Gus Angelopoulos, owner of the Wheel Restaurant in Hammond and hardcore Indiana University fan, is worried.

Angelopoulos has season tickets to the IU games. Row five, behind the Hoosier's bench. You only get seats like that in Bloomington if you are a special fan.

Mike Davis, the former coach of IU who now makes a living at UAB, used to stop by his place for dinner when he was out this way recruiting.

Gus came to this country from Greece in 1966. His parents settled in Northwest Indiana because they had relatives here. He is as proud of his Hoosier heritage as he is of his Greek roots.

Gus graduated from IU about the same time that a guy named Bob Knight took the job. Gus doesn't think much of Knight now because he essentially has turned his back on the state since he left for Texas Tech.

But he sure enjoyed the coach and the teams when they were winning three national championships in Knight's 30-years.

He loves Hoosiers basketball -- not Knight or Davis or Kelvin Sampson -- more than anything else. So much that Gus sometimes hits the road to follow the Hoosiers.

Now, Gus is concerned. He wishes this whole problem with Sampson's staff making too many phone calls to recruits and getting patched in on three way calls would go away. He is hoping that Sampson can survive the backlash from his latest transgression.

Just like the IU administrators and their public relations police wish their self imposed sanctions on Sampson would be enough to stop the outcry for Sampson's job.

The school froze Sampson's salary, meaning he wouldn't get a $500,000 raise and forbid assistant coach Rob Senderoff from recruiting for a year. Senderoff also had a planned raise revoked.

On Thursday, the first access the public had to Sampson since the school announced it was sanctioning him and an assistant coach for violating the terms of their previous NCAA sanctions and for making excessive phone calls to recruits, the school issued a missive saying Sampson would talk about the team and practice but not the NCAA violations.

Sampson spent 30 minutes anyway answering questions about the school's problems.

This distraction is going to hang over the heads of the Hoosiers all season.

Gus doesn't know Sampson particularly well nor is he really attached to him. He believes Rick Greenspan, the athletic director, should be fired for hiring Sampson in the first place.

Gus just knows IU has the potential, with Eric Gordon and D.J. White on the team, to get to the Final Four. This would make Gus proud. It's been six years since they went to the Final Four. During that time, IU has had some teams that weren't so good. The harsh winters in Northwest Indiana are colder when IU doesn't play so well.

"This is very unfortunate," he said. "We could win the whole thing."

For Gus' sake and for the players' sake, you wish this unrest would go away.

They're not used to rooting for a team where the coach breaks the rules.

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