The Sports Curmudgeon

I guess the NCAA is a worthwhile institution because it is the organizing entity that provides for intercollegiate competition in a lot of sports that could not afford the overhead of an organizing body on their own. Lots of the non-revenue sports would lack any means of producing a “national championship competition” without the NCAA. And while those non-revenue sports do not have the cachet of college football or basketball and cannot pretend to have a “College World Series”, they are nonetheless important to the athletes and the institutions.

And of course, the NCAA has found a way to put on the single best large-scale annual sporting event on the planet, March Madness. If the NCAA threatened to “go out of business” and that it would take March Madness with it as a hostage, I’d be sorely tempted to try to find a way to save the NCAA. The men’s college basketball tournament is indeed that good!

Other than these things, the NCAA is about as useful as a pair of inline skates to someone who uses a walker. I constantly marvel at how this organization nominally run by people who associate themselves with institutions of higher learning can be so single-mindedly stupid. This is an organization with a God-given gift for ineptitude. And in the last week or so, the NCAA has strained against even its own formidable limits of silliness.

After a year of intense investigation of the Missouri basketball program, all they could find to sanction was an assistant coach who might have given a player $250. That is still in dispute and has not been proven. Oh yeah, the head coach might have bought a player or a recruit a meal here or there. When this began, you might have thought that all of Western Civilization might be in jeopardy due to the nefarious actions within this program. In the end, the investigators could find nothing of consequence.

We are watching the ongoing spectacle of the Colorado sex parties used as a recruiting tool. You know that these crack investigators – all honor graduates of the Inspector Clousseau School of Pinpoint Observation – will find something really important here to base a punishment on. Somewhere, sometime, some one of the chaperones probably purchased an extra pair of boxer shorts for a recruit because the recruit lost his at a party the night before and that will be deemed an improper gratuity. Give me a break!

At the University of Washington, the players called the team trainer/physician for the softball team “Dr. Feelgood” because they could get painkiller prescriptions whenever they asked for them. The NCAA has taken more than a year to ferret what they call “all the facts” here.

The NCAA is feckless. In terms of leadership, they could not lead a coyote out of a rainstorm with a gravy-coated slab of beef. I often wonder if anyone associated with the management of collegiate athletics could find his/her ass with either hand; then I read the newspapers and realize there is no way they could accomplish such a complex undertaking.

Listen to them rant and rave and they’ll try to convince you that gambling is the root of every evil that infects collegiate sports. Not so. There was a time when they had the Congress of the United States on their side in their jihad against gambling on college sports, but now it seems that their Congressional support might be eroding. Last week, the Congress of the United States found another way to take up its time so that they would not be too concerned with the governing of the country; the Congress will investigate the NCAA. How do you pick a side to root for in that one? Criticize the NCAA all you want about the complexity of its rules and regulations and for the stupid way that it selects the BCS teams. Now step back and look at the tax code and the IRS instructions that stem from Congressional legislation. Asking the Congress to find a simple and rational way to manage collegiate athletics is sort of like asking Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton to debate the finer points of quantum electrodynamics.

Congress – in the person of a Congressthing from Alabama – believes that the NCAA enforces its rules in an arbitrary and capricious manner and that the NCAA imposes penalties on schools without due process such that it has “lost the public confidence”.

Memo to Congressthing: Personally, I trust you and your 434 colleagues on Capitol Hill to do something altruistic in terms of the national good but in opposition to your personal self-interest about as much as I trust an Enron accountant. Now what were you saying about losing the public confidence?

This guy is angry because the NCAA “slaps some institutions on the wrist” for serious allegation while handing out significant penalties to other institutions for minor infractions. He says the NCAA is an institutionalized version of state sponsored terrorism because they are the “only game in town”; if you pretend to be big-time in college athletics, you have to deal with these guys at the NCAA. This Congressthing is from Alabama where they actually went out and paid a high school coach “six figures” to steer a defensive lineman to Alabama. That’s not exactly slavery; but it’s close. And even in Alabama, that is something that cannot be considered a “minor infraction”. At Auburn, an AAU coach was found to have “directed” over $3K to one recruit and arranged to get a car for another one. It looks to me as if this Congressthing is out to prove the validity of the Dennis Miller line that Alabama is actually Darwin’s waiting room.

Ignoring the huffing and puffing of these Congressthings, the NCAA has fallen back on its tried and true bogeyman – gambling. Somehow a survey was conducted and it showed that athletes gamble on sporting events and some have gotten in over their heads and some have admitted in an anonymous survey that they taken money to affect their performance in order to assuage gambling debts. Wow, that sounds serious.

Just as lawyers will tell you that it is possible to indict a ham sandwich with the laxness of the grand jury process, it is also possible to get just about any results you want from a survey if you arrange to make up the questions and then oversee the sampling process. Instead of standing in awe at these revelations from the NCAA, you need to stand up and scream at them:

Show me the consequences!!

If this stuff is real and if the NCAA has anything bordering on evidence to demonstrate that it might be real, then where are the sanctions against athletes and member schools? There aren’t any? Then this must not be such a big deal – or maybe it isn’t a big deal because there isn’t any credible evidence that it is happening. This is grandstanding of the worst kind by a bunch of suits with a personal agenda to push.

Let me be clear here. I fully believe that athletes have been approached to tank some games – or at the minimum to bring them in “under the spread”. I fully believe that athletes have done that in the past and will continue to do that in the future. And there is nothing – I repeat NOTHING – that the NCAA and or the Congress of the United States can do to stop it. This will not stop if athletes get some kind of stipend in addition to their scholarships; this will not stop if athletes get some kind of “profit sharing plan” tied to the athletic departments at schools; this will not stop if Congress makes it illegal to bet on college sports. The fact is that gambling on sports will continue and gambling interests will always seek ways to “get an edge” on a game or two in order to make a score.

How might gambling on college sports be banned? Well, we could shut down the sports books in Las Vegas. That would probably close off about 5% of the action. Now we would have to find a way to stop the Internet betting via offshore books. If you think that is some kind of pie-in-the-sky concept, think again. Anyone with the most rudimentary computer usage skills can find a venue to place a wager on a college athletic event. Go to Google and query “gambling” “college sports” “website”. You will get over 27,000 hits. Many of them are not direct gambling sites located outside the US, but in the first couple of pages in the Google search, you can find a half dozen sites to take your wagers. The probability of shutting down all those links and preventing college students or student-athletes from betting on them is next to zero. And let’s not even talk about putting the local bookies out of business; their work is already illegal and has been for decades. But somehow, they seem to still find a way to keep on keeping on…

I said in a previous rant that the best way to get rid of wagering on college sports is to have some games “fixed”. If the outcome is known prior to the event – but not shared with the media or the professional handicappers – people won’t bet. Try to get money down on the next WWE pay-per-view spectacular; that’s not happening.

The NCAA as an organization is one that seems destined to constantly be in its own way. The people who run it and “make things happen” make an ironclad case and present irrefutable arguments against the legalization of human cloning; we do not need more of these hairballs running around creating mischief and chaos. These folks have an answer to just about any problem that comes along; problem is that their answer is almost invariably – how to say this politely? – wrong! And now even the NCAA has gone so far in its attempts to fashion a triumph of form over substance that it has failed to bring along with it the Congress of the United States. And when you have left those self-pumpulating gasbags behind on the righteous indignation axis, you know you have gone too far.

Save the NCAA for the athletes in the minor sports and for March Madness? It’s a steep price. And the NCAA continues to make the price more burdensome. One of these days, they will probably no longer be a “necessary evil” because the adjective will have been deleted.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…