Writing at the pay-only portion of Full Court, Mark Lewis recently brought back to the surface some of K-State's dirty laundry. In 2003, Deb Patterson faced some heat for trying to establish a sort of "Christians Only" program.

Lewis suggests that analogies to the Penn State situation have caused the Patterson story to bubble up again.

It appears that the reappearance of this story does not stem from new revelations, but rather by people drawing comparisons between Patterson and Penn State's Rene Portland. Nevertheless, materials in the Wildcats' 2004-05 media guide that included scriptures suggested to some that the issue is not resolved. At a state-funded university, the potency of this story could be dynamite.

Last year I saw an interview by Bill Walton with his old coach, the legendary John Wooden. Wooden was raised in a small midwestern town during the Depression. He was conservative, a military man, a devout Christian.

Walton (a pot-smoking hippie Deadhead in his younger years) asked Wooden how he dealt with his young players who were immersed in the California counterculture of the 60s and 70s.

Wooden responded (I'm paraphrasing):

My job was to make you better basketball players and better men. It wasn't my job to decide your beliefs for you. I wanted you to act like men, and I wanted you to be able to stand up for your beliefs, but it wasn't important that your beliefs matched mine.

I wish more coaches were like Wooden.