The immediate answer is: Yes. Yes it is. Faced with a rule that prevents coaches from hiring people associated with recruits to non-basketball positions in a college program — a rule designed to prevent the sketchy package deals that have become a fixture of elite recruiting in the past few years — Floyd found a loophole. He hired one as an assistant coach instead. Naturally, new Floyd assistant and former prep school coach Jason Niblett, whose name sounds like a particularly tasty snack, has denied that his hiring was connected to the decisions of recruits Michael Haynes and Desmond Lee, two of his former players, to attend UTEP. Which, you know, of course he did. But that doesn’t make it any less fishy. (Haynes, for one, turned down scholarship offers from programs like Duke, UCLA and Texas to play for Floyd’s rebuilding UTEP team. Of course he did.) Still, the question stands: Is Tim Floyd’s hiring of Niblett a particularly bad thing? Today, Rob Dauster makes a case that though Floyd’s Niblett hiring is unsavory and against the spirit of the NCAA’s new rule, it’s not as blatant as famed package deals of yore: My question is whether Floyd actually did anything wrong here. Sure, it looks sketchy. I can’t disagree. Being a successful college basketball program is based on your ability to recruit. Based on their resumes, one can assume that these two guys are going to be able to recruit for Floyd

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Is Tim Floyd’s package deal all that bad?