should be focused on their huge conference matchup against Wisconsin tonight (one game in a treacherous three-game homestand that sees Michigan State and archrival Purdue come to Bloomington in the next week) but instead they may be having to worry if they will have a coach by year’s end.

The NCAA released allegations yesterday saying that head basketball coach Kelvin Sampson misled (see: lied) to Indiana University and NCAA investigators regarding improper contact with recruits. In a letter sent by the NCAA to Indiana University, it is alleged that Sampson knowingly and willingly violated telephone recruiting restrictions (set in place because of violations made during his tenure at Oklahoma) and then lied about it. Not good.

That allegation is among five “major violations” that Sampson has been accused of by the NCAA. When I see the words major violation, I’m thinking vacating wins and I’m thinking postseason ban, both of which mean that Kelvin Sampson’s tenure as Indiana University head basketball coach is over.

Sampson, Indiana Athletic Director Rick Greenspan, and other university officials will appear before the Division I Committee on Infractions in June and have until May to issue a written response to the allegations.

So where does Indiana go from here? Self-imposed sanctions, unless it’s a postseason ban in 2009, aren’t likely to be enough and as an Indiana alum and an IU fan I am embarrassed. Sampson needs to go and he needs to go right this second. If Rick Greenspan isn’t sitting down at his desk right now to negotiate the terms of Sampson’s firing or resignation then he deserves to be fired too. Enough is Enough.

I think Bob Knight is an egomaniac and I am certainly the furthest thing from a Bob Knight fan that any Indiana University alumnus could be but at the very least, he ran a clean program that managed to win three national championships. Make no mistake, Indiana basketball fans (and boosters) want to win but they want to win the right way, the fair way, the clean way.

Before anyone says anything, the return of Bob Knight as Indiana head basketball coach would be a horrible, horrible idea and a gigantic leap backwards for the program. Knight couldn’t win at Texas Tech because he couldn’t recruit and I’d venture to say that Eric Gordon, Derrick Rose, Kevin Love or Michael Beasley aren’t going to come to IU and get screamed at for a year or two before heading to the NBA and it’s that quality of player that Indiana needs to compete against Michigan State, Illinois, Wisconsin and a Purdue team that, under Matt Painter, appear to be headed back to Big Ten contention. They are the league’s top team at present.

Rick Greenspan hired Coach Hep, a move that saved the IU football program from permanent obscurity and has led a capital funds campaign for brand spanking new athletic facilities at IU and if he’s interested in keeping his job, he needs to make sure that Kelvin Sampson doesn’t keep his for very much longer.

By my own admission, I wasn’t all that excited about the end of football in America and when the final seconds ticked off the clock at the Super Bowl, I began to feel the way you do the day after Christmas.

Truthfully, I was dreading this weekend. My first weekend without football (and the Pro Bowl doesn’t count as football, it barely qualifies as a competitive sporting event) was going to be, to say the least, slow and mildly depressing. That was until Wednesday and Thursday night.

The Duke/UNC game, a great game that saw Duke hitting every three-pointer and garbage shot imaginable, sparked my interest once again in college hoops and last night’s Indiana/Illinois game in Champaign has me ignited.

(Indianapolis Star/Heather Charles)

A couple of thoughts on last night’s game.

It’s time for Bruce Weber, his basketball team and the Illinois fan base to grow up. As an IU alum and IU fan, nothing is more satisfying to me than beating a fan base who would sell their vital organs to beat IU so for the Hoosiers to come out of Champaign with a win is unspeakably gratifying this morning.

The win is particularly fulfilling considering it came against a fan base that is as borderline obnoxious as Illinois. Look at it this way, these are fans that viciously clung to and defended a white student running onto the field dressed as a Native American and dancing around. Doesn’t sound like the most enlightened bunch of cats, right? Think Ohio State fans without all the, you know, championships and tradition of winning. I can’t say that I blame them for being cranky. The handful of occasions I have traveled to Champaign-Urbana has left me with no further desire to ever go back. It’s like Seattle without all the natural beauty, great seafood and interesting people.

The shove, let’s not mince words, that Chester Frazier gave Eric Gordon at the beginning of last night’s game was absolutely classless and that starts at the top. I know that Bruce Weber’s feelings are hurt that an 18-year-old kid changed his mind and decided not to play at Illinois (I can’t imagine why, I mean Champaign-Urbana is so lovely) but at a certain point you need to move on for the sake of your program. But oh no, not old Bruce. He’s going to continue to let this thing drag out and consume him as he drives this program right into the ground.

And while we’re on the topic of that 18-year-old kid, any NBA GM who takes this kid with his lottery pick had better had his resume uploaded to CareerBuilder.com. I was excited as an IU fan to be getting a player of Gordon’s caliber and while he has shown flashes of…being a pretty good college basketball player, he’s far from the game changer that many IU fans were promised when Gordon committed to IU. What I see when I watch Gordon is an 18-year-old kid who is used to dominating high school competition and can’t create his own looks. Anyone can hit an open shot, only the great players can create and Eric Gordon is far from great, as of now. I think this year in college has really exposed some glaring weaknesses in his game. He’s not a great ballhandler, his shot selection (particularly when he’s pulling up from the parking lot) is questionable and he’s turnover prone. If you’re a GM are you giving $3 million a year to a kid who’s too small to play the 2 at the NBA level and is too turnover prone to efficiently run the point. Put it like this, do you like Eric Gordon matching up against Steve Nash, Tony Parker or Chris Paul? That being said, I think he’s gone after the year and he’s going to get someone to pay him a lot of money to play basketball but his first year or two in the NBA could determine whether he’s Jason Kidd or Mateen Cleaves.

Ok so I’m posting Wednesday’s Line on Thursday morning but hey.. it’s a week from the start of college football season. That is really the best way to diffuse any escalating situation. If you get in a fender bender with someone and the large gentleman you’ve just rear-ended going 80 steps out of his car armed with a hammer, just say, “Week from college football season!” And if that doesn’t work…. run?

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No, seriously… 

The cops in Oakland are mean.

Dog burglars on the loose in Seattle.

Boy ‘assaults’ elderly man with cocktail weiner.

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ESPN tries to make me hate college football with 25-hour pregame show.

Donovan McNabb blogs on the departure of veteran linebacker Jeremiah Trotter.

Stephen A. Smith will no longer be writing columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Stephon Marbury proves once and for all that he grew up under powerlines.

ESPN’s Mark Schlabach with five predictions for the Big Ten.

Eli Manning and Tiki Barker are feuding over comments Barber made during the Giants preseason game on Sunday. New York Daily News.

USC’s Patrick Turner is ready for a breakout year at receiver.

TROT FALLOUT 

• Daily News’ Les Bowen
• ‘Shocked Trotter takes his release in stride,’ Ashley Fox
• ‘Trotter’s passage isn’t that shocking,’ Rich Hofman
• ‘Trotter grew into role as top Birds defender,’ Les Bowen

Eric Gordon and the other Hoosier freshmen in Kelvin Sampson’s sick’07 recruiting class have arrived on campus.. begin the countdown to Midnight Madness!

Michael Vick will not find a place to play in Canada.

Chiefs running back Larry Johnson ends holdout, inks new deal.

Browns target unruly fans.

The AJC’s Tony Barnhart wonders if Alabama can shock the college football world this fall. I’m going with no.

Kevin Costner to fight to keep the College World Series in Omaha.

NFL will be fine after Vick, says Tim Cowlishaw.

Oklahoma quarterback race over; Sam Bradford named starter.

Redskins rookie LaRon Landry drawing rave reviews.

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‘Heroes’ mania is too much, too soon, says Boston Globe critic.

Slashfilm’s ten best movie endings.. kind of a curious list.

Christian Bale not approached for Justice League movie.

A Ferris Bueller sequel? Oh no..  Is nothing sacred?

Bottom Line fave Cold War Kids plan headlining tour, do support dates for White Stripes.