Your're right I forgot about that:
http://www.slate.com/articles/sport..._academic_institution_became_part_of_the.html
And despite the best efforts of
NCAA hall-monitor-in-chief Pete Thamel, who in 2008
wrote a report for the New York Times on “new questions of standards” at Harvard under Amaker, there’s no compelling evidence to suggest that the school is doing anything worth fretting about. Everything Thamel described—a soon-to-be Harvard assistant playing a pick-up game with two recruits, Amaker talking to a potential player’s parent at a grocery store, allegedly lowered academic requirements—wouldn’t crack the top 100 list of the least-ethical decisions most programs made this week. (And for what it’s worth, the
basketball program was cleared of all these charges by the Ivy League, though it did later admit to an “unintentional secondary violation” on account of the pick-up game.)
Even so, it’s undeniable that Harvard is now recruiting a different kind of athlete. Though the school has continually refuted the allegation that—as Yale coach James Jones told Thamel—there was a “drastic shift in restrictions and regulations with the Harvard admissions office,” there has clearly been a drastic shift in the pedigree of the players coming into the program. The most-talented player in Harvard history, Jeremy Lin (who was recruited by Amaker’s predecessor Frank Sullivan), was in fact a fairly typical Crimson recruit: an academic standout who didn’t receive any Division I scholarship offers. Now, Harvard competes for guys that basketball schools actually want. Wesley Saunders, the team’s leading scorer against New Mexico, was
also recruited by USC and Stanford. Zena Edosomwan,
a top-100 recruit who committed to Harvard last year, could’ve gone to UCLA, Texas, or Washington.
