Redd says Ohio State's Final Four season won't be forgotten

Redd says Ohio State's Final Four season won't be forgotten
By RUSTY MILLER
AP Sports Writer
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Michael Redd, a star on Ohio State's 1999 Final Four team, said it's wrong that the NCAA is forcing the school to erase all vestiges of that team's accomplishments.
"You can't take it away from us. I still have my ring, I still have my trophies," Redd said Saturday night before his Milwaukee Bucks played the Los Angeles Clippers. "The fans in Columbus won't ever forget. We, as players, won't forget."
The NCAA ended a two-year investigation of Ohio State's men's basketball program on Friday, putting Ohio State on three years of probation and ordering it to pay back almost $800,000 in tournament revenue in the years 1999 through 2002.
In addition, Ohio State must wipe out any references to the trip to the Final Four or three other trips to the NCAA tournament because it used an ineligible player. That means altering the Final Four banner which hangs from the rafters at Value City Arena and expunging all statistics and team pictures from programs and media guides.
"It's totally not fair, at all, what happened," Redd said of the sanctions.
He said the violations at Ohio State paled compared to what took place at rival Michigan with the Fab Five, when a booster paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to team members.
"Our situation is no way near the situation Michigan had, I don't think personally," he said. "It's disappointing."
The NCAA also forced Michigan to vacate all statistics and references to its NCAA tournament appearances during the period in which the violations took place.
Redd, who grew up in Columbus and still has a house there, could have become Ohio State's career scoring leader but he left school a year early and was taken in the second round of the 2000 NBA draft. He has become one of the top scorers in the league during his career with Milwaukee.
The NCAA came down hard Friday on Jim O'Brien, who was the head coach when the violations took place. It said O'Brien knowingly broke NCAA rules.
O'Brien, speaking by telephone from Boston later that day, said he felt the NCAA penalties tainted the accomplishments of his players.
"The thing that has been the most hurtful today is the fact that there have been a lot of other really good guys who are paying a penalty by taking down the accomplishments of four years of what guys did on the court," O'Brien said. "Most of those guys had absolutely nothing to do with any of this and I think that's unfortunate and very, very unfair to those kids."
Redd's name was never mentioned in any of the documents released by the NCAA and Ohio State.
O'Brien recruited almost all the players on the current Ohio State team, which is ranked No. 7 and has a 25-4 record heading into Sunday's Big Ten tournament championship game. The Buckeyes are the top seed, having won the outright regular-season conference title for the first time in 14 years.
Redd has attended games this season at Value City Arena and was honored at halftime of a recent game.
Even though Ohio State's record books must be expunged of any reference to the Final Four season, he said he hoped to salvage a material part of his memories.
"I'm going to try and get the banner as quick as I can for my house," he said.