Like I said below, look who we hired

Posted on: March 3, 2017 at 13:00:08 CT

Pitt football coach Mike Gottfried, now an ESPN analyst, says, "Glazier does a horrible job. If Glazier says it, then the NCAA concludes it happened. Nobody oversees him. He's like a bounty hunter." Steve Beckett, lawyer for former Illinois basketball star Deon Thomas, agrees with Gottfried. Though they were never proved, allegations that Thomas had been offered improper inducements when he was being recruited by Illinois led the school to hire Glazier in 1990. "Glazier sells coaches down the river to make schools look good," Beckett says. "If your school wants to work within the good-ol'-boy system and doesn't care about its coaches and players, hire him."

One reason colleges hire Glazier is because of his cozy relationship with the NCAA, where he worked for seven years as an investigator. His ninth-floor office in Overland Park commands a view of NCAA headquarters half a mile away. He used to play lunch-hour basketball with NCAA enforcement chief David Berst, and they still play golf together. Chuck Smrt, an NCAA enforcement director, was Glazier's roommate for a year when both were undergraduates at Indiana.

Boeheim says of Glazier, "The NCAA believes what he says. That's what you've got to have on your side. That's what you pay for."

What you get for your money is an unconventional strategy: Glazier does not try to find ways to get his clients out of the muck; he seeks to keep them from sinking deeper into it. However, his detractors say that he's sometimes too quick to have schools admit to wrongdoing.

Glazier figures that if a school comes clean as soon as possible, the NCAA will be impressed by the institution's good faith and candor and, as a result, impose lighter penalties.

"Had Slive and Glazier stayed on," says Beckett, "Deon Thomas [who completed his eligibility this year] wouldn't be the leading scorer in Illinois history and Jimmy Collins wouldn't [still] be the nation's leading recruiter out of Chicago. They'd both be gone, offered up to the NCAA gods. Then we would have gotten our penalty, and Slive and Glazier would have declared it a victory."

Beckett voices a complaint shared by other Glazier detractors. "He takes a cookie-cutter approach," he says. "You fire the coach, get rid of the player, admit you did all these things but say you've got institutional control because you cleaned house, and beg for mercy from the NCAA. Then Glazier and his people get satisfied clients by convincing them they would have lost it all without them.