“The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky, it’s going to give Cleveland State another two years of probation” — Jerry Tarkanian
In 2013, the Basketball Hall of Fame corrected one of the great injustices of the sport: finally electing Jerry Tarkanian to the Hall. Tarkanian, who died in 2015, was one of the greatest teachers of defense the sport of basketball has ever seen. Had he coached at a bigger school at any point in his career, he’d probably have more than one national championship to his name.
Because of his national title, basketball fans today still know the name UNLV. This is despite the fact that UNLV hasn’t made the NCAA tournament since 2013 and has reached the Sweet 16 once in the past 34 years.
Tarkanian was UNLV basketball. And he turned UNLV into Gonzaga before there ever was a Gonzaga.
In the Runnin’ Rebels’ history, they’ve made 10 Sweet 16s, five Elite Eights, four Final Fours and won a national championship. All but one of the Sweet 16 appearances belong to Tarkanian. In 1990, when the Runnin’ Rebels finally broke through to reach their first national title game, they set the record for the biggest blowout in a championship game, pounding Duke 103-73.
Just as impressive, Tarkanian never once had a losing season. The man who he beat for his one national title, Mike Krzyzewski, said this when he passed:
Jerry had consistent high levels of success, because his teams played hard defensively. He’s one of the truly remarkable defensive coaches.
Tarkanian was that good.
He was also one of the biggest thorns in the side of the NCAA, which was one reason why he was ignored by the Hall for so long. And that leads me to why he’s so relevant today.
The NCAA’s Half-Hearted Enforcement
In the 1980s, the NCAA had a public-facing mission to clean up college athletics. We talk about NIL money and how it’s changed the sport, but the reality is that it’s just brought us back to where it was in the 1980s. The only difference is that now the paying of players is done above the table instead of under it. There’s a joke that NIL is short for “Now It’s Legal”.
A great example is SMU football. In 1987, the Mustangs became the first and only Division I program to get whacked by the repeat violator rule, or the “death penalty”. The death penalty stated that if a program was caught committing two major violations within five years, it would have its program shut down for two years. SMU was secretly paying players in the early 1980s, and the NCAA hammer came down hard to make an example of the program. These days, everything SMU did in the 1980s is totally legal and wouldn’t even get a slap on the wrist. In 1987, it sent them to the sidelines and forced them to rebuild from scratch.
To the general public, the penalties were meant to show that the NCAA meant business. To an insider like Tarkanian, it was all a distraction.
What Tarkanian knew — and to the NCAA’s chagrin, had absolutely no problem saying — was that SMU got penalized because its name was SMU. If Texas had done the same thing, the NCAA would have looked the other way.
Tarkanian knew this better than almost anybody, because in his sport, the NCAA had done the same thing with how it treated big schools vs. small schools.
One example was the case of Marist vs. UCLA. In the 1980s, Marist imported a 7-4 center from the Netherlands named Rik Smits, as well as a few other international players. You might have heard of Smits; he went on to a 12-year career with the Indiana Pacers.
The problem was, Marist had broken the rules to get Smits and some of those players. It hadn’t done much in the way of illegal activity; we’re talking things like buying winter coats for players when they arrived at Marist’s campus in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., covering long-distance calls home for its international players, getting a meal or two at Burger King. Per Jonathan Kinane’s research, the total amount of the violations came out to around $770.
And the NCAA responded by dropping the hammer, banning Marist from postseason play for two years. After the Red Foxes reached the 1985 and 1986 NCAA tournaments with Smits leading the way, they wouldn’t be allowed to compete beyond the regular season in 1987 or 1988.
Shortly after Marist’s sanctions were announced, UCLA got caught doing similar things on a grander scale. The Bruins’ violations amounted to three times that of the Red Foxes. The NCAA gave the Bruins a slap on the wrist, basically telling them, “Don’t do this again” and leaving it at that.
Why? UCLA has 11 national titles to its name. Marist’s NCAA tournament history consists of those two appearances in 1985 and 1986. People tuned in to watch UCLA. Most casual fans didn’t know where Marist was. Not only that, but Marist had Smits for two more years. If the NCAA could look tough on cheating and take out a good mid-major that might send a glamour team home early, so much the better for TV ratings.
Tarkanian Calls Out the NCAA
1986 produced another Cinderella story: Cleveland State. Much like Marist, Cleveland State had bent the rules somewhat to turn itself into a mid-major powerhouse. The Vikings got a No. 14 seed in 1986, landing them a matchup with Bob Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers.
It wasn’t expected to be close. The NCAA had just expanded to 64 teams the year before, and all four No. 14s had gone down by nine points or more. Except the Vikings won the game, controlling it from start to finish and beating Indiana 83-79. Then they beat St. Joseph’s, making them the first No. 14 to reach the last 16.
That gave the NCAA a regional of Duke, DePaul, Cleveland State and Navy. Terrible for ratings, especially when you consider this was 1986 and Duke wasn’t really Duke yet.
The NCAA hammer fell on the Vikings in 1987: two-year postseason ban. Similar to Marist, Cleveland State had tried to recruit an international big man. I say tried because Manute Bol never played a minute for the Vikings. Cleveland State paid for him to take an English course in hopes that he could qualify academically, but he could not improve his English enough within six months. Of course, this was a violation and the NCAA slammed the Vikings for it.
At the same time, the Lexington Herald-Leader broke open the cookie jar on Kentucky. In 1985, the paper had spoken with 26 former Kentucky players and got them to admit on the record that they’d been paid to play for the Wildcats. The stories earned the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize in the journalism world and a bullet hole in their window from an angry Kentucky fan.
The NCAA’s response: Nothing. It claimed its investigation hadn’t revealed a thing. Now in 1988, Kentucky was in trouble again. A package from an assistant coach to a recruit burst open in transit, and $1,000 in cash fell out. And Tarkanian didn’t hold back when asked if he thought Kentucky would get in trouble.
"The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky, it’s going to give Cleveland State another two years of probation.”
Tarkanian’s point was two-fold. The NCAA was using Cleveland State as both a smokescreen and a distraction. By going after the Vikings, the NCAA was trying to change the subject and allow the Wildcats to remain unscathed. It wasn’t the first time Tarkanian had done this: in the 1970s, he’d written a column exposing the NCAA’s practices when it had tried to the same thing to him and his program. It’s why the NCAA hated him so much and why it wanted to bring him down.
And that brings me to why Tarkanian’s point is so relevant today.
How Tarkanian Explains Trump
The point of my deep dive into Jerry Tarkanian and the NCAA’s past is that Donald Trump is in the Epstein Files.
And as that story continues to dominate, Trump is trying any distraction he can think of to get us to look anywhere else. He tried yet another attack on trans athletes, getting the U.S. Olympic committee to ban them, when no trans athlete has ever won a medal. He had Tulsi Gabbard claim she’s launching an investigation into Barack Obama. He called for the Washington Commanders and the Cleveland Guardians to change their names back to the monikers they abandoned at the request of Native Americans. He’s claimed the files were made up by Democrats. He’s announced another round of tariffs.
It’s all distraction and BS. He’s desperate for anything that might get people off this story. It’s what he’s always done. Previously, it worked with his base. This time, it’s not.
Tarkanian explains that too, because Kentucky didn’t get away with cheating in 1988, and one of the reasons was Tarkanian himself. When the NCAA investigated UNLV in the 1970s, it found violations and hit the Rebels with probation. As part of the penalty, the NCAA ordered UNLV to suspend Tarkanian as coach.
Tarkanian sued, and the case took 11 years before reaching the Supreme Court. In NCAA v. Tarkanian, the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA had the right to discipline its member schools, but it had to give due process, which it simply hadn’t been doing for decades. In the Marist case, for example, the NCAA had shown its selective enforcement by forcing Marist officials to fly to Kansas City to view evidence and not allowing them to record it. Clearly, this was a violation and a two-tiered justice system. Tarkanian lost the battle, but he won the war.
And so when Kentucky faced the NCAA again in 1989, it did so in the wake of Tarkanian. This time, its name wouldn’t be enough to save it, because the NCAA could not afford another PR disaster. And the Wildcats paid dearly: no televised games in 1989 (that used to be a thing), no postseason play for two years and three years of reduced scholarships.
Ignore the Distractions
The NCAA’s distractions didn’t work, and Kentucky paid the price, in part because Jerry Tarkanian and others made sure the distractions didn’t work. Tarkanian kept fighting, and eventually not only won that war, but his own war with the NCAA.
In 1992, Tarkanian left UNLV to coach the San Antonio Spurs for 20 games. He left because he thought the Spurs needed a point guard to be competitive and ownership disagreed, which resulted in his firing. With time on his hands and $1.3 million in his pocket from the Spurs, Tarkanian turned around and sued the NCAA for harassment, eventually winning another $2.5 million in a settlement. (Do you see why the NCAA didn’t like him much?)
That brings us to our role in this: we need to keep the pressure on and block out the distractions.
Trump is going to keep trying whatever he can to come up with something, anything, to get us off this story. His power only exists as long as his support is strong. And the Epstein Files are fracturing his base because they confirm his role in Epstein’s heinous crimes.
Some have said that it’s pointless because Republicans will never remove Trump, or that we’d just get J.D. Vance. I say look at Richard Nixon. He won 49 states in 1972 and appeared untouchable. In 1974, Republicans went to him to tell him that he could either resign, or he would be impeached and removed. If we keep the pressure on, MAGA will either have to abandon Trump or admit it supports a pedophile.
We need to stay focused and vigilant. The point of this deep dive into Jerry Tarkanian is that Donald Trump is in the Epstein Files. And we need to keep the pressure on him for that.