Flash back to March 29th, 2006. I was a cub reporter at a Louisville TV station covering Indiana’s hiring Kelvin Sampson, and asked Indiana Athletic Director Rick Greenspan why he would hire a coach whose actions at Oklahoma could bring sanctions to IU (remember: Sampson made 577 [!] improper calls to recruits while at Oklahoma). Greenspan’s answer?

“I wouldn’t be so presumptive to answer a question like that”

Of course, that answer is so beyond ignorant it shouldn’t surprise us what happened two month later: The NCAA gave Sampson a 1-year ban from calling recruits and making off-campus visits.

Eighteen months after Greenspan said Sampson screwed up again, broke the rules, made more phone calls than allowed, and the AD took one scholarship away, halted Sampson’s $500k raise, and eventually pushed out the man IU thought would be the fall guy, assistant coach Rob Senderoff.

And now this, violations that will certainly put Indiana on serious probation. Which begs the question: Why on earth would Greenspan stake his entire legacy to someone like Kelvin Sanctions?

Oh wait: We’d be too presumptive to answer that. So we’ll just say his time should end at Indiana. After the jump, how Greenspan botched his last coaching search, how he’s put the athletic department in trouble with other coaching situations, and why he shouldn’t be trusted.

Let’s be clear: Kelvin Sampson is coaching his final games (if he even finishes the season). The NCAA may go a bit easier on IU without Sampson, but the school will still go on probation, and likely be barred from the 2009 tournament. With Eric Gordon surely leaving school early and DJ White graduating, the cupboard is going to be bare.

This will require a rebuilding job like Rick Pitino did at Kentucky in 1989. The next coach will be the most important hire in IU basketball history, and if you measure Hoosier hoops by the ridiculous standards Indiana folk do, you could use the transient property to say it’s the most important hire in IU sports history.

So why would you trust someone like Greenspan to lead that kind of search? Let’s review his hiring history:

Sampson was Greenspan’s big catch. But who did he strike out on? He couldn’t convince John Calipari to leave Memphis. He couldn’t convince Mark Few to leave Gonzaga. And Marquette’s Tom Crean, Texas’s Rick Barnes and then-Texas A&M coach Billy Gillispie all seemed uninterested. So, after dusting off former Iowa coach Steve Alford, he landed on Kelvin Sanctions … er, Sampson.

You stay classy, Rick.

To be fair, he made a great hire with Terry Hoeppner as football coach. Problem is five months after Hoeppner’s passing Greenspan panicked: When the Hoosiers won seven games for the first time over a decade, Rick gave unproven Bill Lynch a 4-year contract. Lynch, you may remember, won eight games his second season as head coach of Ball State .. and won six the next three years. He was fired in 2002 with a whopping 37-53 record.

Oklahoma State crushed Lynch’s Hoosiers in the Insight Bowl by a score of 206 to negative 25.

And to show his Title IX love, Greenspan also mishandled women’s basketball: In 2006 he couldn’t stop coach Sharon Versyp from leaving after just one season. Which would be no big deal … if she didn’t leave to coach the school’s arch rival Purdue.

Versyp and Lynch are only a small part of the problem. Greenspan latched his future onto Kelvin Sampson, a coach he barely knew before. And it burned him big time. So, while it’s time for Sampson to go, its also time for Greenspan. When Kentucky went through it’s troubles, the school found Vanderbilt basketball coach CM Newton. And he found Pitino. Three years later the school was a miracle Christian Laettner shot from going to the Final Four.

It can happen. But you can’t have someone who’s failed consistently leading the search.

Indiana basketball will return, but it may not be until a few years past the start of the next decade. The school can still attract a good athletic director, and do so in the next month, leaving it enough time to find a good coach. If you don’t, then we’re basically writing off finding quality candidates for another year.

That’s what Indiana should do. What should Greenspan do?

We wouldn’t be so presumptive to answer that question.