That’s the latest rumor, from the SBNation sports blog.
Frankly it seems wildly implausible that another university will take any of these three, after reading the DA’s report. Yes, Alex Gardner concluded he couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that what happened March 8-9 was a gang rape, but most universities have a somewhat different standard for admissions, even for basketball players.
While there are plenty of coaches as desperate and unprincipled as Dana Altman, they can no longer claim plausible deniability, as Altman is still trying to about his decision to take Brandon Austin from Providence. (Still no word about Lorraine Davis’s role.)
And you have to wonder what mojo UO’s Faculty Athletics Representative Jim O’Fallon is pulling to keep these players academically eligible and pumping up the Duck basketball APR, when they aren’t even on campus going to classes.
If Andrew Greif of the Oregonian hadn’t found out about the rape allegations and made them public, Altman and the Duck AD would have transferred these three quite happily, and quietly, to some other unsuspecting campus, as Altman all but admitted in his press conference:
But for a real pro at dissimulation, watch Rob Mullens’s fake-out when a reporter asks him – twice – if he and Altman knew the names of the three players. He nods profusely, then repeatedly says “we did not have the identities confirmed”. Perhaps true, but that wasn’t the question. So, he did know the names, he just didn’t do anything about it until he 7 weeks later, when he and his coaches had cashed their bonus checks for the NCAA tournament, and couldn’t pretend anymore:
I’m “disappointed” in Altman.
One thing I would never have guessed is how Dana Altman folded his integrity for the game. So many believed in him and his ethics for naught. Shame on him and UO.