With the events of the last 48 hours (I'll explain below for those who
haven't seen anything, but keep the hockey content up top), I think it's
time to go digging back into old news.  In the case of the hockey team,
this starts with Chris McAlpine finding $500 under a hat.  At this
point, quite frankly, I don't have any confidence that the Minnesota
athletic department would or did complete a thorough investigation.
More accurately, I don't trust the athletic department not to produce a
report that I should believe in the Easter Bunny if it is in their
interests that I should.
 
The bigger upshot is that this seals my opinion that Doug Woog should
go.  This might be unfair if there isn't anything else to find in his
past behavior.  BUT, there are some on-ice reasons to think it's time to
move on (how many juniors and seniors have to have a bad season before
you decide that the coach isn't unlucky, as a local columnist said
recently, he's part of the problem?) and, anyways, his conduct in at
least the McAlpine incident, both the act itself and his attempts to
cover it up, was disgraceful.  Doug Woog isn't the biggest problem in
this department (it didn't take much for me to want to get rid of Clem
Haskins, either), but he is part of the long parade of coach's that
either created or discovered a problem and then lied about it in an
attempt to make it go away.  The culture over on 15th Ave is rotten to
the core, and if it takes burning down the Bierman complex to clean it
up (and it might), so be it.
 
And Doug Woog has been part of the problem.
 
J. Michael Neal
 
Background for those who missed SportsCenter: Yesterday the St. Paul
Pioneer-Press published a lengthy series of articles alleging that the
office manager in the office running athletic tutoring programs wrote
more than 400 papers, take-home tests and other assignments for about 20
Gopher basketball players over a 4-5 year period.  The evidence they
published looks pretty convincing.  Yes, most (though not all) of the
players quoted have an axe to grind with Clem Haskins, but combined with
other evidence I have trouble seeing that there's nothing there.  And if
it is true, I find the idea that Haskins (among others) didn't know
about it to be farcical.  He's denied it, but that's what he did in the
Courtney James domestic assault case, and that turned out to be a
bald-faced lie.  And even if he didn't, he (along with AD Mark Dienhart
and VP McKinley Boston) put his head on the chopping block when he
insisted (and they approved) on having the academic counselling program
for the basketball team pulled out of the independent office that runs
all of the other counselling programs and put inside the athletic
department, with Haskins calling the shots.  Barring a finding that
nothing actually happened, Haskins, Dienhart and Boston should all be
fired.  And that dreaded NCAA phrase "lack of institutional control"
should make a quick appearance.
 
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