Bill Self Cops to Recruiting Violation But With Different Spin

There was a minor brush-up yesterday evening amongst the sports media world when it was revealed that Bill Self, the man who did what Roy Williams couldn't, might have possibly committed a recruiting violation when he spoke to John Wall (America's No. 1 prospect) after a high school tournament recently.

Self allegedly approached Wall following a Word of God basketball game and congratulated him on his play while mentioning that "I'm not supposed to be talking to you ..." It was curious behavior indeed, and Self addressed the exchange after Kansas topped Texas A&M last night.

"Basically, it's accurate," Self said after beating Texas A&M 73-53 Monday night. "I don't know if the exact quote is accurate. After the game was over, like I always do, like every coach always does, I had to catch a plane. So I went back to tell the coaches, 'Congratulations, good win.' I was approached and shook a hand and said, `I can't talk to you, but you played really well."'

"If that exchange, which is all it was, is a problem, then our administration will deal with it," Self said. "I certainly by no means am going to deny that basically that happened. But the reason I was back in the back was to say hi to the coaches after the game."

"Will deal with it," as I mentioned yesterday, probably means "self report it if it becomes an issue." Unfortunately. On one hand, Self didn't do anything so absurdly serious that we should freak out on him, I suppose, but the NCAA theoretically draws a line in the recruiting sand; at what point do we just stop going along with "infractions" that are "fuzzy"?

The blurriness of the issue brings about another point that I find more interesting: Self says, if I'm understanding this correctly, that he was approached by Wall after the game and not the other way around. Which seems very, very odd given the context of the quotations that Allen Vaughn described yesterday.

But the point of this is not to accuse Bill Self of being dishonest or even stretching the truth of the situation; my general beef, again, is with the NCAA for being so wishy-washy about recruiting, when it's blatantly clear that we have issues surrounding the courtship of amateur athletes. And frankly, looking the other way -- but only sometimes -- seems a bit disingenuous.