Alas, a major sports team here at NIU is showing up clearly in the media spotlight after months and months of trying. However, the men’s basketball team probably isn’t going about drawing public attention in quite the way men’s Athletic Director Robert Brigham has in mind.

It’s not the Huskies’ 5-11 record that has the campus buzzing. It’s the latest in a long line of negative incidents that has been snowballing since last March, when John McDougal was fired as head coach.

Last week, after two players were suspended for two games and another was lost possibly for the season as the result of a locker room scuffle, one must wonder if anything else could go wrong for Head Coach Jim Rosborough’s squad. Well, just three days later a bad situation grew worse when senior guard and Huskie co-captain Jerry Williams was declared academically ineligible to play for the rest of this season.

These happenings, tied with the earlier losses of star forward Kenny Battle, who transfered to Illinois, and junior guard Daron White, who quit the team in November, have given the team a negative public image that will be difficult to overcome.

osborough must now do whatever necessary to snap his team back in line. If this means kicking some players off the squad or just plain kicking some butts, so be it. But if the coach fails to take charge now and quell an already volatile situation, the reputation of the entire university could be tarnished. To his credit, Rosborough has been open about the troubles of the team and has taken some action (player suspensions) to show who’s boss.

Brigham is not free of blame either, and he too must do whatever he can to straighten things out. After all, it was he, for all intents and purposes, who charted NIU’s current athletic course by withdrawing from the Mid-American Conference, it was he who fired McDougal, and it was he who hired Rosborough when the players preferred Chicago State’s Bob Hallberg. So now he must come to Rosborough’s aid before the players lose respect for their coach and the team collapses under its own pressure.

This series of events will most likely cast a shadow over the athletic department’s plans to put NIU sports onto the athletic map. And it seems, no matter how noble the department’s efforts to build a respectable athletic program, there will always be some stumbling block to get in the way.

In the wake of the most recent controversy, Rosborough said nothing more could go wrong because “there isn’t anything else conceivably that could happen with this team.” For the sake of the coach, the team and all of NIU, let’s hope not.