Looks like Harvard has flunked College Basketball 101: Don’t Get Caught Cheating.
The top two returning players from last season’s Tommy Amaker-coached NCAA tournament team, senior forward Kyle Casey and senior point guard Brandyn Curry, have been implicated in a massive academic scandal sweeping the venerable university and likely will miss the 2012-13 season, according to a SI.com report.
Casey — the Crimson’s leading scorer during a breakthrough 25-6 campaign in which they cracked the AP top 25 and ended a 66-year tourney drought — reportedly has withdrawn from school pending discipline for being one of roughly 125 students accused of cheating on the take-home final exam in a course titled “Government 1310: Introduction to Congress.”
Curry, the team’s assist leader and best perimeter defender, also will leave the team, according to the Boston Herald.
The losses are devastating to an emerging Northeast hoops dynamo that has made leaps and bounds under Amaker — this is the program that graduated former Knicks sensation Jeremy Lin in 2010, after all — and earlier this year landed the first Scout.com top-100 prospect (power forward Zena Edosomwan of Los Angeles) to commit to an Ivy school. The Crimson were seemingly set to return three starters from the No. 12-seeded team that lost by nine to Vanderbilt in its March Madness opener — but now are down to just one and an array of unproven underclassmen to contend in the veteran-heavy Ivies.
By withdrawing before the registration deadline, Casey and Curry would preserve their final year of eligibility for the 2013-14 season should they be forced to take yearlong leaves of absence and reapply for admission.
The school’s disciplinary arm, the Administrative Board, is still reviewing the charges on a case-by-case basis after the administration announced two weeks ago it was investigating “academic dishonesty, ranging from inappropriate collaboration to outright plagiarism,” in the spring government class.
The scope of the scandal extends to the football team, according to the Harvard Crimson, the school’s newspaper. “A few players” from the Crimson, who open their season Saturday against San Diego as the favorite to repeat as Ivy champion, can expect to face discipline, a member of the squad said.
This Harvard hullabaloo comes in the same week Duke basketball — long considered a model of rule-abiding hardwood success under Mike Krzyzewski, Amaker’s mentor — was stained by an NCAA inquiry into former player Lance Thomas’ nearly $100,000 jewelry purchase during the Blue Devils’ title-winning 2009-10 season.