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Gameday Instant Analysis: A tough week at TU
Published: 12/2/2012 1:37 AM
Last Modified: 12/2/2012 1:37 AM

It was a nice day for a championship game at Chapman Stadium on Saturday.

A little windy, perhaps, but a nice day nonetheless.

It's too bad I was one of the precious few who took advantage of it to watch Tulsa knockoff Central Florida to win the Conference USA title.

An announced crowd of 17,635 watched the game, the smallest paid attendance of the season. It's a shame really.

This Tulsa team is imminently likable, with a homegrown coach who really has done a nice job of holding the program together.

We won't pretend it's Oklahoma or Oklahoma State out there, but for its level, Tulsa does almost all you can ask. Ten wins, a conference championship -- it certainly deserves better than the smallest crowd of the year.

In my Sunday column I talk about the calming influence of TU coach Bill Blankenship. Besides directing his team to an important win Saturday for a troubled athletic department, he's also seen this team through the coaching change, a high-profile player arrest last year and a string of deaths involving former players.

Tulsa fans should feel fortunate Blankenship is a local guy. Combine Saturday's attendance with the uncertainty in the athletic administration and of conference realignment, and your typical successful Conference USA head coach would be hopping the first bus out of town.

Obviously, the game wasn't the only topic of conversation Saturday. The fate of suspended athletic director Ross Parmley wasn't too far away from anyone's mind.

The general chatter surrounded possible replacements for Parmley, not about whether the AD can keep his job after his involvement in an Oklahoma City gambling investigation was revealed last week.

I feel badly for Parmley, especially given the mixed signals about gambling in our society. The NCAA decries all types of sports gambling, yet at the same time, Tulsa is allowed to solicit advertising from local casinos.

Still, the rules are the rules. And everyone who works for an NCAA school knows what the score is -- and that you can't bet on it.

The NCAA investigation into the incident figures to begin in earnest this week, and there will be some uncharted territory for the association.

By most accounts, gambling investigations that involve school administrators are rather rare.

But unless there are more details we haven't discovered or the NCAA is looking to make an example out of someone, I would guess the NCAA impact will be minimal.

I think the departure of Parmley and a department-wide probation period is an educated guess at the likely outcome. Then again, I never envisioned 12,000 plus empty seats Saturday at Chapman Stadium either.

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jdltulsa (3 months ago)

I have long been uncomfortable with Tulsa's association with Creek Nation Casino. College athletics departments should not have marketing relationships with gaming enterprises, period. Even though Creek Nation doesn't do sports gaming, it still is unhealthy to have a gaming enterprise involve with an intercollegiate athletic department.

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Tulsa World Sports Editor Michael Peters has nearly 20 years of daily newspaper experience. A 1993 graduate of Texas A&M, he worked at papers in Bryan-College Station, Texas, Beaumont, Texas, and Galveston, Texas, before joining the Houston Chronicle as High School Sports Editor in 2008. While in Houston, he coordinated coverage of the 2008 Texas Class 5A state football championships and the 2011 NCAA Men's Final Four.

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