“Everyone that did something wrong has been rewarded,” said Sally Dear, a former adjunct lecturer who believes she was fired for being a whistleblower. She helped uncover preferential treatment for basketball players.

Dear is now teaching classes at SUNY Oneonta and Syracuse University, wishing she could return to Binghamton, where she taught for years and recently was awarded a Ph.D. Dear maintained she was unjustly punished for trying to uphold the university’s academic standards.

“I should be able to teach at this university,” she said. “I don’t even dare apply; I’ll never get the job. They’ll laugh if they get my application.”

On the court, Binghamton resembles an intramural team. It has three capable Division I players and will play the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (4-25) in an opening-round America East tournament game on Thursday. The combination of the scandal and the implementation of new recruiting standards handcuffed the program. The effort is there, but the talent is lacking.

“They came here and they were so bad, I really felt bad for them,” Brennan said of Binghamton’s game at Vermont. He added about the bizarre nature of the scandal, “No one really cares who wins the America East, when it gets right down to it.”

It will probably take at least two more years before Binghamton is competitive again in its conference. Binghamton’s new faculty athletic representative, Jim Stark, said there was a strong core of freshmen in place as well as an important ingredient that was missing under the previous administrative regime — patience.

Stark said there are better procedures in place to handle student-athletes who present an academic risk and people in charge who want to win the right way. He pointed to Coach Mark Macon’s throwing the starting center Kyrie Sutton off the team this fall after he was accused of possessing stolen property. Stark said he was not sure that would have happened under the previous regime.