Kansas Jayhawks Ticket Scandal Is Nothing New in College Basketball Today

57 months.

That’s how long former Kansas University employee Charlette Blubaugh will spend behind bars for being the mastermind behind a ticket-theft scheme that left the Jayhawks' athletic department scrambling to recover the approximate $2 million she stole.

Blubaugh, pleading guilty in January to conspiracy to commit fraud, will be joining her husband, Thomas Blubaugh, and three other former KU employees in jail for their parts in pilfering more than 17,000 basketball tickets and over 2,000 football tickets between 2005 to 2010.

Mrs. Blubaugh is the former director of ticket operations and was in charge of KU’s unique computer system designed to track ticket sales, which led to her manipulation of the system and helped cover up ticket thefts by her and her associates.

In a statement made by Kansas a few months after the discovery was made, KU concluded that she was “directly responsible for creating the climate of an ice cream store where the employees feel free to sample the wares without paying for them.”

This entirely crazy situation speaks to the type of entitlement employees and players feel they have when working or playing for a big-ticket school like Kansas University.

Whether it is millions of dollars lost from a ticket scandal, players talking with agents while still attending school or athletes continuously being arrested, college sports and their athletic directors need to tighten the leash on college employees.

This news also follows the recent arrest of two Florida Gator basketball players, Cody Larson and Erik Murphy, who were charged this week with burglarizing cars outside a St. Augustine bar.

Call records indicate that Murphy had the audacity to say, “They don’t have anything on us. We’re gonna get off.”

Dude, the cops caught you red-handed. How can you even think you’re getting off?

Is it because he’s a college star and seems to think he has special privileges other people don’t? I think that’s a pretty fair assumption.

As players and employees continue to commit crimes and this news becomes a commonplace in mainstream media and the sporting world, it’s time for universities to tighten up.

It will be a sad, sad day when these types of crimes are nothing new to the college basketball world and their faithful, dedicated fans.