Enough apologizing and enough martyrdom. It was a known fact on the Duke campus for years that the lacrosse team overdid it when it came to partying. There was a written report in 2004 that said just that and Tallman Trask, the university vice president allegedly overseeing the athletic department, and Joe Alleva, allegedly the athletic director, did absolutely nothing about it. Alleva fired Mike Pressler, the lacrosse coach, because a scapegoat was needed in the immediate aftermath of the incident and Pressler took the hit.
Here's what's wrong with all this: No one at Duke is ever wrong. Duke's last president, Nan Keohane, made a terrible choice when she selected Alleva as athletic director in 1998.
Everyone at Duke knew that Alleva was a pleasant man whose next original idea would be his first, someone whose main asset when applying for the job was the fact that his racquetball partner was Mike Krzyzewski.
Five years later, Alleva had lived down to everything expected of him: taking a bad football program and making it worse, hiring a crony as baseball coach who HAD to be fired because the team was awful and former players came forward to say he had encouraged them to use steroids, and looking foolish almost everyone time he opened his mouth in public (which he rarely did, usually hiding behind press releases). Alleva did what everyone else at Duke has done for years and rode the coattails of Krzyzewski's successful basketball team. Keohane looked at this record and gave Alleva a new contract.
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE . . .Click to expand...
