You comb the newspaper files, looking for some whiff of a clue to Kelvin Sampson’s crimes against common sense.

You find guideposts, but nothing that bangs you over the head like the alleged NCAA violations that seem certain to cost Sampson his job at Indiana. He is accused of breaking phone restrictions stemming from his Oklahoma violations, and of lying to NCAA investigators.

“When you hire sleaze,” wrote Indianapolis Star columnist Bob Kravitz with brutal candor, “you get covered in the sleaze.”

“Sampson appears to have been profoundly arrogant, profoundly ignorant or a little bit of both,” wrote Doug Gottlieb of ESPN.com.

Mind if we add massively stupid?

Maybe Sampson was better suited to working for underdog programs – Montana Tech, where he started as a head coach, and Washington State, his next job – than he was a purebred outfit like Indiana. He once told me about working in tobacco warehouses as a kid in his native North Carolina; hot, grubby work that gave him an appreciation for hardscrabble life.

Later, he recalled fondly the daunting drive west in an old beater with his wife Karen to Butte, Mont., where they shared a skimpy, run-down apartment. From a 7-20 start there, he took Montana Tech to three straight 22-win seasons, making long, long bus trips – including one to Alberta where the door came loose and had to be duct-taped and held in place on the ride home.

He worked wonders at Washington State after starting there at the age of 31 in 1987, taking the Cougars to the NCAA Tournament in 1994.

There was this: Early in his tenure at WSU, the school reprimanded one of Sampson’s assistants for watching a recruit shoot baskets.

And with it, this haunting quote from Sampson: “We’ve done everything that should be done. We’re not going to stoop to cheating.”

When he successfully recruited one of the players who began turning around the WSU program, junior college guard Terrance Lewis, Sampson told The Times, “People want to know how we got these kids. Hard work, old-fashioned hard work. We called Terrance Lewis 900 times and wrote him 2,000 letters.”

Unfortunately, the rules now don’t allow for 900 calls to a recruit. In 1991, NCAA rules began limiting them to one a week. Maybe Sampson, a tireless worker, somehow justified his indiscretions with his passion.

He was a surprise hire at Indiana two years ago, when the Hoosiers couldn’t seem to find the right fit. His arrival created a firestorm in that he and his Oklahoma staff were found to have made 577 impermissible phone calls, stirring concern that he might run amok at Indiana, a place that hangs five national title banners and a reputation for doing it cleanly.

Sampson had been a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. When he got whacked for the Oklahoma violations, the NABC reprimanded him and put his membership on probation for three years.

Ted Kitchel can say, “I told you so.” Upon the Sampson hire, the Indy Star quoted the ex-Hoosiers forward as saying, “I wouldn’t have hired Sampson to coach my fifth-grade girls team.”

Somebody else was prescient. Kravitz wrote the other day that Mike Davis, the Bob Knight successor who departed in 2006, told him “Sampson would have IU in hot water within three years.”

So he’s ahead of schedule. He’s been on the job only 23 months.