Trump Actually Has Some Interesting Ideas... Except...

Curmie was scrolling through the “Memories” function on Facebook earlier this week and came across a post from last year, discussing (OK, bragging about) having a very accurate bracket for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.  What’s relevant, however, is the end of that post: “Interestingly, I watched far fewer games than usual. Mercenaries don't interest me as much as students do.”

It’s certainly true that the game is fundamentally different now than it was even a few years ago.  All five starters on this year’s champion Michigan Wolverines were transfers.  Two starters for Curmie’s beloved Kansas Jayhawks were playing for their fourth different college team.  As of this writing, still early in the transfer window, only three players from the dozen Jayhawks players who logged the most minutes this season have not either lost eligibility or entered the transfer portal.  One of them is a certain lottery pick in the NBA draft, so he won’t be back.  The other two totaled a little under 400 minutes in the 2025-26 season between them; seven individual players had over 600.  [EDIT: now one of those two has also entered the portal.]  At least three of the five players in the portal are almost certainly gone.  It’s certainly time to stop pretending that there’s anything “amateur” about any of this.

The first and most obvious of the things that have changed of late is that now it’s all (as opposed to just “mostly”) about money.  Fans can complain all they want how players now care more about the name on the back of the jersey than the name on the front, but if you’re a 20-year-old kid, especially one from a poor family, who gets offered hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of dollars more to play for Spider Breath Ag & Tech than you were getting at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople… aren’t you going to take the money and run?  After all, you know you’re one serious ACL injury away from never making any money as a player, and chances are you weren’t in college to get an education in the first place.

The system certainly privileges teams with lots of money, generally in the form of boosters.  This was already true to some degree—there aren’t a lot of universities that can offer luxury accommodations for athletes or spend several million dollars a year for a head coach—but the brave new world is far worse.  You could hire a half dozen full professors for what some universities are paying for a single good but not even Honorable Mention All-League basketball player.  (This is where you, Gentle Reader, say “and football is even worse,” and Curmie glances skyward and nods ruefully.)

Finally, the development of players is no longer a priority.  Back in the dark ages (the 2010s), teams would recruit a player, help him get better, and reap the rewards in his junior and senior years.  That doesn’t happen anymore.  There are exceptions—Purdue’s Braden Smith became the NCAA’s all-time assist leader this season in large part by also setting the record for most games played in a Boilermaker uniform—but most of the top players will transfer elsewhere or enter the NBA draft.  Getting a player up to the level where he can really help a good team be better is now simply allowing other teams to offer a little more money, or immediate playing time, or whatever.

NIL and the portal may be a considerable short-term benefit to players, but they’re not good for the game, and they’re awful for fans.  At least in the sports leagues that admit to being professional—the NBA, NFL, etc.—players sign long-term contracts, so they’ll stay with the team for a few years; some even insist on no-trade contracts.  The NCAA allows unlimited free agency every year.  It’s insane.

Curmie, of course, is not the only one to notice all this.  Many, if not most, fans agree that the status quo is absurd.  One such person is a guy named Donald J. Trump, and he’s in a position to do something about it.  Or he thinks he, at least.  Curmie acknowledges that Trump’s Executive Order on championship weekend was a). timed to get maximum exposure and b). an opportunity to distract from any story that includes the words “Epstein,” “Iran,” or “inflation.”  Curmie further stipulates that the EO will certainly be challenged in court; even Jack Marshall, who has defended some pretty outrageous activity by Dear Leader, says this one is “flat-out unconstitutional.”

Still, to quote The Athletic’s Ralph D. Russo and Justin Williams, “multiple sources who have contributed to the document told The Athletic before the order was released that its goal was to spur legislative action,” presumably rather than going into effect per se. There is at least one bill, the so-called SCORE Act (that’s the cutesy acronym for the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act… somebody spent weeks coming up with that title, no doubt) which does some of the things the administration wants, but it’s not assured of passing the House and apparently stands no chance in the Senate.

The major problem, of course, is that the NCAA can’t really function without some level of antitrust exemption, but, to be frank, the NCAA can’t be trusted to operate in the best interests of anyone but, well, the NCAA: not the athletes, not the universities, not the sports, and certainly not the fans. 

OK, but let’s look at what the EO says.  The introduction includes the following argument, about which there is little dispute:

The convergence of enormous pressure to win in football and basketball and the loosening, both by litigation and by State legislation, of consistent rules or limits concerning eligibility, transfers, and pay-for-play schemes has created an out-of-control financial arms race in these sports that is driving universities into debt, threatening to siphon resources from other sports, and damaging student-athletes’ educational and graduation opportunities.  The athletics-related financial threats these crucial universities face are substantial: Already, one major athletic program closed fiscal year 2025 with $535 million in athletics-related debt, and another has $437 million in such debt, while others face enormous annual athletics-related deficits.  These financial perils will inevitably siphon funds from universities’ educational and research purposes, which could impact their capabilities and responsibilities as Federal contractors and grantees.  

It’s worth noting in this regard that only a handful of universities were actually making money from their athletics programs even prior to the surge in NIL spending.  Yes, they make pots of money from TV contracts and the like, but the costs are enormous: salaries for coaches, trainers, and other staff; facilities, including absurdly lavish living facilities for athletes; travel—not just to games, but to bring prospects to campus and to send coaches to scout high school players; training meals; the list goes on and on.  And whereas it’s true that athletics programs often generate donations, more often than not such largesse is bestowed only on athletics: the wealthy alum who might otherwise have funded much-needed renovations to the library or the chemistry lab decides to buy a fancy new scoreboard for the basketball court instead.

Revenons à nos moutons…  The highlights of the Executive Order are as follows:

    Outlawing payments to athletes above “fair market value” for “goods and services” provided by the athlete.  If Curmie is reading this correctly, it means that a fat-cat booster can’t pay a star player $5 million for doing a radio ad.  The intention is great, but this is almost impossible to enforce without putting a dollar limit on NIL, and that’s problematic both ethically and, one suspects, constitutionally.

    Age-based eligibility limits.  It’s difficult to determine the rationale here.  Preventing young girls from entering college early to help the gymnastics team?  Preventing more physically mature players in their mid-20s from playing sports where bulk matters?  (There were a half dozen college football players aged 25 or older last year; Kansas hoopster Gee Ngala was 26, and was, if Curmie remembers correctly, the second-oldest player this season.)

    “Participation in college athletics is permitted for no more than a five-year period, with limited exceptions for military service, missionary service, and other periods of absence from participation that are in the public interest.”  What’s noteworthy here is that whereas voluntary missionary service qualifies for an exemption, injury doesn’t.  This is especially significant in light of the ruling by a state court judge that Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss should be granted an extra year of eligibility because the NCAA improperly denied his petition for a medical redshirt.  (Guess where that judge’s law degree is from… oh, and he got his law degree before septuagenarian Curmie graduated from high school.)

    “Professional athletes cannot return to college athletics.”  A couple of questions here.  First, what’s meant by “professional”?  There are a number of foreign-born basketball players who played professionally in their homelands.  Baylor’s James Nnagi not only played professionally in Europe, he was drafted by the NBA’s Detroit Pistons and played for their summer league team.  The second question is whether the key word here is “return.”  (Curmie’s mind wanders to the ancient Greek word ἀποδίδωμι, which sometimes but not always means “return.”  He won’t bore you with the relevance to theatre history, Gentle Reader.)  Nnagi didn’t return to college because he’d never been there, and he never signed a NBA contract per se.  Oh, and guess what… he’s now in the transfer portal. 

    Allowing only one transfer within that five-year window per athlete with immediate eligibility, with a second available if the athlete earns a four-year degree.  This is a reasonable restriction if it applies only to future transfers, and players who have already transferred more than once retain their eligibility.  Ex post facto, and all that…

    “A national student-athlete agent registry and reasonable protections for student-athletes from excessive  agent commissions.”  A little creepily Big Brother-ish, but perhaps sufficiently warranted so as not as to be bad as Curmie fears.

    And a bunch of logistical stuff.

On the whole, not a bad set of proposals.  A place to start, at least.  If only it were… you know… legal, and stuff.

Plessy v. Ferguson and Sports Organizations in the 2020s

If you’re like Curmie, Gentle Reader, one of the few Supreme Court decisions that was mentioned even in passing in your high school American History class was Plessy v. Ferguson.  Today, this decision, like the Dred Scott case four decades earlier (the only other 19th century SCOTUS ruling the Curmie could name without thinking long and hard), is a reminder of this country’s racist past.  (Yeah, yeah, yeah, racism is still with us, but it sure as hell used to be worse.) 

Plessy affirmed the constitutionality of segregation, provided the facilities, opportunities, etc., were “separate but equal.”  It’s difficult to imagine that anyone actually believed in that “equal” bit in 1896 or at any time after that, but the ruling was allowed to stand for over a half century until finally, in Brown v. Topeka, SCOTUS bothered to notice that equality wasn’t within the same universe as life on the ground for black Americans.

Blacks didn’t have the same rights as whites.  That’s a simple statement of fact, whether we’re talking about employment, educational opportunities, housing, voting rights… even water fountains. “Separate but equal” was always a canard.

Frequent readers of this blog will know that the way Curmie’s mind works is, shall we say, “quirky.”  So it was that he thought of that Supreme Court case from over a century and a quarter ago when he read about the second of two bone-headed decisions by two different organizations controlling two different sports at two different levels.

Josh Gibson of the Homestead Grays

The more recent example was Major League Baseball’s absurd decision to include statistics from the Negro Leagues in their official records.  This catapulted Josh Gibson to the top of the lists in batting average, slugging average, and OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging average) over Ty Cobb in the first instance and Babe Ruth in the latter two.

MLB is living in the fantasy world of the Plessy decision, because in baseball, as in so many other areas, separate was definitely not equal.  The level of competition in the Negro Leagues was not comparable to that in the major leagues.  It just wasn’t.  That doesn’t mean that Gibson or Satchel Paige wouldn’t have prospered had they been allowed to play for the Yankees or the Cubs or whoever, but the fact is that they didn’t play major league ball.

But even if we buy into the fiction that the leagues were comparable, there’s another problem, not even counting the fact that individual Negro League seasons were much shorter than major league seasons; it’s a lot easier to hit for a high average for 91 games (the longest Negro League season) than for a major league season of 154 or 162 games. 

No, Gentle Reader, it’s worse than that.  Even according to the people who did the search that led to the merging of records, the available statistics cover only about 75% of Negro League games.  That means that all of those alleged statistics have next to literally no validity.  Indeed, it’s a virtual impossibility that they’re accurate.  Perhaps those players did even better than the averages we have for them, but it’s more likely that they didn’t: statistics tend to trend toward the middle over time.

Curiously, no seems to be able to say, at this point at least, that Gibson hit x-number of home runs (over 1000, perhaps?) but we know his slugging percentage (!?!).  In other words, folks like John Labombarda of Elias Sports Bureau don’t know how many at bats he had, or how many total bases, but we can somehow accurately intuit the ratio between those arbitrary fanciful utterly fictitious numbers.  Curmie is no statistician, but he does know how numbers work, and, as the Old Vermonter in the joke would say, you cain’t get there from heah.

Nor is it a valid argument to talk about statistical anomalies accruing from changes in the game: live ball vs. dead ball, height of the pitcher’s mound, ballpark configurations, the introduction of artificial turf, etc.  Cy Young really had all those wins, and Nolan Ryan had all those strikeouts… in major leagues games.  Negro League players could have racked up those statistics had they been allowed to play, but they didn’t.  Ted Williams doesn’t get credit for the homers he would have hit had he not served in the military in both World War II and Korea, either.

It is an admirable impulse to want to honor the Buck O’Neills and the Cool Papa Bells of baseball yore.  They are, of course, in the Hall of Fame, but some additional recognition wouldn’t come amiss.  Put their stats on the website, but don’t intermingle them with those of Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth… or of Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, for that matter.  It does no one any good to pretend that segregation didn’t exist.  (Curmie would make a 1984 reference here, but he used that allusion last time.)

But this episode also got me thinking about a different decision by a different collection of idiots regarding a different sport at a different level. And here’s one where the fanciful world of “separate but equal” really is true.  Indeed, the two allegedly different worlds were separate but identical in every significant way. 

If you paid attention to the hype in early February, you’d have thought that Iowa’s Caitlin Clark was about to become the all-time scoring leader in the history of women’s college basketball as she closed in on the numbers compiled by Washington’s Kelsey Plum. Thing was, that record belonged (and still does) to Pearl Moore, who scored over 4000 points between stints at Anderson Junior College and Francis Marion College. (Clark ultimately finished with 3951 points, more than Moore scored at the senior college level, and there really is a difference in the level of the competition the two women faced.)

Lynette Woodard of the Kansas Jayhawks

In terms of Division I women’s basketball, the career points leader at the time was Lynette Woodard, who totaled 3649 points to Plum’s 3527. Woodard played at Kansas a decade and a half or so before I started grad school there. Needless to say, there were a lot of Jayhawk fans incensed about the NCAA’s snub of Woodard. You see, she played when the governing body of women’s intercollegiate sports was the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women; the NCAA at the time had no interest in women’s sports. 

Woodard played for a major university, played the same kind of schedule against the same level of competition, played according to the same rules (well, except that the 3-point line was introduced roughly concurrently with the NCAA’s takeover, so Woodard didn’t profit from it). But the NCAA seems to believe that they invented women’s college basketball, and most of the major media outlets cheerfully let them get away with it. Woodard’s name doesn’t appear, even as a footnote, on a number of lists of “Top 25 Women’s Division 1 scoring leaders.”

In this case, the competition didn’t change at all, but NCAA arrogance denied Woodard her deserved recognition. This isn’t Caitlin Clark’s fault, or Kelsey Plum’s, but the significant event should have been when Clark passed Woodard in late February, not Plum a couple weeks earlier. Clark has done wonders for fan interest in the game, and she seems to be a genuinely good person, something of a rarity among elite athletes. Nothing in my remarks is intended to take anything away from her accomplishments.

Oh, yeah, the racial element. Something of the reverse of MLB. Moore and Woodard are black, Clark and Plum are white. So all the headlines were about one white athlete passing another, when, depending on your perspective, at least one and possibly two black athletes had put up better numbers. Racism? Woodard thinks so, and whereas I’m disinclined to argue with her, I return to one of my mantras: all racism is stupid, but not all stupidity is racist.

In fact, Curmie suspects a situation akin to one I wrote about several years ago, in which I argued that the shooting of a young white woman by a black man was, contrary to the media hype, about male privilege more than race.  Looked at in this light, the similarities between this spring’s actions of the NCAA and Major League Baseball become clearer.

It’s easy to view the respective decisions as opposites: one organization decided to include statistics compiled outside their purview, and the other did not.  Of course, they both got it wrong: the stats that were legitimately separate but equal were treated as if they weren’t, and the ones that compared apples to oranges were viewed as interchangeable.

What unites the two decisions is a frantic if futile attempt to deny the past.  Black baseball players couldn’t play in the major leagues until after the Second World War, but that embarrasses MLB, so they’ll just pretend otherwise.  The NCAA had no interest in women’s sports until the 1980s, but that sorta makes them look sexist, so they’ll just pretend that anything before then didn’t happen. 

Curmie is no right-winger, but he agrees with conservative pundit Jim Pinkerton that “the truth yearns to be free.”  Denying reality, even indirectly, is never a good idea.  Getting MLB or the NCAA to understand that, however, is about likely as likely as putting the toothpaste back in the tube.

The Implications of Returning Reggie Bush’s Heisman

 

Reggie Bush: He’s baaaaaaack.

Former University of Southern California tailback Reggie Bush had his 2005 Heisman Trophy returned to him this week.  It had been “voluntarily” returned when it became clear that Bush had received improper payments to play at USC and therefore shouldn’t have had a college career at all.

The reaction to this reversal has been disquietingly positive.  Indeed, Curmie can’t find anyone other than Jack Marshall of Ethics Alarms (and some of his readers, including Curmie) who thinks this decision is a travesty.  All the talking heads on ESPN nod in agreement as insufferable blowhard Stephen A. Smith intones that the action was “long overdue.”  Various other sports sites generated pretty much the same responses.

Bah.  Humbug.

Reggie Bush was indeed an incredible college football player.  He was a logical choice to win the Heisman in 2005, and he did so over some rather stiff competition.  But that was before it was revealed that he and his family had accepted payments they were fully aware were contrary to NCAA rules.  We’re not talking about buying the kid an unauthorized pizza, here, Gentle Reader.  These were serious charges, and whatever Bush may say now about his innocence, it’s unlikely that USC would have put up so little resistance had they not been pretty certain that there was a fair amount of fire to accompany all that smoke.

It’s also true that the likelihood that Bush wasn’t the only Heisman winner to have broken NCAA rules approaches ontological certainty.  Curmie can think of at least three specific individuals whose guilt has been established to a degree that far exceeds “preponderance of evidence” and is very close to “beyond reasonable doubt” if it hasn’t crossed that threshold, as well.  That doesn’t matter.  It’s the equivalent of getting stopped for going 80 in a 55.  Complaining that other cars were going just as fast isn’t going to get you out of a ticket.  Were you speeding, and not just by a little bit?  Yes?  Then sit down and shut up.

Of course, Bush and USC have been lobbying to get this reversal for some time, and Bush himself staked a claim to a position in the Narcissist’s Hall of Fame by suing the NCAA for defamation for implying (not even saying outright) what virtually everyone believes to be true: that Bush was engaged in “pay-for-play arrangements.”  The statement also says that “Previous penalties, including those that are several years old, will not be re-evaluated or reconsidered based on the recent changes to NIL rules.”  (Yes, they lied.)

Of course, with the advent of NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals, pay-for-play is pretty much happening at every college or university with Division I athletic programs (and probably others, too).  What Bush did (okay, allegedly did) nearly two decades ago would almost certainly be permissible now.  That, coupled with a threat from the likes of 2012 Heisman recipient Johnny Manziel that he’d boycott future Heisman ceremonies until Bush’s award was reinstated, gave the movement some steam.  But seriously… when, exactly, did Manziel develop those “morals and values” he describes in his tweet (or whatever those things are called now)?

Here’s the thing: ex post facto works both ways.  You can’t be charged with a crime that wasn’t a crime when you did it, and you can’t avoid at least ethical responsibility for something that was illegal when you did it but might not be now.  The Heisman Trust’s action (which we can be assured was with the concurrence of the NCAA if not indeed at their behest) is not a pardon; it’s not an act of forgiveness.  It’s a denial of reality: Bush cheated and, unlike USC (which had to surrender scholarships and vacate victories, including the 2004 national championship and the entire 2005 season), is now effectively unpunished.

But this brings up another twist.  As of now, at least, Bush has his Heisman back, but USC still doesn’t have its national championship, which was stripped from them for one reason only: Reggie Bush played on that team.  

Curmie, having grown up in Central New York, became a fan of the local Division I team, the Syracuse Orangemen, in the 1970s.  Twentysomething years later, he enrolled in the PhD program at the University of Kansas, and he’s been a loyal Jayhawk ever since.  The NCAA has stripped victories from the basketball programs at both of those schools.  The Syracuse case involves more moving parts, but the KU case pretty much boils down to one thing: improper payments made to power forward Silvio DeSousa.  There are lots of twists and turns there, including the claim that the university was unaware of an Adidas rep’s shenanigans, but it’s not Curmie’s intention to re-adjudicate that case.  

What is significant, however, is that the NCAA invalidated 15 Kansas wins: the games in which DeSousa played before being retroactively ruled ineligible by the same organization that had previously declared him eligible.  As it happens, the Jayhawks had just recently passed the University of Kentucky to become the NCAA’s winningest team in history; the NCAA verdict put the Wildcats back on top. 

Does this really matter?  No, not really.  But it does put the NCAA in a bit of an ethical bind.  If the organization at the very least signed off on re-instating Bush’s Heisman because what he did is legal now, then the same argument should logically hold for the USC team on which he played, and for the Kansas basketball team.  (Perhaps the Syracuse team should be included, as well, although there were allegations in that case other than pay-to-play.) The list of other programs similarly affected is plenty long; no need to enumerate them all.  It should be noted that those teams have already paid a price in terms of scholarships, recruitment restrictions, and the simple fact that elite players want to be assured they’ll be seen in the post-season.

Of course, there are few organizations of any kind in the world as incompetent, corrupt, and whimsical as the NCAA.  How will they handle this situation?  Curmie’s guess is that they’ll do nothing… at least until someone else sues them.

Is the NCAA Selection Committee Stupid or Corrupt? ¿Por Qué No Los Dos?

Zillionaire basketball coaches who have been fired for corruption even by a university not known for scrupulous ethics tend not to be at the top of Curmie’s heroes list.  Rick Pitino is one such creature.  But when he’s right, he’s right.

Pitino made headlines recently when he savaged the selection committee for the NCAA basketball tournament for not giving a bid to his St. John’s team.  He then refused an invitation to the less prestigious NIT tournament.  Thing is, there is no conceivable way the Red Storm should have been omitted from the “Big Dance.”

Readers who know Curmie personally are familiar with his “Totally Objective But Not Necessarily Accurate” rankings.  Of course, these rankings have proven to be rather accurate, indeed.  This year, they predicted outcomes considerably better than did either the AP or Coaches’ polls.  Curmie has had a bracket in the top 10% nationally (on the ESPN site) several years in a row, and was in the top 1/10 of 1% a couple of years ago. 

The most respected national ranking system is Ken Pomeroy’s KenPom.com.  Other rankings are the BPI (Basketball Power Index) and NET (NCAA Evaluation Tool).  All of these systems are based on objective criteria: the location of the game, the outcome, the quality of the opponent.

All told, then, there are five different ranking systems Curmie is referencing here (his own system has both a “right now” ranking and a “for the season” ranking).  Curmie would have St. John’s as a 5-seed in the “right now” rankings, as an 8-seed for the season.  KenPom would have them as an 8, the BPI as a 6.  Even the massively problematic NET, which Pitino blames for the snub, would have the Red Storm as an 8-seed.  In other words, literally every statistically-based system has St. John’s not merely in the tournament, but comfortably so: they’re no lower that 32nd in any of these rankings; the top 42 are in.

Indeed, St. John’s ranked higher than no fewer than seven teams receiving at-large bids—Clemson, Florida Atlantic, Nevada, South Carolina, Texas A&M, Utah State, and Virginia—in all five categories!  There were a couple others that barely edged out the Red Storm in a single system.

Of course, Florida Atlantic was last year’s Cinderella team, so they get in; South Carolina was picked to be near the bottom of the SEC and their great start made them (for a while) a successful underdog (and their women’s team is really good), and Clemson and Virginia are from the ACC, which always gets preferential treatment.  Usually, it’s Duke; this year, the Blue Devils’ 4-seed is about right. 

It’s apparently North Carolina’s turn to be absurdly over-rated.  Curmie had them as a 3-seed for the season; KenPom and the BPI agree.  The NET and Curmie’s “right now” ranking have them as the last 2-seed.  Who should be the last 1-seed may be up for discussion—Arizona, Auburn, Iowa State, and Tennessee all have a reasonable claim—but it sure as hell isn’t the Tarheels.  What’s worse, they also get a first-round play-in game (overall #1 UConn doesn’t), and they have by far the easiest bracket. 

In Curmie’s “right now” ranking, UConn and Iowa State are the top two teams in the country; they’re in the same quadrant, so only one can make the Final Four.  Meanwhile, UNC is #8, and can get to Glendale without having to beat anyone better than #12 Arizona.  (All four other systems, including Curmie’s ranking for the season, have Arizona ranked higher than North Carolina, so there’s that…)

None of this, of course, means that those teams Curmie is calling over-rated won’t win some games, or even the tournament, but seedings should reflect the past and the present.  There are a lot of teams that don’t belong at all, and St. John’s has plenty of company in feeling… erm… screwed.  Ken Pomeroy has seven teams that didn’t make the tournament ranked higher than South Carolina.

There is always, of course, some controversy surrounding Selection Sunday.  This year seems worse than most.  Curmie can’t recall a year when a team that all of those ranking systems agree should be an 8-seed or higher can’t even get a play-in game as a 10, or one in which a 1-seed wasn’t ranked higher than 8^th in any of those systems, while two other teams from that same conference got bids (or at least seeds) they didn’t deserve.  Curmie’s old, though… maybe he’s forgetting something.

As for the former: maybe Pitino is being punished for past transgressions? Or he stole someone’s girlfriend?  Or committee members are dumber than the proverbial sack of hammers? 

As for the latter: It is true that once upon a time, the ACC was the best college basketball conference in the country.  It is also true that bell-bottom jeans were once considered stylish.  Today, the only plausible explanation for the over-ranking of teams from the fifth-best conference is that the ACC Commissioner has compromising photographs of committee members and barnyard animals.

Court Storming and the Absence of Sprezzatura

After the Wake Forest Demon Deacons beat the Duke Blue Devils 83-79 in basketball Saturday afternoon in Winston-Salem, hordes of Deac fans stormed the court. Actually, Gentle Reader, the previous sentence isn’t quite accurate. Video footage shows that several fans who had gathered under one of the baskets ran onto the court and were already at the free throw line before the game even ended.

These incidents are increasingly commonplace, abetted by television coverage of the events, even as the networks pretend to be appalled by the potential for injuries resulting from the practice. Court-storming may be part of the culture of the sport, but there are—or at the very least should be—limits. Curmie has no problem with displays of post-adolescent exuberance, but the safety of players, coaches, and officials must be paramount.

Duke star Kyle Filipowski is helped off the court
after being injured in a court-storming

The inevitable finally happened, and Duke star Kyle Filipowski was not merely jostled, but injured, in the melee, seriously enough that he had to be helped off the court. As the recipient of a degree from the University of Kansas, Curmie is morally and ethically obligated to despise all things related to Duke basketball 😉, but whereas he wants them to lose every game, he doesn’t really want anyone to get hurt.

The exact extent of Filipowski’s injury is still unclear, but it certainly could affect both the Blue Devils’ chances for the rest of the season and post-season, and, importantly, Filipowski’s future. He’s projected as a first-round draft choice, possibly even a lottery pick, in the upcoming NBA draft. He stands to make tens of millions of dollars over the course of his career… assuming he can play. There is such a thing as a career-ending injury, especially when we’re talking about knees, and that’s what this is; if this injury wasn’t severe, that’s only because of what Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms would call “moral luck.”

The video shows that at least three different Wake Forest fans made contact with Filipowski as he was trying to leave the court. Whether or not the bumping was “intentional” and “personal,” as Filipowski alleges, it was at best reckless and at worst criminal. Let’s face it: the man is seven feet tall; it’s not like he couldn’t be seen. The ethics of the situation, of course, would be the same if it had been a bench player, a student manager, a coach, or a referee who was injured. The incident attracts more headlines because it was Kyle Filipowski who needed to be helped off the court, but the rationale for banning court storming would be the same.

At least two other visiting players have been bumped into by opposing fans in court stormings this season. One of them is Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, probably the most famous women’s basketball player in the country—even more so than WNBA stars. She was “blind-sided” and actually knocked to the floor by an Ohio State fan in a court storming in Columbus.

Imagine if she’d been seriously injured. She wouldn’t have broken the NCAA scoring record for the women’s game, and she wouldn’t be closing in on the real record, held by Lynette Woodard. (The NCAA wasn’t the organization in charge of the women’s game when Woodard played, and they’re being predictably petty, narcissistic, and anal retentive about recognizing Woodard.)

Oops. Once again, Curmie indulged in a little inaccuracy. What he referred to above as “the inevitable finally happen[ing]” had long since happened, as ESPN’s William Weinbaum reports:

In a 2004 court storm, Tucson H.S. star Joe Kay suffered a stroke & was partially paralyzed. “It’s way too long that we've been putting up with this,” Kay told ESPN Sat. after Duke’s Kyle Filipowski got hurt. “I’m completely in favor of banning court storms & field storms.” Now 38, Kay said, “The police should arrest people for going places they are not allowed to go… enforce the rules as they do at other places. It's exactly the same thing.” “Hopefully people will now come to their senses.”

The only thing that’s changed is that Filipowski is known by virtually all college basketball fans across the country, whereas Kay may have been a local celebrity, but folks like me in East Texas weren’t saying “OMG, Joe Kay got hurt in a court storm!” Now, maybe, something will happen… but not unless the powers-that-be actually want it to, and that, despite the copious tut-tutting from the NCAA, conferences, universities, and the media, doesn’t seem to be the case. Indeed, statements of concern and promises of future action from the likes of ACC commissioner Jim Phillips seem very much to be what Curmie’s mom would call “balloon juice.”

Among those who have engaged in court storming this season, both in games in which their team beat Kentucky, were LSU women’s star Angel Reese and South Carolina President emeritus Harris Pastides, who even took to social media to boast about his participation. The problem isn’t going to go away, even in the wake of an injury to a star player, unless there are real, enforceable, guidelines designed both to allow celebrations and to protect the visiting team. And by “enforceable,” I mean sanctions that will be felt, not petty fines of a few thousand dollars to multimillion-dollar programs.

Jay Bilas, probably ESPN’s best analyst (and a former star big man for Duke himself), is outspoken about this issue:

It’s got to stop but it’s not going to. There’s no appetite in college basketball to stop it. The SEC has a rule against it but the institutions are happy to pay the fine because they like the visual. And the truth is, we in the media like the visual too. We put it at the end of every highlight. Years ago, when people used to run out on the field or on the floor, we wouldn’t show it. That was our policy. We don’t have that kind of policies with court stormings. We like it. It’s not stopping and it’s a shame.

Duke coach Jon Scheyer said after the game that when he played, “at least it was 10 seconds and then you could storm the court. Now, it’s the buzzer doesn’t even go off and they’re running on the floor.”

Ten seconds isn’t enough, but 30 probably is. It wouldn’t be difficult to institute a rule that no fans are allowed onto the court, ever, until 30 seconds after the final buzzer. The mechanism already exists in the 30-second clock; let it serve another purpose. The home university can forbid court storming altogether, but they must enforce the ban for 30 seconds. If fans want to celebrate on the court and the home team doesn’t object, so be it, but not until the officials and the opposing team are out of harm’s way.

And if fans are on the court before the game clock has expired, that should be a technical foul on the home team in addition to the other penalties. Would it have mattered this weekend? Duke would have had two free throws and the ball with about a second left in the game. Could they have forced overtime or even won in regulation? It’s extremely unlikely, but the chances wouldn’t have been quite zero.

Whatever the exact rules become, violations must be punished severely. At present, neither the NCAA nor the ACC (in which Wake Forest and Duke play) have any specific sanctions at all in place for court storming. The home university must be responsible for enforcing the rules; failure to do so should be punishable by a significant fine even for the first offense. Curmie suggests $500,000 for the first offense, with half paid to the NCAA or the conference and the other half to the opposing school. Subsequent offenses within a 36-month period would involve stiffer fines, loss of scholarships, and perhaps a prohibition against post-season play.

Any individual violating the rules should be subject to arrest for criminal trespass, and students (after appropriate due process, of course) could be placed on probation, suspended, or even expelled. Anyone who causes physical harm to an official or any representative of the opposing school should face both criminal and civil liability.

Media outlets must agree not to replay footage of court storming, and must cut away from live coverage as quickly as possible (the way they do when some idiot runs onto the field at a baseball game). The cameras should keep rolling, however, with the video available to police and, should there be an injury, to the victim’s legal team.

Chances of this happening: I’m not quite as pessimistic as Jay Bilas, but my nom de plume is Curmie, not Polyanna.

A longer-term solution can be found in the Renaissance concept of sprezzatura, a term used by Baldesar Castiglione in Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) to describe a studied nonchalance, making the difficult appear easy. It expresses a level of confidence, something approaching but not quite reaching arrogance (that difficult task was accomplished, after all). In the basketball world, sprezzatura is Michael Jordan or Stephen Curry swishing a guarded come-from-behind buzzer-beater and offering only a wry smile and a shrug in celebration.

Fans of the truly elite programs (Duke is one, Wake Forest is not), like their players, live in a culture of sprezzatura. They don’t storm the court after a big win, because they expected to win, even if they were the underdog. It was once a cliché that high school coaches in all sports would tell their teams to “act like you’ve been there before.” The fans of the top programs have been there before, too. Wake Forest fans have not… well, not since the days of Tim Duncan, at least, and he graduated before today’s undergrads were born.

Celebrating a win by the home team is great, but it doesn’t have to happen on the court, and it certainly doesn’t involve taunting or assaulting the other team. You haven’t really arrived until you acknowledge that fact and act accordingly.

This essay is a slightly revised and edited version of one which first appeared as a guest column on Ethics Alarms.

NCAA Football, Part 2: Some (Sort of) Solutions

OK, Curmie recently pointed out a handful of the manifold problems with college football as it is currently structured, especially with respect to the bowl system.  There are some issues that are insoluble, either legally (apparently) or structurally.  NIL and the transfer portal aren’t going away, but some tweaks are still possible. 

Next year’s expansion of the playoffs from four to twelve teams is stupid (it potentially adds three games to some teams’ schedules—let’s just forget about all that “student-athlete” rhetoric—but it does solve one problem and mitigate another.  There won’t be an undefeated major conference champion that isn’t given at least the opportunity to win a national title.  If you’re not clearly one of the twelve best teams in the country, STFU if you get ranked 13^th. 

Plus, there will be fewer opt-outs if there’s a national title at stake instead of the rather less impressive distinction of being the champion of the Pop-Tarts Bowl.  (Yes, that’s a real bowl game.)

But these don’t begin to solve all the problems.  Let’s take the ones Curmie identified earlier and offer some possible solutions.   

NIL is becoming the principal if not sole driver of collegiate athletics.  We can’t eliminate the system altogether, but we can impose restrictions.  For example: forbid universities from marketing their players, or seeking contributions from the public (“if you want your team to keep winning, send a check”).  To give a little perspective: it is hardly a secret that Curmie is a fan of the Kansas Jayhawks; KU is the only school from which Curmie has a degree that has Division 1 football. 

Jayhawks coach Lance Leipold was heavily rumored to be a contender for the University of Washington job after their coach, Kalen DeBoer, left for Alabama.  Curmie subscribes to an email list about KU athletics.  The most recent missive manages to whine on three separate occasions about the alleged insufficiency of KU’s NIL funds as a cause for concern.  KU, by the way, is about to give Leipold a substantial raise to his meager $5.7 million salary; it appears likely he’ll soon be able to get the large Coke with his Big Mac combo if he wants it.  Collegiate sports have been mostly about money for a long time; we’re moving towards being exclusively about money.

It would be nice to impose a cap on how much a “student athlete” could make, but that’s probably not feasible.  What could certainly be done is to make all NIL contracts include a promise by the athlete to be available to play in every game, including bowl games, except when ruled medically unable to do so or there is some other reasonable excuse (death in the family, that sort of thing).  “I’m an asshole who doesn’t want to risk injury” is not such a legitimate reason.  NIL sponsors should be permitted to claw back every nickel from players who don’t adhere to this rule.

If Curmie were in a management position with an NFL team, he’d make it clear that he’s a lot more interested in players who want their team to win and do what it takes to make that happen rather than in looking out for themselves alone.  Of course, the average NFL exec is a moron who wouldn’t come to that obvious conclusion, but even curmudgeons can dream, right?

That said, players who stand to make millions as professional athletes are indeed risking their future earnings by playing in bowl games.  They will receive insurance policies based on percentage of their anticipated future income, as determined by independent authorities; the cost of these policies will be shared equally by the NCAA and the player’s university.

The transfer portal will not be open until the day after the national championship game.  Schools who contact players from other teams will be ineligible for any post-season games, including conference championships, for one year (three years for a second offense in the three year period).  Players who advertise their availability prior to that start date will be ineligible to play for anyone for one year. 

And then there are all those bowl games that nobody has ever heard of unless your team plays in it.  Here’s Curmie’s proposal: no bowl game that includes a major conference team and attracts neither 25,000 fans to the stadium nor a TV rating of 1 (i.e., 1% of television sets in the country are tuned to the game) will continue next year.  Those numbers will be halved—12,500 fans and a rating of .5—for games between Group of 5 teams. 

Games that meet only one of those criteria will be on probation: if they reach the goals next year, great.  If their numbers improve but are still below the threshold, the bowl remains on probation.  If the numbers don’t improve, they’re gone.  No new bowl game can be played within 25 miles of the venue for five years.  (A different bowl in the same city that meets the requirements would be allowed to continue.)

Using TV ratings on Sports Media Watch and attendance figures from Wikipedia, Curmie would therefore cancel the Boca Raton and Fenway Bowls immediately, and place the Birmingham, Camelia, Cure, Famous Idaho Potato, Famous Toastery, Frisco, Hawaii, Independence, Las Vegas, Mobile, Myrtle Beach, and New Mexico Bowls on probation.

Of the five current “All-Star” games, the East-West Shrine Bowl would be allowed to continue because of its charitable cause; the others would be cancelled unless they, too, adopt a recognized charity recipient of the game’s revenues.  Such a charity must not be exclusive in terms of race, sex/gender, religion, etc. 

Even if all of these ideas were to be adopted, college football will never be the same.  Curmie supposes there’s something to be said for being upfront about the corruption of the process, but that seems rather a small consolation.  “Student athletes,” especially in football, will increasingly be regarded as commodities to be bought and sold, in large part because they’re marketing themselves that way.  But until someone comes up with a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon in the fall, Curmie will probably continue to watch.  Alas.

 

Athletes Are Both the Most Pampered and Most Abused Students; Both Situations Are Getting Worse

The first part of the title above ought to be self-evident. Far too many universities operate as sports franchises with a few academic courses offered on the side. This, despite the fact that most athletic departments lose money despite TV revenue, ticket sales, etc. 

Even average (by intercollegiate standards) athletes are likely to get a full ride: tuition and fees, room and board.  And that’s not counting NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals which often run well over $100,000 a year for even average players in a major sport at a Division I school. High-end programs in football and basketball get bowl games or in-season (or pre-season) trips to tournaments in exotic locales. The best student physicist at the school might get travel money to a conference in Pittsburgh or something like that, but there’s not going to be a lot of hanging out on the beach on someone else’s dime, much less a tuition waiver and a six-figure income. 

NIL also means that at least some elite athletes in football and basketball are shopping their services to the highest bidder. Every time a star player enters the transfer portal and moves to a different university, the accusations pour forth from the new school’s competitors that they’re “buying players.” Some of those allegations are simply sour grapes; many (most?) aren’t. Of course, the practice has existed under the table for decades, but NIL has certainly exacerbated the problem. 

Then, there are the tutors, the luxurious housing, and other forms of special treatment. A goodly number of athletes, of course, wouldn’t be accepted at Duke or Stanford, or even at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople (extra credit if you get that reference, Gentle Reader), if they didn’t have a jump-shot or some equivalent skill in another sport. 

Bolenciecwcz, the dim-witted football star of James Thurber’s “University Days” (1933) who finally is able to name a mode of transportation after professor and fellow students alike prompt him to say “train,” is a satirical construction, of course, but satire works only if there is the ring of truth. And I suspect the scandal at the University of North Carolina a few years back is more likely the tip of the iceberg than an anomaly. 

Curmie has had a number of students in his classes who actually were the “scholar-athletes” the NCAA pretends anyone with an athletic “scholarship” is. There was the multi-year all-conference tennis player who was also a fine student (in her second language!) and an excellent actress (she got a graduate degree and now works for one of the country’s leading regional theatres), the middle-distance runner who missed the Olympic team by a fraction of a second and did quite well in Curmie’s non-major class, the starting safety on the football team who asked for permission to miss class because he would be interviewing with one of the nation’s top med schools (he got in). 

But there are plenty of examples in the other direction, as well. There was the basketball player who couldn’t write a coherent paragraph about literally anything. There was the football player who complained about his grade in an acting course because he had nothing in common with the character I’d given him in a scene; the character was complaining to his professor about his grade. (Sigh.) Another football player whispered disgusting sexual advances to one of the women in an acting class when I was working with other students. (He came to regret that.) 

My… erm… “favorite,” though, was the star football player who missed about a half dozen more classes than department policy allowed. There were three hour-exams in the course: he got a D on one and failed the other two. He didn’t write either of the required short papers, and he got something like a 31 on the final exam. He subsequently showed up at my office, position coach in tow, to protest his failing grade because one (yes, just one) of his absences should have been excused. His excuse: he was in court… being convicted of an E felony. (Sigh.) 

All that said, it would be easy to make a case that athletes, especially those in sports other than football and basketball, are the most exploited students on campus. Unless, like LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne, what you’re selling is that you look great in a bikini or a miniskirt, you’re not going to get as good an NIL deal as the backup quarterback does. Plus, most sports require that you’ll play more than a dozen or so games; baseball and softball, for example, generally have about 50 games in a regular season. That means, among other things, more road games, and that means more travel, more time out of class, etc. 

The situation is exacerbated enormously by conference re-alignments. Back in the Dark Ages when Curmie was in college, conferences were aligned geographically: schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference were located (wait for it) along the Atlantic coast, the Southeastern Conference was in the southeast, and so on. The Big 10 was in the northern Midwest, and the Big 8 was a little further south and a little further west. 

Rivalries usually centered on proximity: Pittsburgh against West Virginia, Washington against Washington State, Oklahoma against Oklahoma State, and so on. Some rivalries were sport-specific, like Syracuse against Georgetown in basketball. As of about a year from now, none of those pairs of teams will be in the same conference. At the most personal level, this may be the greatest cost of the wholesale shuffling of conferences. Those intense rivalries are part of the fabric of intercollegiate sports. Their prospective demise saddens me. 

Schools moving from conference to conference is nothing new, of course; I can’t think of any conference other than the Ivy League that hasn’t changed at least somewhat in the time since I was an undergrad. But the last couple of years, especially the last few weeks, have been insane. Last year Oklahoma and Texas, two really big names in college athletics, announced they were leaving the Big 12 for the SEC; fans feared for the future of the former conference, which was now down to eight schools. The league responded by adding four new teams to get back to being the Big 12. 

But a few weeks ago UCLA and USC, the two biggest names in the Pac 12, announced that they’ll be joining the Big 10 starting next fall. And then the floodgates opened. The Big 10 and Big 12 have cannibalized the Pac 12, which as of now will be down to four schools come next fall, and one would have to believe that those programs are currently considering their options. And the SEC has its eyes on the two highest profile programs in the ACC (at least in football), Clemson and Florida State. Note that the long-term excellence of Duke and North Carolina in basketball is borderline irrelevant. Nary a women’s team matters in the slightest in this calculus. 

All of this is about one sport, football, and one thing, money. This is aggravated by the fact that universities in general seem incapable of understanding that both income and expenses matter. If it’s a famous faculty member whose presence attracts a handful of tuition-paying new students a year: “look at all the money we’re spending on this guy!” If, on the other hand, it’s going to increase travel costs for sports teams by literally millions of dollars, it’s “look at this spiffy TV deal.” 

So now we turn to the University of Missouri’s head football coach, Eli Drinkwitz (that’s him in the photo), who notes that all of these decisions seem to ignore other sports than his own. He wonders aloud, “did we count the cost for the student-athletes involved in this decision?” The answer to his semi-rhetorical question is “OF COURSE NOT.” 

One of Curmie’s mantras is “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.” And the NCAA sure does tell us a lot about how much they care about “scholar-athletes.” Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knows it’s all what my mom would call “balloon juice” (I might opt instead for a term suggesting bovine fecal matter). The NCAA has never, ever, cared about anything but itself, its self-image, and its power. Students? Fans? Who? Alas, too many universities are following their lead. 

Drinkwitz cites three really significant facts. First, an inevitable result of conference realignment is lack of sleep for the athletes, the number one cause of mental health issues. He mentions baseball and softball: “They travel commercial. They get done playing at 4:00, they gotta get to the airport, they come back, it’s 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, they gotta go to class? I mean, did we ask any of them?” 

He also points to tweets (Curmie is still going to call them that) that the reason a number of students chose their school is so their parents didn’t have to travel to see them on the road. Asks Drinkwitz, “Did we ask them if they wanted to travel from the east coast to the west coast?” Again, OF COURSE NOT. He doesn’t mention other students at their university, but that’s part of the deal, too. You just might want to see your best friend or significant other play their sport. 

Back when there were, you know, ten teams in the Big 10, the greatest distance between two conference teams was 644 miles. Next year, it will be 2686 miles, over 2000 miles more. When there was a Big 8, the longest distance between schools was 747 miles. It will soon be 2320 miles; make that 3125 if, as rumored, Oregon State also joins the Big 12. Having driven a round-trip from Texas to New Hampshire last summer (a mere 1742 miles, one-way), Curmie can attest that 2000+ miles seems like a rather long commute. 

And it’s not just the big conferences. The university where I taught for a couple of decades joined a new conference recently. It’s now 2379 miles to one of our new conference foes… in an FCS (1-AA) league. This is insane. 

Someone on social media noted also that these huge distances will make it more difficult to recruit athletes in sports other than football and (maybe) basketball. Who wants to play softball for UCLA if you’re going to have to travel to New Jersey to play Rutgers? Maybe Long Beach or San Diego State start looking more attractive. Good. 

Finally, Drinkwitz points out that the athletes most directly responsible for giving the universities the ability to get those multi-million-dollar TV contracts don’t share in the profits.  They have restrictions placed on them; “the adults in the room” can do as they please.

There is one advantage to conference re-alignment, of course. Because the University of Missouri left the Big 12 for the SEC a few years ago, they are no longer the arch-rival of my beloved Kansas Jayhawks (I got my PhD at KU). I am therefore no longer duty-bound to despise all things Mizzou, and can, if I might borrow Jack Marshall’s term, declare Eli Drinkwitz an Ethics Hero.

This essay was first published in the Curmie’s Conjectures series of guest posts on Ethics Alarms.  Some minor stylistic changes have been made here, but the argument is unchanged.  As with earlier posts of this type, there are likely to be more comments there than here.  So head there... or don’t... as you will, Gentle Reader.

When "Not Guilty" Shows the Defendant is REALLY Guilty

Curmie is way behind on writing. Let’s start his return with a story that received far too little attention when it broke a couple of weeks ago. The NCAA announced a slap on the wrist penalty for Baylor University’s athletics programs after a years-long investigation into allegations that “Baylor shielded football student-athletes from the school’s disciplinary processes and did not report allegations of misconduct by football student-athletes” over a period of several years in the early 2010s. 

Despite finding the university’s “failings” to be “egregious,” the NCAA handed down a series of rather mild sanctions, the most serious of which is four years of probation.  (Let’s face it: a $5000 fine isn’t going to make a very big dent in Baylor's annual budget of about $800 million.)

How we ought to react to this announcement depends very much on where we focus our attention. The NCAA has long been a contender for the world’s most corrupt and incompetent sports organization, vying with the IOC and FIFA for that dubious distinction. (The International Handball Federation may have achieved a fair amount of well-deserved derision for their monumentally sexist insistence that female competitors wear bikini bottoms instead of shorts, but really, who cares about beach handball, which is virtually unknown in the US and isn’t even an Olympic sport?) 

So for the NCAA, with a reputation for over-reaching to dizzying degrees, to admit that they can’t punish Baylor without being able to point to a specific NCAA rule the university broke is something of a breakthrough. True, it took them years to come to this decision, but… baby steps… baby steps. Still, the rationale behind the decision is more than a little chilling. Here’s the key section of the report:

The panel found that those instances of non-reporting did not constitute impermissible benefits to football student-athletes because of a campus-wide culture of nonreporting. That culture was driven by the school’s broader failure to prioritize Title IX implementation, creating an environment in which faculty and staff did not know and/or understand their obligations to report allegations of sexual or interpersonal violence. Because the culture of non-reporting was not limited to cases involving student-athletes, the panel could not find that these instances resulted in impermissible benefits. (emphasis added)

In other words, the university escapes significant penalties for failing to report incidents of sexual violence by football players because they also couldn’t be bothered to report similar cases in which the perpetrators were non-athletes. 

To be sure, there are those who would disagree with the assessment that football players weren’t treated differently than other students would have been. A lawsuit alleged that no fewer than 52 rapes were committed over a six-year period by Baylor football players. That’s a lot. It doesn’t mean they all happened, of course, but it's a pretty damning statistic.  Another suit filed by a former volleyball player who claims to have been drugged and gang-raped by football players alleges that the Baylor program was such that “football players became increasingly emboldened, knowing that they could break the law, code of conduct, and general standards of human decency with no repercussions.” That comment, too, seems to me to be pretty specifically about football players.  (That suit, in case you were wondering, Gentle Reader, was settled out of court with no details released; the unidentified young woman transferred to another school.)  

In this case, by the way, the police, who ought to be the ones investigating the allegations, weren’t even notified. It is reasonable to argue universities ought not to be involved in investigating and reporting serious crimes at all, but Title IX demands that they do so, and the law is the law. But because the university argues it violated federal law on a consistent, across-the-board basis, they cannot be punished by the NCAA for violating the statute as respects felonious jocks, who according to this logic received no special treatment. 

This means, of course, that Baylor will be able to receive millions of dollars in television rights, post-season payouts for bowl games, etc., because they were even worse than previously imagined, creating a truly horrific culture in which not just pampered athletes but the entire student population is insulated against the repercussions of their actions. 

Art Briles: $15 million buyout 
for being an unethical ass

Curmie sees little evidence of contrition on the part of the university. True, they got rid of football coach Art Briles (they also paid him over $15 million as severance, hardly an agreement designed to teach him lesson in ethics!), athletic director Ian McCaw, and university president Ken Starr (yes, that Ken Starr). There were many pious proclamations, stopping just short of clichés about a new sheriff in town. And a couple (but far from even most) of the culprits were indeed brought to trial and convicted. But it’s difficult to believe that more than the names have changed; the culture simply ran (and runs) too deep. 

Baylor was found not guilty of the most serious offenses. They should be far more ashamed of the strategy employed to get that result than of any guilty verdict.  Should be...