On Dan Dakich and the dismissal at The Dagger

  • 04/01/2008 12:29 pm in

Headline alliteration is my favorite kind.

Those of you interested, I wrote a quick post this morning discussing Dan Dakich’s huge huevos for dismissing Armon Bassett and Jamarcus Ellis at the Dagger. Here’s a little taste:

The entire situation is incredibly weird: According to this report in the Indianapolis Star, the two players missed a meeting that they weren’t allowed to miss, which is not something one should be doing but which is not at all grounds for dismissal. According to the Bloomington Herald-Times, Dakich wanted the players to run sprints, and they told him they wouldn’t, another act of insubordination that’s not exactly polite but which isn’t grounds for getting the long boot goodbye, either.

Of course there’s more: Both players had disciplinary issues under former coach Kelvin Sampson that caused them to miss games, and those issues were never revealed. So Dakich’s sudden curb-kicking was seen by some last night as an administration cleaning house by using a surrogate lame-duck coach to do so; all the while Dakich gets coaching cred among Indiana’s conservative faithful for clearing the team of troublemakers. […]

Check out the whole piece if you have a chance, and feel free to leave a comment at The Dagger.

This thing is so incredibly weird. Either Dakich is acting alone, without the permission of the university and the athletic department, and just dismissing players he’ll never have a chance to coach again … or the administration is using him to clean house before they bring in a new coach. I still don’t get it. Does anyone else?

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