SEATTLE (AP) -Former Indiana coach Kelvin Sampson emerged with a smile from an eight-hour, closed-door hearing before a NCAA panel that will determine whether he violated recruiting rules.
“Hey, guys. How you doing?” a cordial Sampson asked Friday evening when he was surprised in a hallway by an Associated Press reporter while leaving Seattle’s Hotel Deca.
He was with his lawyers after a day full of end runs around public view. Throughout the day, men in suits and ties served as lookouts for inquiring minds from the back service exits of the hotel.
“It went well. It’s a process,” Sampson said of the hearing based on the NCAA’s accusations of Sampson providing false and misleading information to investigators about more than 100 impermissible calls.
The NCAA also accuses Sampson, now an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks, with knowingly violating NCAA recruiting restrictions imposed because of a previous phone-call scandal at Oklahoma.
When asked if the questioning went as he thought it would, Sampson said: “About what we expected.”
“We’ll be back tomorrow,” he added, before sliding closed the side door of a minivan that then drove him away.
Indiana senior associate athletic director Tim Fitzpatrick said the hearing will continue Saturday morning.
Stacey Osburn, associate director of media relations for the NCAA, said the decision on possible sanctions likely won’t be known for at least six weeks.
Indiana officials are trying to avoid additional penalties beyond the scholarship and recruiting restrictions the school imposed when the allegations came to light last year. They will issue a statement at the end of Saturday’s hearing.
Athletic director Rick Greenspan and current Hoosiers coach Tom Crean are among those attending. Both refused comment Friday.
Former assistant coach Rob Senderoff, now an assistant at Kent State, appeared with an attorney and Kent State athletic director, Laing Kennedy. Senderoff, widely viewed as the fall-guy in this case, is accused of making recruiting calls in the presence of Sampson and handing the phone to recruits and recruits’ parents and coaches on recruiting trips, so they could speak to Sampson.
The NCAA banned all those practices when it handed down the Oklahoma punishment in May 2006.
Senderoff faces what the NCAA calls a show-cause penalty, which requires schools to get the NCAA infractions committee’s approval of their hire of a coach. If he receives a show-cause penalty, Kent State would have to either appeal that sanction or fire Senderoff.
Senderoff sneaked out a back door of the banquet room where the hearing was held with Kennedy and an attorney then walked down a back alley during a one-hour break for lunch. He looked spent and bewildered at the end of the day, his face flush.
“Going back to (my hotel) to get some rest,” Senderoff said, sighing. “Long day.”
Sampson has repeatedly denied he was knowingly involved in three-way calls, and Senderoff and Sampson both dispute the NCAA’s contention that they did not tell investigators the whole truth.
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