Kentucky Basketball: Moby Dick, Starring Pete Thamel As Ahab and John Calipari As The Whale

and tweeted…..fine work TruGlenn, or GlennTru….

that has to be some kind of accomplishment……and he did it all without going off the deep end……Way To Go Glenn!!!
Wonder if Cal will go around now saying , “Just call me Moby, baby!”

Let’s see if I can get all of the actors right
Gregory Peck
Christopher Plummer
Wilford Brimley
Sally Field (referenced only to bring another reporter into this)

With Paul Newman as John Calipari
and John Calipari as The Whale.

I could care less what others think, as long as we’re winning honestly……..Its time to move on…..right now, we gotta this football team straighten out

Oh man! Admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without becoming of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man, in all seasons, a temperature of thine own.

All the commentary that has been floated since the decision, including the last article in the Birmingham News – not many people seem to have understood that the school board was powerfully constrained in all that they did by privacy LAWS (FERPA), I capitalize laws in order to indicate those thingies that figure in lawsuits.

The “redaction” of the Clemon Report left the report without one mention of Eric Bledsoe’s name – without one mention of the teacher’s name – without one mention of the class most talked about – and so on. It is perhaps an ironic but nevertheless REAL factor in the situation, that you could have had a lawsuit in which the judge very seriously instructed the jury not to consider anything they had heard or read about the supposed real names redacted from the report.

In other words, the law says that nobody has any right to talk about a student’s grades, or his teacher’s practices, except the school board, and then in private.

In my evaluation of the whole situation, I didn’t give this enough weight. ALL the information of this nature – Eric’s name, the actual grades, the teacher’s name, the class title – ALL of it was ILLEGALLY obtained BY DEFINITION. The natural target of a lawsuit was the press, but they, especially Mr. Thamel and company, were well lawyered up, and the school board never had any intention. (The Department of Education could have taken a shot at it, but not on behalf of an athlete, maybe.)

I’m adducing all this as a reason why the NCAA, after the smoke had cleared, publicly declared hands off. They had all the smoking guns they wanted, they just couldn’t get rid of FERPA. So while the school board was unable to sue because of financial weakness and general reluctance, the NCAA and the newspapers were not in a position to sue to obtain the unredacted documents that might have taken the whole thing one more step. This was the exact opposite of filing FOIA requests. There is no right to this information, period. They would have run smack into FERPA, and possibly into their own dubious procedures in obtaining information – which really impressed me; they would be great to have around at an oyster bar.

If I am not mistaken…D. Rose’s brother had paid his way on previous trips with the team, and in the instance that the NCAA took them to task on was simply “oops, I forgot” and “let me cut you a check” (which can be read differently depending on your bias towards Calipari and his teams)…as Dick Vitale recently pointed out in his most recent piece on Calipari once the NCAA cleared Rose to play, it should have been a done deal…and the culpability rests with the clearinghouse…as for his brother traveling with the team..if he pays his own way why not…from what I have read, Reggie had paid his way several times previous and through a clerical error had bypassed paying on one trip..the trip of course that gets Memphis in hot water…from my understanding the NCAA allows family members to travel with the teams if they pay for their own way and it doesn’t constitute a “benefit”…I doubt Calipari would have put himself knowingly into that kind of situation…too much to risk…as for Pete Thamel…he has probably watched “All the Presidents Men” far too many times and fancies himself a Woodward and Bernstein clone…funny really…there actually has to be smoke for there to be fire…one cannot simply conjure smoke and expect a fire to start…this sort of behavior from the national media will only intensify when UK wins a NCAA championship…expect it