Allegations mean little to Rose's career
A letter from the NCAA detailing alleged major violations by the University of Memphis - available for viewing on the Memphis Commercial-Appeal Web site - begins with six pages of complaints against the women's golf program.
Then it gets a little more interesting. A player on the 2007-08 men's basketball team is accused of having someone else take the SAT exam for him.
It has been widely speculated in the media that the player in question, whose name was blacked out in the letter obtained by the Commercial-Appeal, is Bulls guard Derrick Rose.
He was the only Memphis player who was on the team for that season only, and there is no mention in the letter of any other seasons in question. Another Memphis freshman in 2007-08, Jeff Robinson, transferred to Seton Hall in January of his sophomore year.
The other basketball violation alleged that an associate of one of the Memphis players received free transportation and lodging to some of the team's road games.
Yahoo.com reported that the unnamed associate was Rose's older brother Reggie, which wouldn't be a stretch. Reggie Rose spent the year in Memphis and followed Derrick to most of the Bulls' road games last season.
According to the Commercial-Appeal, the unnamed associate paid Memphis for some of the travel, but not all of it. That makes it sound like a correctable mistake.
Regarding the SAT score, keep in mind that this is an alleged violation, accompanied by speculation or claims from unnamed sources that Rose is the guilty party.
If true, none of this would have any effect on Rose's career with the Bulls.
Nothing condones cheating, but when it comes to Rose, or any of the other one-and-done college players, does it really matter if they passed the SAT, went to class or opened a book?
Guys such as Rose, Michael Beasley, O.J. Mayo, Kevin Durant or Greg Oden knew when they left high school that a high draft slot was a year away. College attendance essentially was a one-season requirement because of NBA rules.
Imagine the stakes if any of those players had trouble gaining college eligibility. After a year in college, Rose would join an NBA team and have the ability to move his family out of a rough South Side neighborhood.
If Rose wasn't college eligible, he most likely would never have played at Memphis. That would have meant no year at the top of the college basketball world for the Tigers and certainly no trip to the NCAA title game.
The alternate door of spending a season playing for pay in Europe was opened by former Arizona recruit Brandon Jennings last year, and it won't benefit the NCAA to see a higher number of high school grads head overseas instead of a college campus.
The Sun-Times added a report Thursday alleging that one of Rose's grades at Simeon was temporarily changed from a D to a C, which conceivably could have helped secure his college eligibility, if true.
Academics might seem irrelevant to Rose's basketball career, but he's also a one-in-a-million athlete.
Measures like Proposition 16 are in place to help ensure that the 900,000 athletes who can't expect to make a comfortable living in pro basketball are encouraged to focus on school work.
No matter what happened at Memphis, that fact shouldn't be lost.