MSU officials said they never questioned assistant basketball coach Mark Montgomery’s education because head coach Tom Izzo saw Montgomery’s graduation ceremony. Reports published Wednesday revealed discrepancies on his résumé.
“Tom saw him graduate himself,” athletics director Ron Mason said. “There was just nothing there. It wasn’t like Mark was trying to mislead us.”
A report in The Detroit News on Wednesday revealed that Montgomery and four other college coaches in Michigan had lied on their résumés. Montgomery, who joined the Spartans’ basketball coaching staff last season, claimed on his résumé that he had graduated from MSU in 1992.
Thinking he had earned his degree, Montgomery attended his graduation ceremony and has considered himself an MSU graduate ever since. He first realized something might not be right when a reporter called him earlier this month.
After checking into the situation, Montgomery discovered he was three credits shy of earning his diploma in food system economic management.
“It had me sick for about three days,” Montgomery told The State News. “It’s just something that I wish never happened.”
Although new MSU coaches’ résumés are usually checked by associate athletics director Shelley Applebaum, it didn’t seem necessary when MSU hired Montgomery away from Central Michigan University prior to last season because Izzo, who was an assistant at the time, attended the 1992 graduation ceremony.
Mason called the inconsistency an “honest mistake” and reiterated that he wouldn’t punish the coach. Montgomery plans to earn the three credits and his degree during the spring.
While playing for MSU from 1989-92, Montgomery was a two-time Academic All-Big Ten honoree.
“It never even crossed my mind,” he said about not receiving a diploma after the graduation ceremony. “After I had taken the 19 credits my last semester, I figured I was all set.”
After leaving MSU in June 1992, he tried out with the Minnesota Timberwolves before going on to play professional basketball in Europe for four years.
Before the 1997-98 season, Montgomery joined the Central Michigan basketball coaching staff as an assistant. He gave the school a résumé similar to the one he gave MSU.
“We pretty much took their word for it, as I think was a common practice at many institutions,” said Marcy Weston, Central Michigan’s senior associate director of athletics. “It’s an academic appointment, but he’s not teaching a class, so his food service degree was not dependent on his coaching.”
Five days after Notre Dame hired George O’Leary as its football head coach in December 2001, he resigned after he admitted lying on his résumé. After the incident, many media outlets began checking information coaches submitted on résumés.
In May, Tom Collen quit his women’s basketball head coaching job at Vanderbilt a day after he was hired when a newspaper ran a story claiming he lied about earning two master’s degrees. Collen later proved that he had earned both degrees.
“It goes a little overboard sometimes, like in that case, where a guy was out of a job who shouldn’t have been,” Mason said. “But accuracy and truthfulness are what we’re looking for.”
Staff writer Krista Latham contributed to this report.
Romando Dixson can be reached at dixsonro@msu.edu.
