IU men's basketball coach Kelvin Sampson spoke at the press conference about recruiting violations at the University of Oklahoma and graduation rates.
On graduation rates:\nUnderstand how you calculate graduation rate. It's not your composite or total graduation rate. They track one class over six years - how many of those kids who came in as freshman, not junior college transfers or two year transfer or didn't come in as scholarship athletes as freshman, they just track freshman athletes in that one year.\nLet's say that I had two junior college kids who graduated college, which happened a lot at Oklahoma. When the NCAA calculates our graduation rate and reports it, the graduation rate will be reported as zero. Why? Because we had no freshman that year.\nI think I speak for coaches everywhere - someone asked me one time, 'How many of your kids graduate?' My first response was to say 'all that want to.' I've yet to have a kid that didn't graduated that didn't want to. I think I speak for all coaches when I say that we need to inform the public on how the NCAA derives their criteria for what they decide is a graduation rate.\nI look at (junior guard) Roderick (Wilmont) sitting here and he comes in with two kids in his recruiting class - three freshman. OK, now we've got three freshman that we are going to track over a six-year period. One kid,\nafter his sophomore year, decides to go to the NBA. The other kid decides to transfer. OK, so your graduation rate is now 33 percent. And Roderick continues on a graduates. We'll you've tracked three kids. And if they report your graduation rate, they're going to report 33 percent, based on that class.\nI think if we have a graduation rate of 50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent - irregardless of our graduation rate, we should not be satisfied with anything that isn't 100.
On recruiting:\nThe violation that we broke was the phone call rule. You are allowed to call a student-athlete one time per week, and that's including your whole staff. Each coach doesn't get a phone call. That was a mistake that we made. There really is no excuse. An NCAA rule is an NCAA rule. We talked to them about it. I don't know that, as a staff, we took that rule serious enough.\nI think if you look back at the compliance of our programs in the last 19 years as a major college head coach, we've never had an issue with NCAA rules, nor will we again.\nI think sometimes, as an adult, when you make a mistake like we made with that, it opens your eyes up to everything you do. You take a personal inventory of yourself about 'How am I performing in other areas?' I told Joe Castiglione, our athletic director, that, in some ways, I am glad that happened. Because, not only did we use corrective measures in that, we\nshored up every area of our compliance office within our office.\nWe hired an assistant coach last year - Jerry Green, who actually used to be the head coach at Tennessee - came in. And for the first time we have - that's how we use our director of basketball operations. He's the liaison with our compliance office and he has fiscal and academic responsibility within our office.\nWhen you go through something like that, again, it makes you take inventory of what you think's important and kind of shakes you back to reality a little bit. I made no bones about it ... I made a mistake. We've corrected it and we'll move forward.
