Is N&O reporter Dan Kane one-and-done with Duke-Sulaimon?

A friend who read a recent post here about an effort by Dan Kane, investigative reporter for The News & Observer, to get to the bottom of Rasheed Sulaimon's dismissal from the Duke University basketball team, said Kane would write no more than one story on the subject. Sulaimon, as you might remember, was the Blue Devils coach's (a name to not to be included in further posts) first-ever player dismissal in that coach’s coaching lifetime. My friend said Kane had met his match with Duke and would get no further than what had been reported. A one-and-done report, so to speak.

Sulaimon was linked to a couple of non-investigated rape allegations on the Duke campus more than a year ago. The coach and his staff were aware of the allegations but did nothing about it them, at least not publically. Only after other incidents with Sulaimon did the basketball player get booted from the team. It’s obvious the player just didn’t fit in the coach’s game plan which includes hiring a bunch of one-and-done athletes just to win a national basketball title versus recruiting students who want to get a full education (or at least more than one year) while playing basketball. It’s also well known Sulaimon was team-disruptive. The combination of the three—rape allegations, not fitting into the game plan, being disruptive—was caused for Sulaimon’s dismissal.

But today’s post is not about the Duke situation at all. It’s about Kane, someone who has been criticized and praised in this space for his thorough and sometimes over-the-top investigation of the obviously life-threatening academic-athletics scandal at UNC-Chapel Hill, something that could bring to an end the world as we know it. He published another story today that briefly noted UNC is very much cooperating with the NCAA investigation, becoming a partner of sorts. Some think this is unusual, but the bottom line is that UNC wants to bring to an end the inquisition and get on to the penalty phase so several years from now the football and basketball teams, probably under new coaching leadership, can move on to repeating the academic skimming and head towards more titles. Duke does it with one-and-done players. UNC does it with players who probably shouldn’t be in school there at all.

So, back to Kane. Today he was brief in “revealing” teamwork by UNC and the NCAA and was long in repeating everything else in this scandal that has come before. A shorter story would have been sufficient but The N&O continues to milk the scandal for all it can, to sell papers. It’s now obvious that Kane, when it comes to getting to the bottom of the Duke-Sulaimon scandal, has hit a thick wall or there would have been more reporting since his story a couple of weeks ago. This is disturbing and shows that indeed Kane has met his match when it comes to dualing with the Duke Coach and the University the coach controls. Hopefully, Kane will prove wrong this theory. If so, more apologies will be forthcoming, but it's doubtful that will have to happen.

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