Dan Dakich stuck his foot in his mouth again

ESPN is reviewing the latest embarrassing incident involving Dan Dakich.

Dan Dakich has spent most of his time as a college basketball media member doing two things: a) arguing that unpaid college athletes aren’t being exploited, and b) trying to intimidate anyone who disagrees. While it’s an objectively pathetic way to spend one’s time, it’s a position that has been quite lucrative to Dakich. After failing to make the NCAA tournament even once when he was head coach at Bowling Green for 10 years, Dakich been a color commentator for ESPN since 2010 and hosts a radio show in Indianapolis on ESPN Radio affiliate 1070 The Fan.

Dakich is the man who once suggested college basketball players couldn’t be broke because Kentucky forward Derek Willis had several tattoos. He’s the guy who was once thoroughly outwitted by Frank Kaminsky on his favorite subject. When he isn’t losing arguments on social media, Dakich is typically whining about how today’s college athletes aren’t as tough as the players from his era, back when he averaged 3.6 points per game for Indiana in the ‘80s.

If Dakich is in the news, it’s only because he’s made himself into a fool once again. It happened this past weekend when Dakich stuck his foot in his mouth repeatedly while arguing with several academics on Twitter about compensation for college athletes. ESPN is now investigating Dakich’s behavior, and issued the following statement: “We are taking this matter very seriously and are in the process of looking into it.”

Dakich’s most recent embarrassment happened after a lecturing fellow at Duke highlighted certain media members who were critical of Jalen Johnson’s decision to leave Duke last month. Read our own James Dator for a good take on that situation. Dakich dug his heels in to argue, and then other academics joined in to tell him why he was wrong.

The conversation took place over several threads, but you can find examples here, here, and here. Dakich then addressed it on his radio show and of course made things even worse. Via Awful Announcing:

“I had somebody come at me. Buncha academics last night. Two guys and a lady, right? Two guys and a lady came at me. And they said, ‘well, you’re yelling at student-athletes while they’re being exploited’ or something, and I said, look, maybe, but I…I was in the arena and you guys were sitting outside bitching. Now, remember, it was two girls…two men and one lady. Guess what that got called? Sexist. (Laughs) Be careful. I didn’t even realize, I just said bitching because it’s what people do. It’s what everybody does, everybody just bitches. But that’s sexist apparently because I said bitching and a lady was in the conversation. And I said outside the arena, and then she wanted to, quote, go at in the pool. Well, if you go at it in a pool, that’s a public place and then I’m gonna have to get divorced, and then it’s just gonna be a problem.”

Dakich is now being accused of doxxing the Duke fellow for spelling out his name and talking about his office hours, and he’s being accused of sexual harassment for how he was speaking during his rant. This feels like every Dakich controversy rolled into one:

This time last year, Dakich called a high school basketball player a “meth head” and said he was going to “beat the hell out of every school board member” after a high school coach was fired. This latest incident is merely the continuation of the same tired gimmick that he’s been riding publicly for the last decade.

Dakich briefly deactivated his Twitter over the incident, but returned almost immediately:

We’ll update this post if ESPN disciplines Dakich over the incident.