Let’s forget about all the criminal findings of both a Yahoo! report and KU’s internal investigation into allegations that over $1 million worth of tickets were improperly distributed.
In the best-case scenario for Perkins, he comes off as a manager who had no idea what his employees were doing under his nose. If he’s truly innocent in these ticket scandal stories -- and that's what the KU investigation said -- then the question becomes how in the world did he let this happen?
Perkins hired the folks responsible for the ticket scandal in KU’s internal investigation. He considered them friends.
If this were a one-time occurrence, a lot of people might dismiss it. It happens to the best of us, right?
Well, this isn’t the first mishap for Perkins, as Sam Mellinger of the Kansas City Star explains.
The takeaway is that the university is shamed, again, another in a long line of foul-ups during Perkins’ seven years as athletic director. There was the Moon Bar stabbing and the point plankn fights and the Mark Mangino mess, and now we have white-collar fraud gone rampant.
As Mellinger speculates, what might be saving Perkins from a firing right now is of course politics.
While he has presided over an, at times, embarrassing tenure at KU, he’s also raising lots and lots of money. KU’s athletic budget has nearly doubled. The basketball team is more popular than ever. He helped get the football team into the Orange Bowl. He pumped money into the football facilities.
If this doesn’t finally drop the hammer on Perkins, I’m not sure what will.