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.

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.

The Players Era Tournament: An Ominous View of the Future

 

On top of everything else, the championship trophy
is so tacky it looks like it was designed
by Donald Trump

Curmie is of a mixed mind about the Geico Players Era “Festival” (i.e., basketball tournament).  On the one hand, there were some really good games between some of the best college teams in the country, with the added bonus for Curmie that, even without their star player, his beloved Kansas Jayhawks went 3-0, including a big comeback win against a ranked team in the third-place game.  On the other hand, the event epitomizes everything (well, perhaps not everything) that is wrong with college sports.

First off, it’s all about NIL money.  If you’re not into sportsball, Gentle Reader, that’s money paid to players as a bribe an incentive to attend a particular university.  That’s in addition to the euphemistically termed “scholarships” they receive.  And we’re not talking about enough to buy a pizza on Saturday night.  Some of these guys actually make more to “go to school” than the NBA minimum salary, which exceeds one and a quarter million dollars for rookies (and higher than that for more veteran players).  It’s no longer uncommon for players to play for four different universities.  The NCAA can talk about “student athletes” all they want; the fact is that elite players aren’t students at all.  They’re mercenaries, largely if not completely uninterested in education, ready to sell their services for the best (short-term) offer.

It could be argued, one supposes, that star players really do generate income for the school: ticket prices, television deals, apparel licensing, and so on.  But even pedestrian players, guys who have no more chance of a professional career in sports than Curmie does, are making more to sit on the bench of a college basketball team than they’ll likely see in the real world for years to come.  Wouldn’t it be nice if universities were as interested in attracting the top chemists or sociologists or journalists or violinists (or…) as they are in making sure that guy who plays a few garbage-time minutes a year for the basketball team is handsomely rewarded?

Yes, Curmie is old and perhaps old-fashioned, but he remembers fondly when athletes actually went to classes and interacted with other students.  They even graduated after attending the same school for four years.  Now, at the top level, it’s rare for a player to return to the roster.  At Kansas, for example, no starters returned from last year, and only one player who got more than mop-up minutes is back… and he entered the transfer portal before re-negotiating an NIL deal already worth over a half a million dollars.

Remember, too, that the very best players are likely to leave for the NBA after even a single season, and foreign players can have played in a professional league in their home country and still be eligible to play collegiate ball here. It’s an absolute mess.

But the structure makes this event even more problematic than others of the type.  Most of these early-season tournaments consist of eight teams, with no two from the same conference.  There’s a standard bracket: if you win your first-round game, you next play someone else who did, too.  Ultimately, the champion wins three games in a row; the second-place team won two, then lost one; third place won, then lost, then won, etc. 

But there were 18 (count ‘em!) teams in the Players Era event, and there were three teams that won all three of their games: eventual champion Michigan; third-place Kansas; and Iowa State, who didn’t even get a chance to play for the extra cash despite winning their first two games, one of them against ranked St. John’s.  We’re talking real money here: $1 million, $500K, $300K, and $200K for first through fourth, respectively: all to go to a school’s NIL budget.  That’s in addition to the $1 million all 18 teams collected.

The first problem is that the first two games for each team were pre-determined, meaning that there was no power-matching until the third round, and you could get to a potential additional payoff without having to beat any of the eight ranked teams in the tournament.  (Kansas did; there were two first-round games between ranked teams.)

But it’s how you get to the third game that matters.  The process of selecting the “4 Kings,” i.e., the four teams who were guaranteed at least an extra $200K in NIL funds, relied ultimately on point differential.  There were, as noted above, five teams that had 2-0 records after the second round.  Michigan destroyed their first two opponents, so they went to the championship game with Gonzaga; Tennessee and Kansas rounded out the top four, with Iowa State fifth.

This system presents several problems, one of which is obvious: there’s an incentive to engage in unsportsmanlike conduct.  Normally, if you’re up by a comfortable margin as time is expiring, you get the ball over midcourt and make no attempt to score.  Now, however, winning the game may not be enough, and you never know whether that one extra score could be worth $200K, the difference between losing the third-place game and not getting to play in it, and between winning that game and losing in the championship round.

A few years ago, a Kansas player dunked the ball when the outcome was no longer in doubt, and he could have just dribbled out the clock.  KU coach Bill Self ripped him a new one and apologized to the opposing team.  In last Tuesday’s game against Syracuse, a Kansas player dunked the ball when the outcome was no longer in doubt, and he could have just dribbled out the clock.  Self was thrilled.  As it happened, those two points were what got Kansas instead of Iowa State into the third-place game, as it gave KU a +21 differential to Iowa State’s +19 (Iowa State would have won the next tie-breaker had both teams finished at +19.  You can’t blame Kansas for doing what they could within the rules to advance, but if Curmie had gone to grad school in Ames instead of Lawrence, he’d be plenty pissed, especially since ISU’s Milan Momcilovic (a very good shooter, by the way) apparently passed up a shot in the final seconds of their second game.

The silly rule also provided an advantage to teams that played later in the day on Tuesday.  In college football, teams want to play defense first if a game goes to overtime because they know what they need to do.  Similarly, teams that played later Tuesday had a better idea whether it would be to their advantage to leave their starters in, slow the game down, etc. 

Perhaps most problematic, although it doesn’t come quite as easily to mind, is what has been suggested about the Houston/Tennessee game.  Quoting Sports Illustrated’s Kevin Sweeney: “as the game came down to the wire, it became increasingly obvious that only Tennessee was playing for a spot in the event’s championship game Wednesday. And even the Vols’ spot was very much up in the air.” 

That’s because although Houston won their first game, it was by a narrow margin, and unless they completely destroyed the Vols, they weren’t going to make it to even the third-place game.  When it became clear that the best they could do was a narrow victory, their mental energy inevitably declined.  Sure, there should still be plenty of incentive to win, and in one sense there’s no excuse, but it’s human nature to let down a little if there isn’t a lot of difference between winning and losing.

And… since the tournament went out of its way not to schedule games between teams from the same conference, it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which either that rule had to be abandoned, or a team that earned a higher seeding would be dropped.  For example, Kansas and Iowa State were ranked fourth and fifth after the second round.  If Tennessee had won their first-round game more narrowly, the Jayhawks and Cyclones could have been third and fourth… would they play each other, contrary to what happened in the first two rounds, or would one of them be closed out of the third-place game?  Indeed, it’s hypothetically possible that the top four teams could all have been from either the Big 10 or Big 12.  Luckily (I guess), we didn’t need to find out how such a scenario would play out.

But there’s yet one more complication: because of the bizarre scheduling, teams didn’t find out who or when they were playing on Wednesday until 10:00 Tuesday night.  In a traditional bracket, you’d at least know it was one of two teams; here, it could be any of a dozen or more teams, and you’d have maybe a couple of hours to prepare for that particular opponent, thereby devaluing coaching.  That’s not the way to get the best possible game; it’s how to highlight individual skills over teamwork.  That might work for the casual fan, but not for those who actually know something about the game.

Tournament co-founder Seth Berger claims the goal of this idiocy was to create a format in which “every shot matters, every basket matters, every minute matters.”  That didn’t happen.  And it’s rather predictable that when people pointed out the manifold inanities of the Players Era format, the response was that it was the messaging, not the structure, that’s the problem: “one of the things we have to do is continue educating about why our format is unique and it’s exciting.”  There are mumbles about “work[ing] very quickly to get to a better format,” but it’s clear that the centerpiece of the stupidity, privileging point differential, will remain in an expanded 32-team extravaganza.

What’s sad is that teams will continue to chase the almighty dollar, abandoning the less lucrative but competently managed tournaments in actual destination venues like Hawai’i or the Bahamas.  (Sorry, Las Vegas is not such a destination.  Curmie has been there once, and would have to be held at gunpoint to return.)  College athletic programs have long since abandoned even the pretense of being about students.  This is just one more nail in the coffin.

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.

"Racial Remarks" and Big 12 Basketball Coaches

Big 12 basketball is a strange place. This year’s conference is widely regarded as the best from top to bottom of any league in decades. Yes, “decades,” plural. 

Just a couple of examples: the worst team in the Big 12, Oklahoma, destroyed what was then the #2 team in the country, Alabama, by 24 points. As Curmie writes this on the morning of Selection Sunday, regular season champion Kansas is a virtual certainty to capture one of the four #1 seeds in the NCAA tournament and still has a chance to be the overall #1, despite being embarrassed in the final of the conference tournament in one of their six conference losses, including four by double-digits. Tournament winner Texas is now regarded as a possibility for a #1 seed, as well. 

That’s the good news. The bad news swirls more around the coaches, such that the hospitalization of Kansas coach Bill Self immediately before the conference tournament with an unspecified illness (not a heart attack, as had been erroneously reported, but that’s about all we know) was only the fourth-biggest story of the season about Big 12 coaches. 

The first, chronologically, was the dismissal of Texas coach Chris Beard after he was arrested for a felony after allegedly biting and attempting to strangle his fiancée. (Beard now looks to be the front-runner for the job at Ole Miss. Sigh.) 

But let’s turn our attention to two other coaches—now-former Texas Tech coach Mark Adams and TCU coach Jamie Dixon, both accused of making racist remarks. Adams was initially reprimanded for “an inappropriate, unacceptable, and racially insensitive comment.” Athletic Director Kirby Hocutt subsequently suspended Adams “in order to conduct a more thorough inquiry of Adams' interactions with his players and staff.” 

Later in the week, the school and Adams agreed to a settlement—about $4 million—leading to Adams’s resignation. The buyout for firing Adams without cause would have been nearly twice that figure, about $7.5 million. Either way, it appears that Adams will still be able to get the medium drink instead of the small with his #2 combo meal. 

Two things strike Curmie about this situation, and they might or might not sort of contradict each other. According to the university, “Adams was encouraging the student-athlete to be more receptive to coaching and referenced Bible verses about workers, teachers, parents, and slaves serving their masters.” OK, that’s a pretty stupid thing to say, but not for the reason Texas Tech seems to want to spin the story. 

There are certainly other ways than quoting scripture for a coach, especially one at a public university, to attempt to motivate players. And suggesting that the relationship between coach and player is in any way comparable to that between master and slave is not merely troubling at best, but outright idiotic.

But, as Curmie has said repeatedly over the years, whereas all racism is stupid, not all stupidity is racist. The slaves of the Bible aren’t, generally speaking, African, and Curmie sincerely doubts that Adams was suggesting anything racial at all, merely that he’s the coach, he decides what plays to run, what defenses to play, and who’s on the floor and who’s on the bench. 

Still, as an excellent editorial by Ryan Sanders of the Dallas Morning News points out, it’s “tone-deaf… for a 66-year-old white man to tell a young black man to be humble, and use a Scripture about slavery to support his message.” 

It may also be significant that the university upgraded its initial reprimand to outright dismissal after an investigation. The “slaves” reference may have been the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and that Adams would accept the buyout rather than demand the extra several million dollars he’d have received for being fired without cause seems as if it might be significant. Or not… 

The TCU case is both more and less complicated. We don’t know exactly what Jamie Dixon is alleged to have said, only that disgruntled big man Eddie Lampkin (who has left the program) and his mom have gone public with accusations of “racial remarks.” Lampkin posted screenshots to his now-deleted Instagram account of purported text message exchanges between his mother and Dixon, and between himself and an assistant coach. 

In his text, Dixon thanks Lampkin’s mom for the previous day’s conversation (which she says never took place) and wishes the best for him as he enters the transfer portal (she says no one from their end has indicated that Lampkin would do so). Lampkin himself tells the assistant coach “It’s crazy y’all let him treat us like that.” Curmie trusts that this is sufficiently weird enough for you, Gentle Reader. 

There are few certainties here, but one is that Lampkin has had a rough year, both personally (his brother was killed last summer and an apparently beloved aunt died earlier this year) and on the court (roughly 6 points and 6 rebounds in 20 minutes a game). He’s clearly not firing on all cylinders, either athletically or emotionally. He seems to believe that his teammates have been similarly mistreated (notice the “us” in his text to the assistant coach), but none of them seem to be supporting his claims. 

Does that mean his allegations are false? Not inherently, of course, but there seems to be nothing in Dixon’s career to indicate any racial animus. All three of the assistant coaches are black, as are both players who were getting on-court minutes Lampkin apparently thought should be his. Steven Johnson of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram writes in an article in which the words “puzzling criticism” appear in the headline:

The Star-Telegram spoke to multiple Black parents of current players and to another longtime AAU Black coach who has had multiple athletes play for Dixon.

All said their children and players have never told them of any racist or racially insensitive comments made by Dixon.

One parent said she immediately called her son after Lampkin’s post, and the player informed her that he never heard Dixon say anything racist….

The AAU coach said Dixon, “knows the hell out of some basketball,” and he has never heard any type of racial accusations about Dixon from players or his colleagues.

Johnson, a black man himself, concludes, “Suffice to say, there’s no evidence of a culture problem with the TCU men’s basketball program.” 

Johnson’s colleague Mac Engel is even more outspoken. His first sentence reads, “Eddie Lampkin, or someone in Eddie Lampkin’s family, failed to realize that Eddie Lampkin was barely a decent college basketball player.” Ouch. Shortly thereafter, we get this: “Unfounded allegations of racist language against anyone is a great way to terminate a relationship.” He’s just warming up:

Lampkin could have been one of those college players who would be welcome at his alma mater forever, instead he will leave in disgrace, and disappointment.

The team was tired of him. The athletic department had had it with him.

Although he had NIL money exceeding six figures, according to sources his priority was more NIL deals. And he was not happy about playing time.

It was hard to justify that much more playing time for a player who stopped working, and acted as if he was better than his production.

He is talented. He isn’t talented enough to be lazy….

There was “stuff” off the court the team grew tired of; it was drama without the points and rebounds. Teammates will put up with noise for production.

Tell us what you really think, Mac! 

TCU is outwardly unconcerned about Lampkin’s accusations: Dixon was on the sidelines in the conference tournament, in which TCU staged a mild upset of Kansas State (an unlikely result if the team wasn’t on board with Dixon’s leadership) before losing to eventual champion Texas. 

In all probability, the university is doing its own investigation, similar to but more thorough than Johnson’s research. They’re also smart enough to do so behind the scenes. If, as expected, they find nothing of concern, the brouhaha will disappear nearly as fast as Lampkin’s career as a Horned Frog. It’s a possibility, albeit a longshot, that TCU will uncover a serious problem and proceed to cover it up… but Curmie doubts it. If there’s something there, chances are that we’ll know. 

Ultimately, both Texas Tech and TCU seem to have handled their respective cases appropriately. Having just noted that two university administrations might at least possibly have done the right thing, Curmie now awaits the arrival of the remaining horsemen.

2nd Annual Fulminations of the Season

It’s mid-March again, time for the annual rant against the incompetence of the NCAA tournament selection committee. This year, I didn’t have time to work out “my” system, tracking every game by every team. And I couldn’t find a stat sheet showing each team’s record against top 50, top 100, and top 200 opposition. So here’s what I did: I tracked every team that made it to the NCAA tournament, got a vote in either the AP or coaches’ poll, or placed in the top 50 in RPI, the Sagarin ratings, or the Pomeroy ratings. I think those five systems are listed in increasing order of accuracy and provide a nice combination of the subjective (the polls) and the objective (the three computer-generated rankings). Moreover, the objective analyses include both disjunctive win/loss and more continuum-based analyses (a blowout is better than a squeaker). I took each school’s ranking in each area, multiplied it by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively, and divided by 15. (For the two polls, anyone not getting any votes at all was given a 50.) The best a team could do, then, is 1; the worst somewhere in the mid-300s.

At the top, it all looks pretty good: the top three teams in order are Ohio State (1.20), Kansas (2.12), and Duke (2.87). After that it gets shakier. Teams that made the tournament and shouldn’t have: Georgia, UAB, Southern Cal, and Virginia Commonwealth: familiar faces, all. (At least three of the four were relegated to play-in games.) Those who should have got in and didn’t: Virginia Tech, New Mexico, St. Mary’s, Colorado. At least there wasn’t anything egregious this year, although Virginia Tech was better this year than eight teams with at-large bids, and a full dozen teams better than Virginia Commonwealth didn’t get in.

The biggest problems were the seedings within the field, however. Most abused was Utah State, who earned a 5 and got a 12. Really. They’d be a 4 according to their RPI, a 5 according to both polls and Pomeroy, a 6 according to Sagarin. Literally no one lists them below #21 in the country. So how’d they get dumped down to a 12 seed (numbers 45-48)? Allow me to quote myself from last year, when Utah State earned an 8 and got a 12 and UTEP earned a 9 and got a 12: “The crimes of these two teams? They’re from mid-major conferences, they aren’t Gonzaga or UNLV, and they don’t even have the decency to be from the Eastern or Central time zones. What do they expect?” And this year, those stupid Aggies are still located in Logan. They just won’t learn.

Next most under-valued: Belmont, whom Pomeroy actually lists as #18 in the country (a 5 seed), earned a 9 overall, and got a 13. They’re at least conscientious enough to have their campus in Nashville, but man, are they pushy. They seem to think that going 30-4, with all the losses on the road, three of them against tournament teams from the SEC, they should get a little respect. Sheesh.

Other teams seeded at least two rankings below what they deserve: Texas, Kentucky, UNLV, Gonzaga, Missouri, Richmond, Clemson. You know how I said “they aren’t Gonzaga or UNLV” last year? This year, those places get kicked around, too. Mizzou has at least had a strange season: they’ve played really well at home, horribly on the road. So at least I see the committee’s logic. (Besides, they’re Mizzou; don’t expect this loyal Jayhawk to weep much for them.) Clemson, however, earned a 9 (a 6 according to Pomeroy) but had to go to a play-in game. And besides, everyone knows the Big East is invincible, so those Big 12 and ACC teams are just delaying the inevitable. Don’t ask me about Kentucky; I got nothin’.

In the other direction, there’s Vanderbilt, Butler (hey, they were good last year), Michigan, UCLA, and Tennessee. Most over-rated: UCLA, who earned a 12 (a 13 from Pomeroy) and got a 7. No individual metric has them higher than a 9; none of the objective systems have them above an 11. Go figure. Plus, two teams from the SEC (not counting Georgia who shouldn’t be in the field at all and got a 10-seed) and one mediocrity from the Big 10 (deserved a play-in game, got an 8). No surprises there.

Of course, it’s not just the under-rated teams that suffer: in other words, not only should Utah State not have to play a 5-seed or Belmont a 4, but Kansas State and Wisconsin both deserve easier first-round games than the Aggies and the Bruins will provide. On the flip side, while Pitt is supposedly the overall 4th seed, no one familiar with the game thinks their bracket isn’t hands-down the easiest. The Panthers don’t deserve a top seed to begin with, yet they get a 2 who should be a 4, and a 3 who has two 18-point losses (one at home, one on a neutral site) in March. As the overall #4, they should have to face the overall #5 (or somebody who beats them) to make it to Houston. The best other team in their bracket is at #9 and fading fast.

Last year, Duke rode precisely this scenario, the overall #4 and by far the easiest bracket, to a national championship. It will be much harder for the Blue Devils this year, as their prospective 3rd and 4th round opponents are actually both under-rated. [EDIT: Apparently the NCAA has decided that the first game of the tournament for 60 of the 68 teams in the new format is now the 2nd round. It was the first round last year, but there are big-conference mediocrities in the play-in round this year, not just champions from less prestigious conferences, so of course we have to change the numbering system. Therefore, Duke's 4th and 5th round opponents are likely to be high-quality and under-rated teams. Sheesh.]

The real problem with the system is that teams like Utah State may well lose in the first round: they should be about evenly matched with Kansas State. And if KSU prevails, the talking heads will all babble about how USU wasn’t so good, after all. The point is, Utah State should have drawn Bucknell, not the Wildcats, who were rated #3 in the country at the beginning of the season. Similarly, significantly over-rated UCLA may win over (also over-rated, but less egregiously so) Michigan State; but they should have had to face Georgetown in the first round. (I'll also note that the Jayhawks might well face another second-round game against a team significantly better than their seed: hopefully, they won't play like they did last year.) Still, despite the structural advantage to being over-rated, I’ll predict a better tournament record for the teams I’ve identified as under-rated than those I’ve called over-rated, despite having to play higher-ranked opponents. Last year, they went 10-9 vs. 4-11, respectively.

In the Supreme Hypocrisy Sweepstakes, the NCAA Has Opened a Slight Lead on University Administrators

No fewer than four headlines about topics touching on education have caught my eye in the last 24 hours. Two of them have to do with collegiate sports, two with other issues. Sports today; other topics tomorrow (I hope).

We start with the apparent inevitability that the whores brain trust at the NCAA will, sooner rather than later, announce that the field for the men’s national basketball tournament will be expanded from 65 teams to 96. The same NCAA that crows incessantly about “student-athletes” but won’t actually require programs to take some responsibility for the academic progress of their players (my screed here) now sends forth its VP Greg Shaheen to proclaim with a disingenuousness that would make Sarah Palin proud that, in the expanded format, “the amount of time student-athletes would be out of school would be roughly the same as the current model” and there’d be “a reduction in travel time.” Yeah, right. A team that would earn a 9-seed in the current arrangement would have to play on, say, Thursday against a 24-seed (!), meaning they’d miss class for a minimum of three days (Wednesday through Friday). If they win, they play again on Saturday (against an 8-seed). But at the end of the weekend, we’re only down to 32 teams, not the current 16. So there needs to be another game, probably against a 1-seed, on Tuesday, meaning those players would miss another three days (Monday through Wednesday). And if they keep winning, they’d be expected to play again on Thursday and Saturday. Then they could go home for two whole days of classes before having to show up, by NCAA dictum, at the Final Four site by Wednesday, with games Saturday and Monday. In other words, if a 9-seed or lower made it to the national championship game, they’d miss 8 of a series of 9 classes that meet MWF. Think that can’t happen? Given the stupidity with which the exalted selection committee under-values any team that isn’t from a so-called power conference, I don’t.

Let’s leave aside the dilution of the tournament with even more mediocre teams from big conferences: if NCAA lapdog Minnesota coach Tubby Smith really “[doesn’t] see any watering down at all,” then he’s even stupider than I thought. Let’s duck, too, the thorny issue of what to do with regular-season champions from smaller conferences: include them and their conference tournament is de-valued, exclude them and the regular season is de-valued (these teams are currently guaranteed a spot in the NIT, which would presumably disappear). Let’s just concentrate on the fact that the NCAA chooses to actively disprove its own pretensions of “student-athletes.” That formulation sort of loses something if you won’t even allow these kids to go to class, don’t you think? By the way, I endorse John Feinstein’s analysis, which I read after having already come to virtually the same conclusions. This decision is about one thing only: short-term profits for the NCAA and its water-carriers the athletic departments. The fans, players, and long-term good of the game? Are you kidding?

In other sports news, it seems that some of my brethren and sistern in the academic field are getting a little disgruntled that in an era of shrinking budgets, athletics departments don’t seem to be being asked to tighten their extra-large belts even a little bit. While it is true that the football and men’s basketball programs at some universities make money, athletic departments as a whole don’t. Indeed, there are precisely two major public universities in the country—Nebraska and LSU—in which the athletics departments receive no subsidies from their respective universities. So it is, for example, that the Faculty Senate at the University of Memphis has proposed that the university eliminate its $2 million underwriting of the Athletic Department (this measure would still leave untouched the $7+ million per year the department gets from student fees). The $7.7 million subsidy by the University of California at Berkeley is similarly under fire. All told, as described in this January article from USA Today, while the rest of us have been trying to find ways of cutting back, in athletics departments at the 99 public universities in the power conferences, subsidies from the general fund grew “about 20% in four years, from $685 million in 2005 to $826 million in 2008, after adjusting for inflation. At more than a third of those schools, the percentage of athletic department revenue coming from subsidies grew during the four-year period studied.” That would be an average of over $8.3 million per school per year. That's well over 100 faculty who could have been hired or retained, or more than 300 full-ride scholarships to students who, you know, have something to offer in the classroom.

It may or may not be true that successful, big-time, athletics programs lead to alumni giving and student satisfaction: the fact that it's Conventional Wisdom doesn't make it true. All I know is that a win over Harvard in my undergrad days was as much fun as a win over Mizzou in my grad school days. As for funding, well, according to the most recent figures in the Chronicle of Higher Education, there are ten institutions with an endowment of over $1 million per student: of these, precisely one, Stanford, is in a major athletic conference. Even when we eliminate the per-student component, we’re left with the simple fact that only four of the schools with the twelve largest university endowments, and only about 46% of all universities with $1 billion endowments, have big-time athletics, and several of those that do (Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Virginia…) aren’t perennial powers in any major sport. [Note: the tables are password-protected: if you don’t have a Chronicle subscription, you’re going to have to trust me on the numbers.] So I’m thinking that there isn’t exactly a one-to-one correlation between attracting donors and going to a BCS bowl game.

On the one hand, the faculty protests at Memphis and Berkeley and wherever else are more symbolic than pragmatic. No university president has the courage to suggest that their sainted football or basketball coach isn’t worth $1 million a year, or that a bunch of functional illiterates shouldn’t take up space in classrooms, lower the level of discussion, and generally be coddled and cooed over. N.B., I am fully aware that there are a great many people about whom the term “student athlete” isn’t an oxymoron. I’ve had them in my classes. But I’ve also had the others—the ones who think they’re entitled to a good grade in my class because they can catch a football well enough to start for a team that went 4-8 in Division I-AA. No, expecting anyone in a university administration or on a Board of Trustees to care more about real student achievement than about whether the team goes to the Petunia Bowl—that would be asking far too much. But maybe some good will come of the outcry, anyway: if nothing else, I suspect at least a few more people now know that it’s the universities who subsidize athletics, not the other way around.

"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…