Dallas school district reopens grade fixing allegations against Darrell Arthur

[Russ Smith]

http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/localnews/news8/stories/wfaa081009_mo_disd.f94d1914.html

Basically a local station didn't buy the original investigation which claimed nothing happened, so they went back and looked and found a lot of discrepancies and when they confronted the school district, the district agreed to reopen the case.

I'm still not clear if this actually has any implication for Kansas in the story it says that Arthur appears to have been helped without his knowledge(which I find awfully hard to believe) by someone who wanted the team to win. Since the Clearinghouse certified Arthur's transcripts before Kansas admitted him I don't think Kansas can be held liable here unless they had reason to believe the transcripts were not accurate.

That's the whole issue in the mayo case it's quite clear USC had reason to suspect something was wrong with mayo because they readily admit both they and the NCAA did a special background check because of all the rumors about Mayo. So the claim there is they knew and just ignored it, nobody is making that claim about Kansas.

 

[DWKB]

Man, not a peep when we got a verbal from Thomas Robinson, but this crap pops back up and boom?

I'll let Andy Katz speak for me:

Let's chill out with trying to link an investigation into whether or not Darrell Arthur had improper grade changes in a Dallas high school and its ultimately nullifying Kansas' national championship in April.

Here's the deal from multiple sources with ties to the NCAA process and Kansas: Kansas would have to know that Arthur's grades were changed after he went through the independent NCAA clearinghouse, then failed to do anything about it and essentially purposely played an ineligible player during his two-year career.

Despite speculation over Darrell Arthur's eligibility to play at Kansas, the Jayhawks' 2008 national title would be hard to contest.

Kansas denies knowing there was anything wrong with Arthur's grades.

Arthur was cleared by the NCAA to participate out of Dallas' South Oak Cliff High School. Kansas, LSU and Baylor were three of the schools recruiting Arthur the most. Dallas Independent School District superintendent Michael Hinojosa, according to ABC affiliate WFAA, wants a new investigation into Arthur's academic records and those of former teammates.

If Arthur's grade change occurred then he might not have had the sufficient credits to graduate from high school. That means Arthur would have been ineligible to go through the NCAA clearinghouse.

But Kansas played Arthur after he was cleared by the NCAA. If the clearinghouse received false information that it didn't know was false, then Kansas wouldn't be at fault. It would have to be proved that Kansas helped coordinate a change or had knowledge of it, both points Kansas denies. Kansas' staff has no evidence to support that Arthur had his grades changed or knew anything about it.

So, unless this proves to be true and Kansas was complicit in the case there is nothing to worry about when it comes to KU's national title in April.

Kansas coach Bill Self went back and looked at Arthur's academic report when this issue was first raised two months ago. Self was convinced Arthur was fine, and so Kansas was too, and still is. The first investigation cleared South Oak Cliff for the 2005 and 2007 state championships. But WFAA-TV reported that witnesses weren't interviewed for Arthur's algebra, English and theater arts grades.

This story will continue until this next investigation is completed and released. But Kansas is showing no signs of sweating out the decision. The 2008 national title is expected to be unscathed and the banner will be raised to the top of Phog Allen without incident.

Arthur, his mother, and his former coach having pending lawsuits with WFAA for privacy violations from the first time around.

 

[Russ Smith]

Man, not a peep when we got a verbal from Thomas Robinson, but this crap pops back up and boom?

I'll let Andy Katz speak for me:



Arthur, his mother, and his former coach having pending lawsuits with WFAA for privacy violations from the first time around.

Hey you're welcome to start a thread about getting Robinson, it was a nice get for Kansas.

With regards to Katz, maybe you missed the part of my post that said the exact same thing, there's nothing to suggest Kansas has any issue here because nobody seems to be suggesting they knew Arthur's grades may have been changed.

With respect to the lawsuit that's exactly what Arthur should do, grades are covered under privacy laws, a newspaper should NOT be able to get his grades like that. the problem is they did, and if they are right about his grades it shows that the same school that got caught changing grades before, may have done it again.

If you read my original post it's quite clear I don't think this has any impact on Kansas, what it is possibly is yet another example of how out of whack things are with amateur sports that some schools do things like this in pursuit of highschool state championships.

 

[Russ Smith]

on recruiting I typically follow UCLA and Pac 10 recruiting only. That's why say a kid like tyler commits I post about it, because most thought he'd end up in the Pac 10 at USC.

The only time I really follow Kansas recruiting is when UCLA is competing with them for a kid, currently that would be Michael Snaer who I don't think UCLA has a prayer with and I think actually will end up at Missouri although Kansas could still get him.

There's a great story on Rivals that Yahoo picked up about Dalonte hill and K State, he makes 420K now as their top assistant, which near as anybody can find makes him by far the highest paid assistant coach in the country, nearly double anybody on any of the teams in the final 4 last season. The whole reason of course is when Huggins left, he was going to take hill to West Virginia and Hill was going to try and take Michael Beasley with him. So K State ponied up a huge raise to keep Hill and Beasley. The article points out in effect, K State bought Beasley.