General

Tim Floyd’s Capacity For Rationalization Exceeds All Listed Standards

Jan 21, 2010, 10:00 PM UTC

â†µ You got fired, your old program self-imposed exceedingly weak and selfish punishments that the NCAA will hopefully triple, and you're now radioactive to every college in the country. O.J. Mayo's runners, one of whom got USC in trouble a decade ago, walked into your office and handed you a star prep recruit. Later one of them said—not to the press, but to the U.S. Attorney's Office, FBI, and IRS—that you handed the runners actual money. The audacity! It's like you're Jerry Tarkanian on PCP or something.â†µ

â†µâ†µAnd yet you manage to sayâ†µsomething like this:â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥“Why I left was not in any way an admission of guilt. It was a complete testament to a lack of support by my administration and how we were treated after four years of doing everything the right way.”â†µâ‡¥

â†µâ†µâ†µI must hand it to you, Tim Floyd. Your capacity for self-delusion is Wagnerian in its majesty.â†µ

â†µâ†µEven if Floyd is telling the truth—about as likely as the Mississippi State recruits now claiming their Facebook posts about a floppy-haired-freshman-sponsoredâ†µtrip to the strip club were a “joke”—about the specific allegation that Floyd handed Rodney Guillory $1,000, Guillory’s involvement with a program “doing everything the right way” is brief. It starts with Guillory walking into Floyd’s office promising to deliver Mayo and ends thirty seconds later with a door slamming in his face.â†µ

â†µâ†µTim Floyd knew Guillory. If he did not the first thing anyone “doing things the right way” would have done was ask someone in the athletic department about him, find out that he got Jeff Trepagnier suspended for a third of the season in 2000 for providing plane tickets, and call him back into him back into his office so he could slam the door in his face. This has all been gone over before: Tim Floyd is a disingenuous man to the core. â†µ

â†µ

â†µHey, at least he got in some no-he-di'in'ts on beleaguered USC athletic director Mike Garrett:â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥The day the story broke, my athletic director called me and asked me where I was. I happened to be in New Orleans after being there for seven months. He asked me if I’d read the story. I said, ‘Yes. And I did not do what I’m accused of doing.’ Two, ‘Where are you?’ ‘I’m in New Orleans.’ The third thing he said was, ‘You need to get your ass back to Los Angeles, so I can decide what I’m going to do with you.’ …â†µâ‡¥
â†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥“It was a situation where the athletic director was more worried about himself than our program. Everything we had done to establish that program as one of the top national-level programs in the country was being destroyed from within. Players being released, the treatment of our coaches, the treatment of me as the head coach. . . . And at this point in my career, I didn’t feel like I needed to stay there and deal with that. I felt I’d done enough over 33 years of being in this business to never have my integrity challenged and did not appreciate it.”â†µâ‡¥

â†µâ†µâ†µTim Floyd, ladies and gentlemen, does not care to have his integrity challenged. When it is challenged he has to find it and the closet where he stuffed it after Guillory walked into his office is very dusty and he has allergies. â†µ

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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

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