Crisis Management 101

After taking a little while to come out of shock, I have managed to put together what the UConn SID should be distributing to every media outlet. They won't, because they are idiots and prefer the old no comment route. But if Jeff Hathaway had answered my screams from outside his office they could've saved the ship - or at least plugged some holes....

"official" statement: Over his 23 years of service to the University of Connecticut Jim Calhoun has excelled his two main objectives; winning basketball games and forming kids into productive young men. While the notoriety comes from wins, Coach Calhoun's greatest pride comes from taking troubled youth and turning them into men. When at 15 years old Coach lost his father he was basically adopted by his high school basketball coach. When Calhoun left college for manual labor in his hometown, it was that same high school coach who put Calhoun back on the path to higher education and made him a man.
So when Coach sees a person like a Caron Butler, who was arrested 15 times by age 15, he can't help but step in. It's ingrained in Coach because of his own life. After three years at UConn a tearful Caron bid the school adieu and has since set up countless charities and received significant accolades for them, including in 2006 when Sporting News named him to their "Good Guys in Sports" list. Caron would be the first to admit that none of this would have been possible without Jim Calhoun and the UConn family.
Sadly, not every kid that UConn recruits has the family structure and maturity of Emeka Okafor or Craig Austrie. So while there were many calls made to Nate Miles over the course of 2006 and 2007, they were calls to make sure that he was all right. To make sure things were going ok as Nate bounced around from high school to high school, constantly misunderstood and homesick. These were not calls to say - 'hey, come play for UConn.' Not every college coach is ruthless like Lane Kiffin. Some coaches, like Jim Calhoun, are real people. When UConn began recruiting Miles in 2006 they saw a basketball talent - that much is for sure. But they also saw a reclamation project and a kid who needed defending and guidance...because no one else was there to give it to him. If he landed at UConn, awesome. But if he went somewhere else and survived the hand he had been dealt, well, that was what was truly important.
We are all familiar with the Nate Miles saga and how it ended poorly at UConn. What not enough people realize is what Miles has gone through. His mother was an alcoholic and his father was no where to be found. That left Nate to raise his sister by himself. A sister who has cancer. No wonder he went to five different high schools (never kicked out of any, mind you- just homesick, which is tough for a kid who never really had a home.)
Jim Calhoun and UConn were going to provide the home Nate and his little sister needed. The phone calls need to be looked at in the bigger scheme of things. Nate committed to UConn in 2006, so it makes no sense that the program would have been still making "recruiting calls" in 2007. The program cared about him, and now, sadly, they may be punished.
This real issue here is another big time agent wannabe who STOLE A MILLION BUCKS FROM RIP is the crux of this Yahoo story. He went to school here and was on the absolute bottom of the team totem-pole, but that didn't keep him from using this "connection" to deceive others. He tricked Richard Hamilton, and tricking Nate Miles wasn't very difficult. The kid was vulnerable and looking for guidance. Add in a guardian in Sean Patterson who was in it for the money, and Josh Nochimson had an easy target. He is the real criminal here, and the one who should be targeted.

Other thoughts
-ok, so that got a little sloppy, but that would be the gist of my crisis management, not this bullshit UConn put out today. Hathaway - what a clown. The statement only covers their ass because Miles never played, so the NCAA can't take away any of our wins, etc. Just like the Not a Dime Back thing, Hathaway completely fails to come out and say Calhoun is our man and we stand by him. Just terrible. This is the kind of thing that is gonna agitate the old man right out of Storrs. He doesn't need this garbage from a university that owes everything it has to him.
-also, total bullshit hack ass journalism by Yahoo sports. According to the Uconn statement the responded to a yahoo FOI request in the fall, and they waited to pull it out now. This is some CBS Dan Rather/George W 2004 election stuff. If you want to be taken seriously as a journalist you cant do it by publishing ambushes.