When I wrote about the Bud Mackey situation a few weeks ago being the official start to the Kelvin Sampson era at IU, I was wrong. That was just a kid getting busted distributing crack cocaine outside his high school.

Today’s news, however, really is the official start to the Kelvin Sampson era at Indiana, with the revelation that Sampson’s coaching staff was once again busted for making more phone calls to recruits than NCAA rules allow.

Sampson, as you might recall, was found to have made an excessive number of phone calls to recruits at Oklahoma, a rules violation that the NCAA deemed a “major infraction”, and one that caused IU to tie a salary raise in Sampson’s contract to his future compliance with the rules. Well, that’s out the window now. Sampson will forfeit a scheduled $500,000 raise, and the IU basketball team will lose a scholarship next year.

Sampson and Indiana AD Rick Greenspan are scheduled to talk to the media on Sunday afternoon. Boy, I can’t wait to hear the excuses for this one.

We’ll have more thoughts on this later in the day, but the fact that anyone is even REMOTELY surprised by this makes me laugh. Hiring Sampson in the wake of the earlier NCAA investigation and then being surprised at future rules violations is akin to inviting a dog that isn’t housebroken into your apartment and then finding that he’s crapped on your persian rug. Sampson and his staff are partially to blame for this, but the real blame lies in the office of the IU athletic department and the IU board of trustees, both of whom knew exactly what Sampson brought to the table in terms of lack of rules compliance, yet hired him anyway just so they could have someone that they can call “their guy”.

It’s an absolute affront to IU basketball fans, who actually do care about their basketball team doing things the right way (which is rare in major college sports). Congratulations, Mr. Greenspan and trustees. IU basketball now has another category to compete with Kentucky in.