Tag: NCAA (Page 2 of 2)

The hypocrisy that permeates big-money college sports takes your breath away. College football and men’s basketball have become such huge commercial enterprises that together they generate more than $6 billion in annual revenue, more than the National Basketball Association…And what does the labor force that makes it possible for coaches to earn millions, and causes marketers to spend billions, get? Nothing. The workers are supposed to be content with a scholarship that does not even cover the full cost of attending college.

The New York Times has entered the discussion about the future of big time college sports. Joe Nocera wrote this lengthy piece two weeks ago, and has followed it up with a couple smaller op-eds since. Nocera presents a five point plan to change how football and men’s basketball are run:

• Schools will bid on players
• Each school will operate under a strict salary cap
• Each player that stays in school for four years gets an additional two year scholarship to complete or extend their education
• Each player receives lifetime health insurance
• An organization would represent player interests for collective bargaining

There are flaws in the idea. While Nocera suggests a plan like this would eliminate recruiting violations, I could see it making things worse as coaches find ways to get around the salary cap.

But every plan to revamp college sports has shortcomings. I like that this addresses more beyond sharing revenues with the athletes. The fact it is in the Times, where it will be seen by university presidents and administrators, is important.

I think it’s worth the time to read and consider.

If there’s one thing fans of college sports can agree on it’s that the NCAA sucks. While well-intentioned at its core, it has turned into an unwieldy, hypocritical bureaucracy more interested in self-preservation and revenue generation than the best interests of the “student athletes”*

(Favorite NCAA hypocrisy is the insistence on the term “student athletes” during NCAA sanctioned events. Because nothing says “student athlete” more than the Derrick Roses and John Walls of the world.)

In recent weeks, they’ve added two new items to their list of stupid: potentially expanding the men’s NCAA tournament to 96 teams and exploring taking away touchdowns for football players who taunt opponents.

1) Expanding the tournament. Dumb. The argument “why mess with something that is already perfect” is often short-sighted, but in this case it carries the day. You can make a case that there are teams deserving of tourney bids each year yet are not selected. But 32 of them? Really? That seems a little extreme.

One eight seed and two six seeds have won the NCAA title. Only two double digit seeds have ever made the Final Four. Adding 32 teams to the tournament is not correcting some great injustice. It’s watering down a tournament that is about as competitive as you could ask. Another weekend of games isn’t going to make the tournament better. Rather, it will be a weekend of mismatches and blowouts.

Besides, we already have the expanded tournament. The conference tournaments the week before the NCAAs in many ways serve as an expanded tournament. What’s more exciting: watching a Patriot League conference title game, played on a home court with screaming fans, or watching those same two teams fly halfway across the country to play random opponents in front of half empty arenas?

There is no logical explanation for expanding to 96 teams beyond taking money away from the conferences and sending it straight to the NCAA’s account. I can’t imagine conferences will dispense with their post-season tournaments. But I also would not expect them to draw as well if most of the teams are guaranteed to be playing a week later. For an organization that is insistent on not instituting a playoff of any kind at the BCS level, it’s an interesting suggestion to stretch out the basketball season even further. Making the “student athletes” travel for up to five straight weeks doesn’t seem to be in their best interests.

2) Taunting. Dumber. This comes across as a bunch of old, white academics taking a stand against the urbanization of the game.

At first glance, the proposal has some merit. I think most people are tired of the incessant woofing that goes on during games. At the same time, smack is part of the game. You blow someone up, you get to woof a bit. You throw a wicked head fake and jet by a corner while he’s picking up his jock, you can say a few words.

I have two problems with the rule, though. First, taking points off the board for something that gains the offensive player no advantage is draconian. In effect, referees will be saying “I disagree with the moral implications of your actions while scoring, therefore I’m taking away the points.”

Second, it’s purely a judgement call. Watch a full slate of games on a Saturday and you’ll see a wide disparity in how calls are made from game-to-game and conference-to-conference. I’m sure the NCAA will lay down strict guidelines for what constitutes taunting, but we’ve all seen the current rules interpreted differently at different times. A referee out of position may think a player is pointing at the guy he blew past when in fact he’s pointing at the guy who is making the play-making block.

Oh, and it’s not just the offense that taunts.* Will there be as heavy a penalty for defensive players who taunt as offensive ones? There’s no equal punishment for a defensive end that taunts after a sack to that of a running back who taunts on a scoring play.

(Apparently I have three problems.)

It’s fine to attempt to keep sportsmanship paramount and reduce the amount of unsportsmanlike conduct. But there’s a better way to do it than taking fairly scored points off of the board.

I think this is going to be a very interesting decade for college sports, at least at the BCS/Division 1 level. No one seems to be happy with anything that the NCAA does. They enact silly rules governing game-play and are constantly in a reactionary mode when it comes to regulating recruiting. They are woefully understaffed on the rules enforcement side, and it takes a monumental scandal to get a BCS school to get seriously punished for rules violations.

The Ed O’Bannon lawsuit, in which the former UCLA basketball player argues that the NCAA owes him, and other players, compensation for using his likeness could cripple the organization and its members if O’Bannon wins. Throw in a new wave of conference expansion/consolidation and, at least at the top levels, college football and basketball will look very different in ten years.

I don’t think the BCS conferences would think twice about breaking away from the NCAA if they thought they could still collect the revenues they’re making under the NCAA umbrella. The NCAA could well be an organization that governs the lower levels of college athletics, while the BCS schools operate at a higher plane, somewhere between the NCAA and professional sports. I’m sure whatever system is in place, there will still be a bureaucracy in place for us to hate.

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I’ve got some thoughts on the NCAA’s ban on schools using Native American mascots in post-season events. In a word, dumb. Not because I don’t think Native American mascots are offensive, or at least, inappropriate, because I do. But the NCAA’s ruling makes little sense.

Basically, it’s wildly inconsistent and unenforceable. What college sports get, by far, the most attention? Football and men’s basketball. So, realistically, the ban affects only those sports to the general public. But the NCAA doesn’t control the post-season in football, so the ban pretty much covers men’s basketball. If it’s not a blanket ban, it’s immediately a bad thing. Then, let’s say the ban stands up in court and is in place this coming NCAA tournament. What does CBS do? Can their announcers make no references to mascots like Illini, Seminoles, and Utes? Can they not show crowd shots of groups of fans wearing clothes with Native American references? Does CBS have to edit the audio feed to ensure that no cheers containing Native American references make it through the the viewers at home? Silly. The NCAA tried to make a bold stand, but knowing that they have no justification to do so or enforcement to carry out the policy, they watered it down into something that embarrasses them rather than the schools in question.

As I said, though, I do think Native American mascots are inappropriate. The general argument for them is that it is a way of honoring the fierceness and resolve of Native Americans. I must roll my eyes at that suggestion. Not to go all <a href=”http://howardzinn.org/default/”>Howard Zinn</a> on you, but it seems like we spent roughly 200 years using psychological, crude biological, and traditional war methods to get the Natives off land we wanted. We (We being all of us of white, European ancestry) broke pretty much every good faith treaty the Natives ever signed with us. When we had decimated them to the point they could no longer offer resistance, we forced them to either turn their back on their culture and assimilate into the new American culture, or we moved them off to isolated reservations where they were locked into lives of poverty and want. And then we want to “honor their spirit” by naming sports teams after them? Seems more than a little ironic to me.

People often use the Notre Dame example to counter bleeding heart, pinko liberals like me who have the nerve to suggest dropping Native American mascots. I believe Notre Dame was set up to educate Irish Catholic orphans from the Chicago area, making Fighting Irish a perfectly appropriate choice to identify ND’s athletic teams. Was Florida State set-up to educate Seminoles? How many Utes are enrolled at Utah? Is the faculty and administration of Illinois made up primarily of descendants of the Illini tribes?

Quite frankly, I don’t care if any of these schools change their mascots. I don’t find teams that have names of particular tribes to be offensive, just inappropriate and archaic. There have been many schools that have changed their mascots over the years, whether it was to drop Native American references (St. John’s and Marquette being two examples) or to quietly de-emphasize a school’s agricultural roots (Nebraska and Wichita State dropping the “corn” and “wheat” references from everyday mascot usage). College sports are full of colorful mascots based on interesting local history (Jayhawks, Hoosiers, Sooners to name three). If the schools that use Native references believe those mascots best sum up what their state is all about, they should be free to continue to use them. But suggesting that using those mascots is an attempt to honor the people we booted off the lands to build the universities is garbage. At least it is in the 21st Century.

Bob Kravitz of the Indianapolis Star had an excellent <a href=”http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050810/COLUMNISTS01/508100430/1034″>column</a> on this subject earlier this week as well. I had no idea about the origination of the term redskins and find it even more offensive now.