I can't entirely blame Isaiah Rusher for his shortcomings.
That would be too easy.
On Wednesday, basketball head coach Steve Alford announced that Rusher was dismissed from the team.
"Isaiah needed to go home to Houston and take care of some personal issues," Alford said. "We wish him the best and hope that he is able to get things taken care of."
The Daily Lobo e-mailed Rusher for comment, but he did not respond.
Who knows if we will ever get a definitive answer to what happened? But one thing's for sure: The odds were against Rusher. No doubt he was a reclamation project, and Alford and his staff decided to roll the dice on him. It's a well-established, and dubious, practice for college basketball coaches to take chances on high-risk players. Sometimes it pans out. Other times it doesn't.
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I can't fault Alford and his staff for trying to help Rusher.
But you can't point the finger at Rusher for failing to change. Remember, there are others who bear responsibility for what happened. Leadership starts in the home, and Rusher's parental leadership appears to have been nonexistent. Rusher, one of seven children, was the only child in his family to graduate from high school.
Still, he came to UNM's campus academically ill-prepared. One of the many high schools he attended, Kashmere High School, was labeled a "dropout factory" by John Hopkins University.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that it took Rusher so long to gain NCAA eligibility.
After signing a letter of intent with the Lobos in 2007, Rusher was finally cleared to play two years later on July 6.
Less than three weeks later, he was dismissed from the team for "personal issues" - likely a euphemism for his brash attitude.
Apparently, Rusher was talented - and temperamental.
"He was a nice guy, but he couldn't control his temper," said an anonymous source who was familiar with the situation.
But you don't just develop an attitude problem. My best guess is there's a pattern of Rusher's misbehavior that no one nipped in the bud.
No one really took a genuine interest in him. That is, until it was too late.
It wasn't until college, until Alford and former assistant Chris Walker invested in Rusher, helped him become the first person in his family to graduate from high school, and saved him a scholarship while he was busy getting his academic affairs in order.
But it needed to start earlier.
If not from his parents, Rusher needed guidance from his coaches in high school. But they were too preoccupied with winning games. Rusher, the superstar, was pampered, all his defective characteristics ignored, his academic disparity forgiven.
I never met Rusher, so I went searching for someone who could or would defend him.
One of his former coaches, Bruce Glover, who coached him at Bellaire High School, refused to comment on the situation. When the Daily Lobo contacted Kashmere High School, where Rusher played basketball during his senior season, we were told that Rusher's former coach retired. How convenient.
It seems somewhere along the way, a bunch of influential people failed the 21-year-old would-be freshman.
So what good does all the pampering he received from high school coaches do him now?
It looks like Rusher's only friends were here at the University.
But the two years of discipline he received from Alford and his staff don't compensate for 19 years of letting it slide.
And now Rusher's run out of mulligans. So this is his punishment.
It's just unfortunate that the people who failed him will go undisciplined.
