Three Stories about College Basketball. Sort of.

 

It’s a little later in the season than Curmie normally writes about college basketball: we’re already into the second weekend of the NCAA tournament, after all.  Nor is this piece focused primarily on the whimsicality of the selection committee, although that sort of comes into play.  What we have instead is the three-topic essay about things at least tangential to basketball.

First up: the Big 12 tournament, held at the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City.  There were a lot of complaints last year about how ugly the court was; an article in the Topeka Capital-Journal describes “a court design that could be generously described as unusual.”  Those folks were being kind.  The court was the perfect storm of ugly, boring, and self-indulgent: little “XII”s all lined up in a symmetrical pattern on a grey surface.  Curmie likes you too much to show a photo here, but if you’re curious, Gentle Reader, click here. 

That article also quotes Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark as saying, “we wanted to make a profound statement.”  Well, they did that.  Unfortunately, that statement was that the league was being run by fucking idiots… or, perhaps by blind folks.  Yormark also said that all the players loved the floor.  He obviously didn’t talk to the players quoted in various articles… or he was lying: certainly a possibility, as admitting a mistake is apparently outside the realm of possibility.

A few weeks ago, when Curmie heard the conference was going to go in a different direction, he rejoiced.  He shouldn’t have.  What the league did was to spend an estimated $185,000 to rent (rent!) a spiffy LED floor that could show all kinds of cool graphics, team logos, updated stats and similar grooviness.  Of course, a lot of that was only going to be really legible from one side of the court, but we can imagine that stuff like team logos could swirl around the space.  Little of that stuff would be visible to TV viewers, but there were snippets.  But when the game was actually going on… the same fugly design as last year. 

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the biggest problem.  The damned floor was slippery.  Well, that’s what a lot of players said.  Others, presumably, weren’t bothered.  Curmie heard about it on a Kansas radio broadcast before the (men’s) regular season even ended.  That’s because KU women’s coach Brandon Schneider had warned men’s coach Bill Self about it after the KU women’s team played on it in their conference tournament.  At the time, the men’s team might get a “double bye,” or they might not.  It was even suggested that getting a lower seed might almost be preferable, as you’d have a game against a lesser team to familiarize yourselves with the court before playing a team that might legitimately beat you. 

True, there was a track record for the LED court, but it was mostly for exhibition games and the like: in other words, where the show was more important than the outcome.  Even the floor’s defenders admitted that the floor takes getting used to.  But K-State forward Taj Manning went straight to the point, noting not only that one of his teammates got a migraine from the lights, but that it was “slippery” and “a bad floor; they shouldn’t bring it back.”  Texas Tech coach Grant McCasland added that “I think with size around the basket it's not [a big issue] but the quickness of guard play, and stop-and-start action -- it just has a different response than what we're used to.”  In other words, it changes the dynamics of the game: giving the advantage to teams with size and power over those with speed and agility.  Texas Tech, who was already playing without their best big man, lost their star guard (and projected 1st-round draft pick) Christian Anderson when he slipped and suffered a groin injury during the Iowa State game.  Coincidence?  Perhaps.

The complaints finally grew loud enough that the league decided to change back to last year’s ugly but predictable floor for the semi-finals and final.  Be it noted: between the men’s and women’s tournaments, there were 30 games played.  27 of them were on the LED floor, despite the fact that concerns were raised in the first women’s games nine days earlier.  Of course, two things remain pretty constant in the world of major sports organizations (NCAA, IOC, NFL, FIFA…).  1). There’s one thing pretty certain about proclamations that it’s all about player safety: it’s never about player safety.  Witness, for example the 2023 Super Bowl or the 2015 Women’s World Cup in soccer.  2). And, as the latter example illustrates, player safety complaints matter more when they come from men rather than women.

Look, Gentle Reader, Curmie doesn’t know whether that court is literally unsafe or whether it just takes a little getting used to.  But it’s certainly different, and therefore should not have even been considered for a post-season conference tournament.  If one of those early-season invitationals like the already stupid “innovative” Geico Players Era “Festival,” go for it.  Everybody knows going in what they’re going to get, and the tournament is clearly more about flash and trash than basketball, anyway, so why not?  But not in a conference tournament with NCAA bids and seedings on the line.

Moving on.  There’s speculation that the appearance of the Queens University Royals in this year’s NCAA tournament might be their last.  The small Presbyterian-affiliated school with an undergraduate population of only a little over 1200 won the Atlantic Sun Conference tournament this year, defeating regular season champion Central Arkansas in overtime in the championship game.  The Royals moved up from Division II in 2022; this was their first year of eligibility to compete in the NCAAs.  (Don’t ask why the wait; Curmie has no idea.) 

So why the problem?  Well, Queens announced its merger with Elon University in December; the details will be worked out by the end of the summer.  Does that mean the two schools will have only one basketball team between them?  It’s possible.  Indeed, someone named Rob Reinhart proclaimed that Queens won’t have a team after this year.  Reinhart, or whoever he is, has been named a troll, though, so there’s that.  Still, the two campuses are only a couple miles apart, so it wouldn’t be difficult to merge the teams after staffing and other logistics are worked out.

There doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer at this point, but the probability is that, at least in the short term, the two schools will have different teams, playing in different conferences (Elon is in the Coastal Athletic Conference).  It will all depend on the details of the merger agreement, but if there can be teams called the University of North Carolina at Wilmington or Texas A&M Corpus Christi, then it doesn’t seem impossible that two affiliated schools could operate their athletics programs independently.  Or maybe it is.  We shall see.

Finally, there’s this year’s manifestation of Bruce Pearl being Bruce Pearl.  The most recent story was about his rant against the University of North Carolina’s firing of head coach and alumnus Hubert Davis, bemoaning the school’s lack of loyalty.  Before that, though, was his claim that the Miami (of Ohio) RedHawks shouldn’t be in the NCAA field despite their undefeated regular season after losing in the first round of their conference tournament.  Here’s The Athletic’s Will Leitch’s commentary on Pearl: 

This was a man literally banned by the sport who is now, and I suspect moving forward, going to be its public face, right there talking to the camera during the three weeks college basketball has the sports world’s undivided attention.  I can think of no better metaphor for the state of college basketball (and, really, the world).

Then he moves on the Pearl’s argument: 

Not having the RedHawks in the tournament — a tournament with 68 freaking teams in it — would have essentially argued not just that their regular season accomplishment meant nothing, but that the regular season, anyone’s regular season, was in fact pointless: It would tell college basketball fans across the country that there was no reason for any of them to pay attention until March, something non-college basketball fans already do, but nonetheless is not exactly the message you want to send to your most loyal customers.

The situation was aggravated, of course, by Pearl’s advocacy for Auburn, the team he coached last year and which, thanks in no small part to his interference advocacy, is now coached by his son. 

Bruce Pearl has been an unethical gasbag for years.  Curmie described him thus in 2010: 

Pearl and many (most?) of his brethren don’t give a crap about under-prepared kids in general, just the 6’8” ones with post-up skills. And when they’ve served the only purpose Pearl has for them, namely winning basketball games and thereby inflating his salary, he’s perfectly willing to toss them, 70% of them, sans degree or NBA contract, on the scrap heap.

Curmie isn’t a fan, to say the least.

But here’s the problem: Curmie agrees with him on both of these issues.  Unless there was some locker-room stuff we don’t know about, firing Davis was remarkably stupid.  The Tarheels’ best player, Caleb Wilson, was lost for the season due to a pair of injuries.  With him in the lineup, they were 19-4, including five wins against ranked teams.  Without him, they were 5-5, including losses in their first games in both the ACC and NCAA tournaments.  A little loyalty, or at least recognition that sometimes you have bad luck, wouldn’t have come amiss.

As for the NCAA selections…  Well, if I tell you that the team that won both the regular season and tournament in the Big East (St. John’s) was a 5-seed and the team that came in second in both (UConn) was a 2-seed, that should tell you how much the committee really cares about getting things right.  (Curmie had St. John’s as a 2 and UConn as a 4.)  And there’s absolutely no question that Miami shouldn’t have been in the tournament.  Yes, they went undefeated in the regular season, but their strength of schedule in the non-con according to KenPom was #361 (of 365).  If they’d played literally anyone actually good and lost a close game against, say, Ohio State (or even Cincinnati), that would probably have been the best game they played all year, but no one would be arguing for them; they’re somewhere around the 90th best team. 

Their best win was against Akron, at home, by one possession; they won four (!) games in overtime.  On the one hand, that makes them scrappy and well-coached.  On the other hand, it means that if in any of those four games, a single jump-shot in regulation had been a quarter of an inch in one direction or the other and therefore rattled in instead of out or vice versa, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.  They’d have taken their automatic bid to the NIT (the way Curmie’s former employer did, having won their conference regular season title and then losing in the championship game on their opponent’s home court (!) instead of a first-round loss to the #198 team in the country on a neutral court).  Note to Will Leitch: pay a little attention or you’ll say something stupid.

Curmie will grant that CBS shouldn’t have let Pearl opine about Auburn, but they probably couldn’t resist.  They also, of course, called on Wally Szczerbiak, unquestionably one of the two best players in RedHawks history, to make the case for his alma mater.  They probably think it’s cute.  They’re wrong.

So… that’s enough college basketball talk for now.  Until the next topic comes up, at least.

"Scholar-Athletes" Ought to Graduate

My political/cultural blog over on Livejournal—the one that has apparently decided it doesn’t want to let me post there any more—was subtitled “From the Radical Middle.” The point was (and is) that few people who actually think have what others would regard as a consistent ideology. I’m liberal on this issue, conservative on that one, libertarian here, socialist there. And while others may regard my politics as consistently liberal, I don’t. I hasten to add here that I don’t run away from the label the way, say, John Kerry did in the ’04 election; I just don’t think it applies. But I’ve been accused of worse.

One way in which I am a “liberal,” or a “progressive,” or whatever those folks are calling themselves now, is that I see the Obama administration not as the conservative talking heads do, as a socialistic hegemon unwilling to grant the opposition the right to sit at the table, but rather as the precise opposite: my problem with the President is that I perceive him as too willing to listen, too interested in getting bi-partisan support, too reticent about metaphorically breaking a few legs. My approach: “You want to filibuster? Go ahead, but you’re going to have to do it like Jimmy Stewart in ‘Mister Smith Goes to Washington’: we’re not going to pull legislation because you threaten. Don’t worry, we’ll make sure the television cameras are there so the whole country can see what a pompous, hypocritical, puerile little jackass you are.” 

“Senator Lieberman, you were re-elected on a platform that included a health care package that looks a whole lot like what you’re now opposing. You can vote against it if you want, but if you vote against cloture, kiss that committee chairmanship good-bye. Oh, and if you say word one about this conversation to anyone you’re out of the caucus altogether.” “As for you, Representative Stupak, would you rather receive the endorsement of the DNC, or would you rather we actively solicit an actual Democrat to run against you in a primary? If the former, then become persuaded that the safeguards already present in the bill actually exist, STFU, and vote for the damned thing, because your 15 minutes of fame has expired.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of bi-partisanship. There have been occasions when, in those elections between two generally equally mediocre candidates, I’ve voted for “gridlock.” (I may not be the libertarian I once was, but those roots run deep.) But it became very clear very early in this administration that the Republicans—all of them, not just the pre-existing frothing-at-the-mouth brigade—made a collective decision to do everything in their power to obstruct any initiative generated by this President, whether such a measure would help the country or not, whether their constituents would benefit or not, even whether they themselves were already on record supporting the idea or not. 

And while the first few years of this millennium certainly demonstrated that the Republicans are horrible at governance, they did study long enough at the Karl Rove School of Outrageous Prevarication and Political Slimeballitude to get pretty good at ululating that the minority didn’t get absolutely everything they wanted at a negotiation, at playing to the simmering racial animus that motivates much of their base, at whining about the (corporatist) media when those so-called journalists actually do their job (by accident, no doubt), and at creating Astroturf events which get lots of press coverage but actually demonstrate the failures of the American educational system that anyone could believe the crap being spewed out there. It’s all about their power, and if there’s no country left at the end of their disingenuous and petulant outbreaks, well, that’s a risk they’re apparently willing to take.

The point is, the President tried bipartisanship, even repeatedly sent his minion Rahm Emanuel out to chastise his own left wing (this from the guy the right-wing media keeps calling a socialist) when they resisted the dilution beyond recognition of the fundamental points of what we—those millions more of us who voted for him than for the other guy—thought was his agenda. And yet he has been labeled by the right as being somehow an extreme partisan (compared to his predecessor? really?). The correct response is the one we’ve all been tempted to make when accused of something of which we’re completely innocent: “You call that [fill-in-the-blank]? Here (with demonstration) is [fill-in-the-blank].

But this entry isn’t really about politics. It’s about college sports; specifically, it’s about men’s basketball and the NCAA tournament which some of you may have noticed is currently transpiring. You see, a couple months ago, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the first person in that job to actually care about education in a very long time indeed, made headlines by walking into the lion’s den of the NCAA meeting in Atlanta and pointing out, if I might mix my metaphors here, that the emperor has no clothes. 

He argued, for example, that the cozy little one-and-done rule worked out by the NBA and the NCAA is pretty much a fraud. It has considerable potential to hurt the game, hurt (some of) the athletes, hurt the fans… but the NBA gets to use college ball as its unpaid minor league, the NCAA gets to profit from the labors of athletes already good enough, at 18, to play professionally, and both get to continue the pretense that they give a damn about anything or anyone but themselves.

Still, there’s little chance of changing that stupid rule. A rule that could be changed, however, from outside the NCAA if need be (although I wouldn't recommend that approach), is tied to graduation rates. Duncan talked about this two months ago, and repeated it this week. Mike Celizic, one of the more thoughtful sportswriters around these days, has picked up the cue. You see, Duncan suggested that for a team to be eligible to compete in the NCAA basketball tournament, they’d have to actually graduate (gasp) 40% of their players within six years (and those who leave early to pursue an NBA career, who transfer to another school, or even who leave in good academic standing wouldn’t count against them!). 

With all those caveats, with all the assistance available to jocks (and often unavailable to other students), with tuition and fees paid (don’t even start with that nonsense about all their other expenses, as if kids without jump-shots don’t have the same problems without the pampering), requiring a 40% graduation rate to go to the tournament is roughly equivalent to saying you can’t get a driver’s license unless you can identify the brake pedal.

But the whining from the NCAA, coaches, and other hypocrites has been, well, reminiscent of the Boehner Brigade’s mendacity. Tennessee’s Bruce Pearl, who is very, very, good at rationalization and even better at recruiting kids who, in Celizic’s words, “have less interest in going to class than a cat has in taking swimming lessons,” whimpers that all he wants to do is provide “the opportunity to students that aren’t prepared.” Celizic rightly calls “BS” (and I don't mean Bachelor of Science) on that. Pearl and many (most?) of his brethren don’t give a crap about under-prepared kids in general, just the 6’8” ones with post-up skills. And when they’ve served the only purpose Pearl has for them, namely winning basketball games and thereby inflating his salary, he’s perfectly willing to toss them, 70% of them, sans degree or NBA contract, on the scrap heap. 

But compared to Gary Williams of Maryland, who manages to graduate only 1 in 12 of his players (despite a contract which rewards him for his players’ academic success), Pearl is a pedagogical poster-child. Similarly, the NCAA, whose College Republican-style automata drone on about “student-athletes” or even “scholar-athletes” instead of “players,” is, as usual, a lot longer on sanctimony than on substance.

It’s important at this point to explode the canard that “everybody else is doing it, and we can’t compete unless we do, too.” Horse puckey. No program is without its skeletons, and I adopt something of the attitude of Restoration comedy that the ones who trumpet their righteousness the loudest probably have the most to hide. That said, there are many programs that recruit young men (and women—but there’s less, not to say no, hypocrisy on the women’s side) who actually want to get an education, and who ultimately earn a degree. The folks at insidehighered.com, for example, have set up their own bracket, with teams advancing based on their success at achieving the NCAA’s Progress Rate. Last year’s winner: North Carolina, who won the real tournament, too. This year’s winner: Kansas, who defeats fellow #1 seed Duke in the finals… a scenario which could very easily play out in the actual tournament, too. The website also, incidentally, chuckles at itself a little for, picking, say, Ohio over Georgetown. Oh, wait…

In other words, don’t sing me a long sad song about how you can’t compete and educate at the same time—not if the likes of North Carolina, Kansas, and Duke can manage especially high graduation rates. And don’t complain about Mr. Duncan’s proposal, ‘cuz when they make me Tsar, it’s gonna look like this. First off, we start at 40%, but that number goes up by 5% every year until it reaches 75%. Yes, 75%. If the departure of a player in good academic standing doesn’t count against a team, that’s not an unreasonable standard. The first time a team falls below a standard within a five-year period, they get a warning, and all players in good academic standing are free to transfer to another school without a waiting period. 

Second time in a five-year period: no post-season play of any kind, students in good standing can transfer without penalty, and the coach is summarily fired and barred from working in any capacity at any NCAA school for three years. See if you can make $2.4 million a year working at the carwash, Bruce. Third time in a five-year period: same punishment for the Athletic Director. You want “scholar-athletes”? I’ll show you “scholar-athletes.”

Of course, this will increase the pressure on people like me to be kind to lazy idiots who take up a disproportionate amount of our time with no care, let alone hope, for success in the classroom. I was once asked by my boss (not at my current university) to give an independent study to the starting power forward and, regardless of how he performed, to give him a C or better. I said no. I once failed a star athlete who easily exceeded the maximum number of allowable absences (he did claim that one of them should have been excused because he was in court… being convicted of an E felony), never wrote either of the required papers, missed a test and a couple of quizzes altogether, and got something like a 37 on the final. But I had an assistant coach badger me for days, pleading this little punk’s case. I said no. Repeatedly. 

And if I can do it, so can (and likely will) a lot of other faculty around the country. But, just to make sure, we’ll make any interference with the grading process (including advocacy) by any coach a violation of NCAA rules. There are also a handful of extremely good basketball players who are just, well, stupid. That’s why they can go to the NBA at any time, and the NBA will also be obligated to underwrite a legitimate minor-league system for players who have no interest in college. It works in baseball; it can work in basketball.

Oh, and this column wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t enumerate the entire Wall of Shame of this year’s NCAA tournament participants who don’t graduate 40% of their players. In order of increasing ineptitude/amorality: Louisville. Georgia Tech. Clemson. New Mexico State. Missouri. Baylor. Kentucky. Tennessee. Washington. Arkansas-Pine Bluff. California. Maryland. There are some very good universities on that list… maybe even some that could be shamed into doing the right thing if they got enough bad press. Just doing my part…