March madness is extending into April. It’s “so American!” But in reality it’s big business, bonuses, and school reputations so unfortunately tainted with blurred lines of crime and delayed expulsions.
From Mark Zeigler: “The student sections at the Final Four are in mosh pits behind each basket, 50 feet away and 27 inches below the raised court to better utilize the full seating (and monetary) capacity of a 70,000-seat NFL stadium for a college basketball game.
The college bands are down there, too, with the best view of their classmates on the floor being video boards a few hundred feet above.
The kids can’t see the game, but the TV cameras can see the kids, which is what is important. TV needs those images to differentiate it from the zero-sum veneer of professional sports, to cleanse it, to launder it, to pretend it’s all about text books and ivy-covered campuses and professors in tweed jackets and big-picture perspective and the good ol’ college try.
And the overwhelming majority of college sports are, played in Division III gymnasiums with laminated wooden bleachers, on empty fields with a dozen parents clapping from the sideline. The game ends, the students disappear into the library to study for an Applied Physics midterm – their scoring average less important than their grade-point average.
Just not the Final Four. Not college sport’s jewel.
The stakes are too high, and when the stakes are high, we stop seeing the ivy and tweed and start ignoring the educational mission. We start rationalizing. We start looking the other way. Lines start blurring.
Here’s the lineup for the Final Four this week in Glendale, Ariz.:
–You’ve got North Carolina, which shouldn’t even be here and maybe shouldn’t have been last year, either. It presided over arguably the most heinous academic scandal in NCAA history, 18 years of fraudulent courses in the university’s African and Afro-American Studies department that – what do you know? – football and basketball players all seemed to take.
Athletic director Bubba Cunningham actually said this to CBSSports.com earlier this year: “Is this academic fraud? Yes it is by a normal person’s standards. But by the NCAA definition, (it is not).”
The NCAA sent UNC a formal Notice of Allegations back in May 2015, which typically means the Committee on Infractions will mete out a penalty in a matter of months. But the school that popularized basketball’s “Four Corners” stall employed similar tactics, spending a reported $18 million in legal fees, and here we are nearly two years later with little perceptible progress.
It’s money well spent. Roy Williams’ basketball team has reached two straight Final Fours and came within a buzzer-beater from being national champion last year.
Williams was asked Thursday about the scandal. “Some junk swirling around that I haven’t enjoyed or appreciated,” he called it.
–You’ve got South Carolina, which has some junk swirling around as well. It has suspended eight players over the last two seasons, including five arrested for a variety of transgressions ranging from firing a BB gun at an occupied vehicle to knocking someone unconscious outside a bar to marijuana possession.
Five were suspended for undisclosed reasons last March on the eve of the Gamecocks’ opener in the NIT, and two were later dismissed from the program presumably for their part in the BB gun incident.
In October, freshman Rakym Felder needed to be subdued via Taser at 1:28 a.m. when he allegedly resisted arrest after, the police report said, “sucker punching the unsuspecting bystander, causing him to fall to the ground and lose consciousness.” That fetched a whole one-game suspension, after which Felder said of coach Frank Martin: “I knew Frank had my back.”
In December, star player Sindarius Thornwell was suspended indefinitely, again for unspecified reasons, only for details to emerge about an arrest six months earlier for marijuana possession and driving with a suspended license. The Gamecocks were 7-0 at the time. Six games later, after going 3-3, Thornwell was reinstated.
“We tend to forget we’re dealing with young people,” Martin rationalized. “They tend to make mistakes just like us old people that have life figured out.”
–You’ve also got Gonzaga, which doesn’t have much junk swirling around but does have starting guard Josh Perkins. He was found slumped in the driver’s seat of his running car at 4 a.m. in October, failed a field sobriety test and was charged with physical control of a vehicle under the influence.
Gonzaga coach Mark Few issued a statement saying, “We take this situation very seriously.”
So seriously that Perkins was suspended for two games, a preseason exhibition against West Georgia and the opener against Utah Valley. He was back on the floor for the next game against San Diego State, which had beaten the Zags in its last trip to Spokane. That meant Perkins missed one regular-season game, the equivalent punishment in many programs for showing up late to a practice or a meeting.
–And then you’ve got Oregon, which had three players accused of gang raping a student in March 2014. One of them, Brandon Austin, had transferred from Providence amid similar charges of sexual assault.
Austin was sitting out the season as a transfer, but Dominic Artis and Damyean Dotson were allowed to play for the Ducks in the NCAA Tournament. The district attorney later declined to press charges, but the school thought enough of the allegations (and salacious police report) to dismiss all three players and reach an $800,000 settlement with the victim.
Most questionable, though, was the timing. Oregon dragged the case through the spring and didn’t expel the players until June, after the quarter was completed. How convenient. The basketball team’s Academic Progress Rate was dangerously close to the NCAA minimum, and booting them mid-quarter could have meant a ban from future NCAA Tournaments. Coach Dana Altman also stood to receive a $20,000 APR bonus; his athletic director got $40,000.
Oregon officials insist they did nothing untoward, and on Thursday Altman offered curt responses to questions about the incident.
“I’m comfortable with the way we handled it,” he said. “It was three years ago.”
Altman kept his job amid cries for his ouster, and here they are at a football stadium outside Phoenix with students standing in a pit 50 feet behind the basket. The stakes are too high. Junk starts swirling around. Perspective gets distorted, lines blur. Tweed becomes greed.
For proof, look no further than Oregon’s celebration last Saturday after beating Kansas to reach the Final Four for the first time since 1939. The players and coaches climbed a ladder (that, by the way, has its own NCAA-approved sponsor) and snipped off a piece of nylon net.
Then a bearded Oregon alum worth $26 billion did. Phil Knight, Mr. Swoosh himself.”