Category: Daily Rants

The NCAA tournament “reconvenes” today and we will complete the process of winnowing the field to the Final Four by Sunday night.  As I have said here many times, college basketball in March is my favorite sporting event; nonetheless, I have to offer a critical observation here:

• MLB is rightfully concerned with issues surrounding “pace of play” and is considering ways to increase it.  The “pace of play” in college basketball is just fine until the last three or four minutes of a close game; then it downshifts into a “glacial pace”.
• The reasons for that are not mysterious.  Teams usually have 2 or 3 timeouts apiece in their pockets and when the game is close they will use all of them.  Teams will extend the time it takes to administer fouls shots with multiple substitutions in each situation.  AND, particularly in close games, there will be at least a couple of times when the officials “go to the monitor” to review a call or to put a tenth of a second or two back on the clock.
• The final three minutes of a close game – especially in the NCAA Tournament – can take twenty minutes to play.

The NCAA rules mavens could address all three of those root causes for glacial pace of play if they wanted to; there may be no perfect solution here that would garner universal acclaim but finding ways to improve this “pace of play” issue is not like acing a course in differential topology.

If the NCAA needs some motivation to get working on this issue, let me offer up this one:

• If the games moved along more quickly in the final minutes, all of those student-athletes would have to stand around doing nothing; they could all be back in the library studying to become school alumni.

I want to mention a couple of the broadcast teams for the tournament based on what I heard/saw last weekend:

1. Brian Anderson/Chris Webber:  Last year, these two were abysmal; it was painful to hear the contorted logic Chris Webber would use to try to explain things that needed no explanation.  This year, there is significant improvement; this tandem is still not close to being the best announcing team to do the tournament games, but they are no longer the broadcast equivalent of a root canal.
2. Jim Nantz/ Bruce Raftery/ Grant Hill:  These guys are really good.  The best 3-man announcing team ever was Dick Enberg/Al McGuire/Billy Packer back in the 80s.  The current group is not that far behind.
3. Kevin Harlan/Reggie Miller/Dan Bonner:  Miller and Bonner do a good job with color/analysis.  If Harlan could tone down his play-by-play just a bit below the intensity of “hair-on-fire”, it would be a major improvement.
4. Ian Eagle/Jim Spanarkel:  For reasons that were always mysterious to me, CBS had this tandem together and then split them up a couple years ago.  Now they are back together, and they have regained the same easy delivery that makes them easy to listen to.

Pitt basketball was the pits this year.  [I apologize; that was too easy.]  Back in the days when Pitt was part of the Big East in that conference’s original incarnation, Pitt was a contender and an annual invitee to the NCAA Tournament.  In the process of imploding the original big East, Pitt moved to the ACC and changed coaches; that has not exactly worked out well for Pitt.  This year in ACC Conference games, Pitt’s record was 0-19 – including a quick exit from the ACC Conference Tournament.  As a result, Pitt fired coach, Ken Stallings and is hunting for a replacement.

I wonder just how appealing the job at Pitt is.  On one hand, a coach who takes the job and makes Pitt competitive/relevant in the ACC would be a hero in Pittsburgh and it would make said coach very much in demand 5 or 6 years down the road.  On the other hand, Pitt may just be destined to be a bottom-feeder in the world of ACC basketball and the coach that takes the job there will pocket a nice chunk of change and take his career down to the mid-major level after that.  Tom Crean is an excellent coach; he was looking for a job and interviewed at Pitt; Tom Crean took the job at Georgia not Pitt.  Nate Oats was a “hot rumor” to take the Pitt job but he chose to stay at Buffalo and signed a contract extension there.  Those situations are telling:

• It appears as if there is “word on the street” in and around the coaching community that the Pitt job is not a great one.  Pitt will get a coach and it may even get a coach you have heard of before.  The thing you can be sure of is that the boosters at Pitt are going to have to dig deep into their pockets to come up with a fat contract offer to lure that new coach.

Finally, here are some pertinent comments from folks who do not take the NCAA Tournament as a life-and-death situation:

“How bad is my bracket doing? I’ve just learned that two of the schools in my Final Four dropped basketball 10 years ago.

“No. 1 overall seed Virginia was upset by UMBC, which I’m pretty sure is a credit union.”  [Brad Dickson, formerly with the Omaha World-Herald]

And …

“The PAC-12 Conference – which just went 1-8 in football bowl games last season – followed up with an 0-3 showing in this year’s NCAA basketball tournament.

“And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, now the Washington Generals are threatening to sue for trademark infringement.”  [Dwight Perry, Seattle Times]

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

 

 

About a week ago, Buster Olney wrote this interesting piece for ESPN.com about the apparent crash of the MLB free agent market over the winter.  This is part of the second paragraph of Olney’s article:

“ … it became apparent that Scott Boras — baseball’s most prominent agent, someone with a long history of late-winter negotiation victories — lost to the market, in a rout.

The column points out that the current CBA does not contain any significant provisions to minimize the number of “tanking teams” and when there are “tanking teams” that means less competition for the services of free agents who are seeking major deals.  Moreover, the current CBA punishes the normally “big-spending teams” with a significant luxury tax meaning that even teams who have access to plenty of revenue can think twice before throwing money at “the best player left on the board”.

As with almost all of Buster Olney’s writings, there is plenty of info and insight contained here.  I think that the emergence and almost universal acceptance of advanced analytics in MLB also hurt many of the free agents this year.  When GMs look back on some of the huge deals done with star players who were 30 and older, the landscape is not a pretty one.

• Albert Pujols has never lived up to his mega-deal and there are still plenty of years to go on that deal.
• Troy Tulowitzki got a lucrative long-term deal but his body fell apart.
• Alfonso Soriano signed a long-term deal with the Cubs that turned out to be an albatross around the neck of that franchise for its duration.
• Josh Hamilton got a huge deal and then the Angels had to eat more than $50M of that deal just to trade him away.

Those examples are from memory; the field is littered with other bad deals.  And the list above does not even begin to consider the big contracts given to pitchers whose careers had peaked.  The point here is that teams are becoming far more interested in young players in their prime production years and less interested in obtaining players on contracts that have an element of “lifetime achievement award” in there.

While MLB flaps around trying to deal with “pace of play” issues, the folks who run minor league baseball have put some new rules in place to see how they can speed up games.  As with any set of changes, there are some good ideas and some bad ones.

1. In Double-A and in Triple-A games, there will be a 15-second pitch clock whenever there are no men on base.
2. There will be limits on the number of visits to the mound that can happen in each game.  Here are the team limits:  Triple-A clubs will be allowed six visits per team; Double-A clubs will be allowed eight visits per team; Single-A clubs will be allowed 10 visits per team; there will not be a limit on mound visits for Short Season and Rookie-level clubs.  “Mound visits” will include any conference with a manager, coach or other position player even if the pitcher leaves the mound to go and talk to the player.
3. In an attempt to shorten the length of extra inning games, each extra inning will begin with a runner on second base.  The “designated baserunner” will be the player in the batting order one ahead of the player due up first in the extra inning.  [Of course, the manager can elect to put in a pinch-runner for the “designated baserunner” and the normal rules for a pinch-runner would apply.]

I have no problem whatsoever with the limitations imposed by a pitch clock nor any limits on mound visits in a game.  The third rule change related to extra innings is the most controversial of the bunch and I have to admit that my first reaction was that this is too fundamental a change to the rules that got the teams to the point where extra innings became necessary.  Let me explain that last statement a bit.

Think about international soccer as my counter example.  In final tournament competition, teams play 90 minutes of soccer under a set of rules and then play another 30 minutes under the same set of rules.  If the game is still tied after all that, the winner is decided on penalty kicks.  [The NHL does the same sort of thing.]  The ultimate winner of the game/tournament is decided under a totally different set of rules and circumstances from the ones that produced the tie game.  I do not like that circumstance.

Baseball and basketball have extra innings/overtimes where the teams simply continue to play baseball/basketball until there is a winner.  If there is a tie at the end of a PGA Tour event, the players decide the winner by playing golf – they do not determine the winner for example by going to the driving range and seeing who can drive a ball the furthest.  I prefer that way to break ties.  So, my first inclination is to oppose the idea of starting every extra inning with a man on second base.

At the same time, I do not want to sound like an old geezer telling the kids to get off my lawn.  So, I am going to reserve judgement on this until there is some data to say how it works out on the field.  I will need to be convinced that this is a positive change – but I am willing to be convinced.

Finally, Scott Ostler of the SF Chronicle had this comment recently regarding an aspect of baseball that has changed over the years:

“Not everything was better in the old days, but this was: You were not a feared hitter unless you strode to the plate swinging three bats, then discarded two.”

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

 

 

I plan to take a break today from commentary about the NCAA Tournament simply because I know that I will be back to that topic in a couple of days.  So, let me mention first that the NFL’s Competition Committee has been in session to consider making rule changes to the game to make it better in 2018.  They do this every year; so, don’t get your hopes up too high.  Of course, the rule that everyone wants to have “adjusted” is the one that defines what is a catch and what is not a catch.  According to reports, the Committee is indeed looking into that one.

However, there are reports about another rule change that will be proposed to the owners for a vote.  [Aside:  It takes an affirmative vote of 24 owners to put a rule change into effect, so the Committee only makes rule-change recommendations.]  This other rule-change could provide as many controversies as the confusion of the “catch/no-catch” rule interpretation has.  According to reports, the Committee will recommend that the replay officials in NY – the ones that have the final say on coaches’ challenges and “instant” replays – should also have the authority to eject players from games for “egregious non-football acts”.

There were two “incidents” in games last year that did not lead to ejections but did lead to the perpetrators sitting out a full game on a suspension.  Those were:

1. Mike Evans (Bucs’ WR) assaulting Marshon Lattimore (Saints’ CB) from behind when Lattimore and Jameis Winston were in the midst of a “disagreement” on the sidelines.
2. Rob Gronkowski (Pats’ TE) clocking Tre’Davious White (Bills’ CB) in the back of the head after a play was over.

I agree that both of those acts were “egregious” and were certainly not “football-acts”.  However, this rule change opens up a huge can of worms.  Remember years ago, when Terrell Owens was with the Niners and scored a TD and then ran to the Cowboys’ star logo at midfield and posed?  Was that “egregious”?  It surely was not a “football-act”.

I am all in favor of ejecting players who do things such as those perpetrated by Gronk and Evans.  I would not object to officials ejecting players who get into shoving matches that stop short of punches being thrown.  [Aside:  A great use of replay footage would be to identify the players who instigate fights/altercations on the field so that the instigators would be punished in addition to the responders.]  It would not bother me to see a player ejected for his second unnecessary roughing penalty or spearing penalty or things like that.  I am not worried at all about the “ejection” part of this rule.  Here is what worries me:

1. I am not 100% confident that the “guys in NY” will get it right as often as not.  That lack of confidence comes from watching the same replay reviews that they do and reaching different conclusions about what the call must be.
2. I need a lot more clarity around what “egregious” means and where the boundary is between a “football act” and a “random act of violence”.
3. I believe that the upshot of this rule will be for the game officials to ignore completely any thoughts of player ejection(s) because they will know that the “guys in NY” can handle all of that.  This is an extension of what has happened with the instant replay rules; officials now realize that calls can be “made right” so there is less compulsion to get every one of them right in the first place.

This rule-change will be considered by the owners at their Spring Meeting in Orlando later this month…

Last week, a group of Jets’ fans sued the team.  Often when fans sue teams, the claims are only marginally above the “frivolous line” and sometimes do not even attain that lofty status.  This lawsuit seems to me to have a tad more meat on its bones.

Recently, the Jets decided to allow season tickets to be purchased in the mezzanine sections without the prior purchase of a PSL.  Up until that decision, the only way someone could be eligible to buy a season ticket to the Jets’ games was to first purchase a Personal Seat License; the current holders of those PSLs who also buy season tickets over and above the costs of those PSLs are now suing the Jets claiming that this decision renders their “investment” in their PSLs worthless.

On the other side of this argument, the Jets say that PSL holders would get benefits not available to the folks who buy their season tickets without the PSL “investment”.  These benefits would include:

• Special access to exclusive team events
• Discounts to team and stadium events
• Ability to upgrade their seats to lower levels at “no additional fee”.

Given that the PSLs cost multiple thousands of dollars, those benefits seem like pretty thin gruel to me.  The concept that PSLs are some sort of “investment” is also pretty tenuous in my view.  I would categorize PSLs closer to “extortion” than to “investment grade” but that is just me.  I am glad not to be in the geographic area where potential jurors might be summoned to hear this case…

One final NFL note today is an addendum to the reports about some of the truly stupid questions that NFL teams ask of potential draftees at the NFL Combine.  Just about every year, there are reports of truly offensive – and borderline illegal – questions put to the young players at the Combine such as “Is your mother a prostitute?”  This year, one of the questions supposedly posed to Da’Shawn Hand (DL, Alabama) was:

• “Do you like llamas?”

My answer to that question would have to be:

• I love llamas.  I have two of them at home.  I named them “Dolly” and “Como se”.

Finally, Scott Ostler of the SF Chronicle had this analysis of a recent NFL free agent signing:

“Derek Carr picks up Jordy Nelson at the airport and drives him around, showing him the sights. Because Nelson signed with the Raiders, I assume Carr didn’t show him the Coliseum.”

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

 

 

As you may imagine, my weekend was dominated by NCAA Tournament games.  What follows are the notes I took while watching and flipping from channel to channel starting with the Friday games:

• Providence/Texas A&M:  Aggies first field goal was at 12:30 of the first half; they get lots of shots because they hit the offensive boards hard.  Providence controls tempo with deliberate offense and aggressive defense – no uncontested shots.  Game was close to the end and the Aggies move on.
• Cal State-Fullerton/Purdue:  Early part of the game shows Tournament jitters with both teams shooting bricks.  Purdue leads by 9 at the half but looks like much the better team here.  Second half looks like Purdue is playing a JV squad in a scrimmage.
• Marshall/Wichita St.:  In the first half, Marshall indeed looks like the higher seeded team, but they rallied and tied the game with about 9 minutes to play in the second half.  Marshall got hot late in the game and won its first NCAA Tournament game ever.
• Cincy/Georgia St.:  Cincy is A LOT BIGGER than Ga St.  The game was close early because Ga St. was hot from the field, but Cincy dominated the rebounding at either end.  DeMarcus Simonds is a one-man team for Ga St., but Cincy was too much for him alone.  Game was closer than the 15-point margin indicates.
• UNC/Lipscomb:  Racehorse game early.  UNC leads by 9 at the half but it is not that close.  Second half not all that interesting; game is not in doubt.
• Arkansas/Butler:  Butler dominates early (they led 21-2 at one point) but Arkansas hangs in and leads 29-27 with about 4 minutes in the first half.  Arkansas does not play disciplined basketball.  Butler’s Kemar Baldwin had an excellent game leading 10-seed Butler to a win.
• West Virginia/Murray State:  With 12:15 to go in the first half, the score was 8-6; there have been lots of bricks and lots of turnovers so far.  Not surprisingly, WVU plays defense better than offense.
• Texas/Nevada:  Texas is not a “Shaka Smart team”; they play much more efficiently on offense than his teams at VCU ever did and play not nearly as frenetically on defense.  Nevada closed a 14-point deficit late in the game and won in OT.

[Aside:  Jerry Rice does a promo spot for the NCAA lauding athletes who will succeed in life outside athletics.  Fine.  Here is the what the NCAA put on the screen at the end, “Prioritizing academics, well-being, fairness”.  Takes chutzpah for the NCAA to put “academics” in the lead there, no?]

• Michigan St. Bucknell:  Officials let this game get a lot “chippier” than I prefer.  Final score was a 4-point win for Michigan St., but the game was not really that close.
• K-State/Creighton:  These schools probably compete with one another for “local recruits”.  K-State won this one comfortably.
• Charleston/Auburn:  Close game pretty much all the way; score is tied with 2:00 to play.  Auburn survives an “overall sloppy game”.
• Xavier/Texas Southern:  Never really a contest.
• Virginia/UMBC:  This was a vintage game for Virginia.  They held the opponent in check with good defense, but they do not score a lot of points themselves.  AT halftime the score was 21-21.  UMBC is hot in the second half and leads by 16 with 11:30 to play; UVa not built to come back from this sort of thing.  In the end, UVa tries to catch up by shooting 3-point shots; that’s not gonna work.

[Aside:  College basketball fans should give thanks for UMBC.  Finally, a 16-seed has beaten a 1-seed; and going forward, we can put to rest all of those cookie-cutter reports about “when will it happen”.  UMBC scored 74 points in their win.  That is the most points allowed by Virginia this season; in 11 games this year, Virginia had held opponents to 50 points or less.  This game was a big deal.]

• Syracuse/TCU:  The Syracuse zone clearly frustrates TCU, but they managed to lead by a point at the half because Syracuse’s offense is bland.  Both teams are relying on defense in the second half; the game is close all the way meaning it is an interesting game.
• Florida State/Missouri:  The game is a blowout early.  Pay attention to UMBC/UVa and Syracuse/TCU instead of this one.
• New Mexico St./Clemson:  See Florida State/Missouri comment above…

After a good night’s sleep and some early morning chores, I returned to my comfy chair, my notepad and plenty of coffee for Saturday’s fare.

• Alabama/Villanova:  Bama’s defense held Nova to a low score and a low shooting percentage in the 1^st half.  Don’t know what Jay Wright said to Nova at halftime but it worked.  Nova was a different team at both ends of the court in the second half with a 15-0 run in the first four minutes.
• Duke/Rhode Island:  Neither team shooting well early on.  Duke put on a run in a 5-minute span to lead by 17 putting the game on ice.

[Aside:  It is “fashionable” to hate Grayson Allen.  Nevertheless, you have to acknowledge that he is not a prima donna; he does all the “hustle stuff” you want from a player.  And he is a meathead.]

• Kentucky/Buffalo:  This game was never in doubt…
• Tennessee/Loyola-Chicago:  In the one bracket I filled out, I had Tennessee going to the Elite 8; at the same time, I wanted Loyola to do well for “nostalgia” reasons I mentioned last week.  Loyola advances on a buzzer-beater for the second time in this tournament.

[Tennessee/Loyola had a “military flavor” to it.  Tennessee featured a forward named Admiral Schofield and Loyola featured a guard named Clayton Custer.  Last Saturday was not Clayton Custer’s last stand…]

• Gonzaga/Ohio St.:  Zags build up a big lead and then miss plenty of easy shots to make a game of it.  Ohio St. leads with 8:00 to play in the game.  Gonzaga wins a close one here.
• Kansas/Seton Hall:  I love the grit/intensity Seton Hall plays with.  The final score shows a 4-point difference but every time I tuned in to watch for a few minutes, it never seemed to me that Seton Hall was going to win.
• Florida/Texas Tech:  This is a helter-skelter game by both teams with tons of sloppy plays.  Even though it was a close game, I do not find it fun to watch.
• Houston/Michigan: [This note was written late in the first half of this game] The team that makes the last mistake is gonna lose this game.  That would be Houston who did not guard the inbounding player in the final seconds leading to a miracle 3-point shot by Michigan as time expired.

Sunday’s fare consisted of 8 more games that would cut the field from 64 teams on Thursday afternoon to 16 teams as of Monday morning.  That makes 48 games in 4 days; how great is that?

• Butler/Purdue:  This game went back and forth for the whole first half.  Butler “looks like a damned good 10-seed”.  Purdue was hot early in the second half and held on to win by 3 points.
• Michigan St./Syracuse:  Michigan St. was my pick to win it all in the one bracket I filled out.  C’est la guerre!  Both teams played tough defense leading to 3 shot-clock violations in the first half.  Michigan St. missed 13 consecutive shots from the field at the end putting them behind by 3 with 7 seconds to play.  When they missed a buzzer-beater, Syracuse won 55-53.
• Texas A&M/UNC:  UNC led 20-13 early in the first half and then trailed 42-28 at halftime.  The Aggies dominated every facet of the game for the last 30 minutes.
• Cincy/Nevada:  Cincy is a 2-seed playing a 7-seed and at halftime, it looks just the way you would expect; Cincy leads by 12 and is in control.  In the second half, Nevada completely flipped the script and won the game with another late rally.
• Clemson/Auburn:  A total blowout.  I watched this game only when all the others were in commercial breaks.
• UMBC/K-State:  When UMBC was down only 5 points at half, I noted “A second-half run like on Friday night will put a 16-seed in the Sweet 16.  An omen?”  Actually, that was getting ahead of myself.  On Friday, UMBC was the “giant killer”; on Sunday, K-State was the “Cinderella killer”.
• Florida St./Xavier:  Xavier is methodical but Florida St. keeping it close with the 1-seed in this bracket.  In the final 5 minutes of the game, Xavier was either bad or dumb – – or perhaps both – – and Florida St. advances
• Marshall/West Virginia:  A game of runs early on but W. Virginia is faster and quicker than Marshall at every position.  By halftime, this game was over.

As I noted last week, one coaching matchup next week will be Jay Wright and Bob Huggins.  If the game were to be scored by fashion writers, there would be no reason for W. Virginia to leave Morgantown.

Thursday evening, there will be 4 games on tap.  Of the 8 teams participating, the highest remaining seed is Michigan who was a 3-seed.  There will be a pair of 7-seeds, a pair of 9-seeds and one 11-seed on display.

Friday night will be the “chalky games”.  There will be a pair of 1-seeds, a pair of 2-seeds and a 3-seed in action on Friday.

Finally, apropos of nothing in particular, here is an item from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times:

“A hunter in Maryland was knocked unconscious when a mortally wounded Canada goose — which typically weighs in at 10-15 pounds — fell out of the sky and conked him.

“In other words: ‘Duck, Duck, Goose’ … meet ‘Goose, Goose, Duck’!”

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

 

 

Today is not a great day to be a PAC-12 basketball fan.  The conference sent three teams to the NCAA Tournament and all three of them lost their first game:

1. UCLA lost one of the play-in games to St. Bonaventure earlier this week.  The Bonnies then lost badly to Florida in the opening round games yesterday.
2. Arizona St. also lost a play-in game earlier this week.  The winner of that game was Syracuse who faces TCU today.
3. Arizona was seeded 4^th in the field and lost badly to Buffalo yesterday.  See the commentary below…

PAC-12 fans may point to the fact that the Selection Committee did not put USC in the field despite USC finishing second in the conference and in the conference tournament.  If that is the rhetorical refuge for PAC-12 fans, that only confirms that this is not a great day to be a PAC-12 basketball fan.

Here are transcriptions – with some editing to clean up some of the language and lots of the grammar – of notes I made while watching yesterday’s games.  Yes, I am bleary-eyed this morning and I may indeed need to change the batteries on my TV remote before today is over.

• OU/Rhode Island:  Trae Young has lots of skill/potential; he can create shots for himself and others.  The rest of the OU team is mediocre.  The first game of the day went to OT; hope that is a good omen.
• Kansas/Penn:  Game is in Wichita making it almost a home-game for Kansas – as if they needed an advantage.  Penn committed 3 turnovers in its first 4 possessions and clanked a lot of 3-point shots early.  Cannot stay with Kansas doing that.  Devonte Graham had 19 of Kansas’ 33 points at halftime.

[Aside:  As a Penn alum from MANY moons ago, I have followed Ivy League basketball for a long time.  This Penn team has lots of very good Ivy League players; nonetheless, the fundamental difference in speed and athletic ability as compared to Kansas was huge.]

• Tennessee/Wright St.:  No doubt about this outcome about 8 minutes into the game.
• Gonzaga/UNC-Greensboro:  Gonzaga leads by 9 at the half but the game is closer than that.  UNC-G went 0 for 12 on 3-point shots in the first half.  The game was tied with 30-seconds to play and a truly dumb offensive foul by UNC-G lost the game.
• Duke/Iona:  Duke dominated early and then seemed to coast going into halftime.  Then they hit the gas again in the second half and won comfortably.
• Loyola-Chicago/Miami:  The game was tied at the half and that is a fair representation of how the play went for the first 20 minutes.  Miami is obviously the bigger team, but Loyola is relentless on the boards.  In the second half, both teams played tough defense; every shot was contested.  Loyola pulled the first upset of the tournament with a buzzer-beater that left 0.3 seconds on the clock.
• Ohio St./South Dakota St.  Ohio St is bigger and quicker, and they hit six 3-point shots in the first half.  Nonetheless, the game was tied at halftime.
• Seton Hall/NC St.:  Seton Hall won by 11 but these teams are more evenly matched than that.  If this were the NBA, these teams would go to seven games to decide the one that moves on in the playoffs.
• Villanova/Radford:  This was a mismatch from the start.
• Kentucky/Davidson:  Kentucky is way more athletic, but the game was tied at 54 with 7 minutes to play.  Kentucky fans may not like to hear this, but the officiating was very much in Kentucky’s favor for most of the second half.
• Texas Tech/Stephen F. Austin:  SFA led by 3 at the half and both teams played good defense in the first half.  Texas Tech guard, Keenan Evans, scored 19 points in the second half to lead Tech to its win.
• Houston/San Diego St.:  San Diego St. has 4 players who look as if they can scratch their ankles without bending at the waist; they are long and skinny.  The game was decided when a buzzer-beater did not drop, and Houston moves on…

[Aside:  Players wearing “man buns” seem out of place.  It makes them look more like team managers than it does players.  When I see it, I wonder if they have done their hair that way as an homage to their mother.  But that’s just me…]

[Another Aside:  Houston has 4 players on the roster whose name ends in “Jr.”  I looked at the official roster and learned that of the 4, only Galen Robinson, Jr. is actually a junior at Houston.]

• Alabama/Va.Tech:  This would have been far more interesting as a football game than as a basketball game.  The game was close so there was some reason to watch.  Neither team played effective defense.  Alabama played much better in the final 5 minutes of the game and that decided it.
• Buffalo/Arizona:  Buffalo was the better team for the first 10 minutes and the Bulls led by 2 at the half.  The Buffalo quickness produced a 13-point lead with 9 minutes to play in the game and soon after that, it sure looked to me as if Arizona just quit.  Arizona was bigger and stronger, and it made no difference.  Arizona under Sean Miller has underachieved in the NCAA tournament in recent years, but this performance was nothing short of embarrassing.
• Michigan/Montana:  The first 5 minutes of this game produced a week’s worth of bad shots by both teams – or so I thought.  In the second half, Montana went 10 minutes and 7 seconds without scoring a point and some of the shot selections in that period might be considered felonies in some jurisdictions.  Michigan “survived and advanced” which is what they need to do in a single elimination tournament, but they sure did not look good doing it.
• Florida/St. Bonaventure:  The first half produced a lot of running and frenetic motion on the floor but not a lot of points.  The game was really no contest in the second half; the Bonnies just ran out of gas and Florida won handily.

It is hard to say which teams looked the best yesterday because some of the really good teams had no meaningful opposition.  Rhode Island, Loyola, Buffalo and Alabama all played hard for the full game yesterday.  Kansas and Kentucky are scary in terms of athleticism.  Villanova and Duke were surgically efficient.

However, it is easy to point to Arizona as the team that looked the worst yesterday.  Deandre Ayton is clearly their best player – and may indeed be the overall #1 pick in the upcoming NBA Draft – and somehow the team found ways to keep him from getting the ball on offense.  I said above that it looked to me as if the team quit in the second half; in addition to that, they played dumb basketball while they were still trying.

Finally, Dwight Perry had this comment recently in the Seattle Times about a new degree program offered at a university in Switzerland.  College coaches and athletic directors have taken notice…

“Switzerland’s Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts will offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees in yodeling, starting in the 2018-19 academic year.

“So what’s next, a Lit minor in ‘Old Yeller’?”

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

 

 

I wonder if any of the coaches of highly seeded teams that will tip off today in the NCAA tournament will remind his team to “Beware the Ides of March” lest they be upset.  I also wonder how many of his players would get the reference if this admonition was presented to the team.

Verne Lundquist will not be calling any of the games this year for the first time in a long time.  CBS Sports has moved the team of Ian Eagle and Jim Spanarkel up a notch to take the #2 slot in their announcing rotation previously headed up by Lundquist.  Long-term readers here know that I have always enjoyed the Eagle/Spanarkel tandem; so, while I am sad to know that Verne Lundquist will not be there, I am also glad to see the “new guys” get a promotion.  Eagle and Spanarkel – along with Allie Force as a sideline reporter – will start their coverage this year on Friday afternoon with the Purdue/Cal St.-Fullerton game.

The lead announcing team for the Tournament – the folks who will call the Final Four games and the Championship Game down the road – is the same as it was last year.  Jim Nantz will do play-by-play with Bill Raftery and Grant Hill providing commentary and Tracy Wolfson handling the sideline duty.  This has been an excellent announcing crew for the past couple of years and I am glad to see that the network mavens have not chosen to make a change simply for the sake of making a change.

The American Gaming Association (AGA) is a trade group that represents and promotes the casino gaming industry.  I mention that because they have a vested interest in proclaiming some of the numbers I will cite here.  According to the AGA, Americans will wager $10B on the 2018 NCAA Tournament.  That is a whole lot of cheese even when you consider that there are 67 games involved.

The AGA also says that it estimates $300M of that wagered money will flow through the Nevada casinos where sports wagering is legal.  In case the batteries on your calculator are dead, that means 3% of the money will be wagered legally and 97% will be wagered “illegally”.  Lumped into all of that “illegal” wagering are all of the Bracket Pools that are constructed and conducted around the country.  [Aside:  I mean the ones that are always won by Gladys in HR as I noted in my rant two days ago.]  It makes no sense to get bogged down in the numbers themselves here except to note that there will be lots of money bet on the Tournament in ways that are not sanctioned by the laws on the books.

Again, according to the AGA, approximately two-thirds of the states have extant laws that make it illegal to participate in sports pools including Bracket Pools.  I seriously doubt that the State Police and State Prosecutors will be swooping in to arrest Gladys in HR and the people who organized every Bracket Pool in those 30+ States; but technically, all those people are “lawbreakers”.

Every person reading this has either been a part of a Bracket Pool or knows someone who has been.  All of those people are not hardened criminals despite their behavior here – even if they have repeated this behavior every year for the last 20 years.  This situation simply makes it clear that these laws are ineffective and out of touch with the reality of human nature.

One reaction to all this could be:

• Well, since no one is ever arrested or prosecuted for these “crimes”, the laws on the books are harmless.  Let well enough alone.

I prefer to look at the situation through a different lens:

1. The same – or companion – laws that make Bracket Pools illegal also make it illegal for lots of folks to wager on the basketball games themselves.  Like the laws regarding Bracket Pools, that does not prevent that behavior; it simply drives it underground to illegal bookies and/or offshore Internet sportsbooks.  If the Truth In Advertising laws were applied to the laws that forbid sports wagering on individual games, those laws should be labeled “The Local Bookies’ Full Employment Acts”.
2. Simply because millions of people choose to participate in Bracket Pools recognizing that – technically – those pools are against the law, it breeds a disrespect for the extant laws.  If the citizenry is expected to honor and respect the laws, there should not be silly laws on the books that are routinely ignored by tons of people for whom there are no consequences.  In those situations, either enforce the law(s) or change them.

I am not a member of the AGA; moreover, I am suspicious of statistics tossed out there by trade associations simply for the fact that they have an axe to grind.  In this case, I do not have to believe their stats are completely accurate to know for certain that there are lots of good folks out there who are going to be “lawbreakers” as soon as the first game of the Tournament begins just after noon (EDT) today.  Like Gladys in HR – who will win many of the Bracket Pools out there – these folks are not hardened criminals.

Recently, I cited a comment from Memphis basketball coach, Tubby Smith, who decried all the transfers made by athletes.  His point was that as soon as things did not go the way the athlete expected, they simply transferred schools; Smith called that quitting and said the system encouraged/taught the athletes to quit.  Well, that will not be a burr under Tubby Smith’s saddle for now.  Memphis fired Tubby Smith as its head coach earlier this week citing a drop in attendance and “unrest” among the boosters of the program.  Memphis has not made the Tournament in either of Smith’s two years at the school.

Rumor has it that Memphis will try to get Penny Hardaway to take the job there.  Hardaway played at Memphis during his collegiate days and has become a successful high school coach after his NBA career ended.  Time will tell who winds up with the Memphis job, but in the meantime, do not shed copious tears for Tubby Smith.  He will get a payment of $9.7M to stay home and not be the coach at Memphis.

Finally, you will quickly realize that Scott Ostler of the SF Chronicle is all in favor of increasing the pace of play in MLB when you read this comment:

“MLB players rejected a 20-second pitch clock. OK. How about a big loudspeaker next to the mound.  After 20 seconds: ‘THROW THE DAMN BALL, MEAT!’   Speed up the game? Shoot relievers out of a bullpen cannon.”

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

 

 

Even though today is “Pi Day”, I hope not to be irrational in this rant.  Having said that, I am going to tread carefully into an area that I try assiduously to avoid here; I am going to comment on a prominent political figure.

A few weeks ago, the FBI investigation of college basketball was prominent in the news and lots of commentators were tut-tutting about player exploitation and NCAA greed and the venal mess of a system that has evolved around recruitment of top-shelf players and … you remember all that stuff.  Amid all that sound and fury, President Obama said that the current NCAA system for college basketball is:

“… not a sustainable way of doing business.”

First of all, I think it is perfectly sustainable; it has been going on for a while and absent a legal theory in the Department of Justice that says schools are defrauded when a shoe company pays money to a player to attend a specific school – that is the essence of the legal theory behind the FBI probe – there is no reason the current system cannot project to the future.  The event that will make the current system unsustainable would be for the shoe companies to decide to stop the payments to the families of the high school recruits.

President Obama addressed a Sports Analytics Conference hosted by MIT in Boston.   In addition to his statement about unsustainability, he also said:

“[Basketball] needs to create a well-structured [developmental league], so that the NCAA is not serving as a farm system for the NBA with a bunch of kids who are unpaid but are under enormous financial pressure.”

Please note that if the Department of Justice under President Obama three years ago did not start the probe they are continuing today, the kids would be paid – not by the schools but by the shoe companies – and that would alleviate the “enormous financial pressure” that they putatively face.  For the top-shelf high school player who is a year away from being a lottery pick, the payment of $100-150K by a shoe company can tide him over for his year in college; then he can sign his millions-of-dollars guaranteed contract in the NBA.  Let us not lose sight of the fact that the real problem here is not the poor kid who is getting a six-figure tax free payment; the real problem here is the hypocrisy of the schools and the NCAA who pretend that these are “student-athletes”.

On another vector, I have to point out that President Obama is late to the party.  He was the President for 8 years and in those 8 years, there is ample evidence that he was paying attention to college basketball.  He made the “Presidential Bracket Selection” into an annual television program; his brother-in-law was the head coach at Oregon State.  I recognize completely that the President of the United States has lots of things on his calendar every day of the year, but President Obama had 8 years to use his bully pulpit to push for reforms of college basketball – – and he did not.

For those of us out here who have long thought that the NCAA is feckless, hypocritical and corrupt, may I pose this question to President Obama with utmost respect:

• “Where were you when you could have used the prestige of your office to move the debate here on a positive vector?  Surely, you have not had this epiphany after you left office; you had to know the current system was rotten at the core.”

I am not willing to accept that the time was never right for the Administration to take a position on this matter because President Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, managed to use the NCAA Tournament as a reason to decry the less-than-laudatory graduation rates for “student-athletes” at many of the big time schools that were participating in the tournament.  [Aside:  It always fascinated me that Secretary Duncan never acknowledged how ill-prepared some of these “student athletes” were to be college students and that lack of preparation came out of institutions nominally aligned with the Department of Education.  But that is none of my business…]

I am not here to “trash” President Obama.  Rather, I want to urge him to pitch in and help do something to fix college athletics – basketball and football being the two sports that need the most “fixing”.  If the FBI probe shuts off the money from the shoe companies – via assistant coaches at various schools – to the players and if nothing else changes, the players will be the main victims of the probe.  Is that really the outcome most desired by most people?

The NCAA will take in more than $800M from the basketball tournament this year; they have little motivation to change much of anything so long as that money spigot stays wide open.  The NBA is making plenty of money too; they have no economic reason to change much of anything; if they do make a change, you can be sure that it will not voluntarily be one that costs teams or the league a ton of money.  Change is only going to come from pressure outside the sport – and once the FBI has concluded its probe and potentially some folks are indicted and tried for what the DoJ thinks is fraud and bribery, the FBI will be on to other things.  The FBI is not an agent of change here.

Presidential involvement in college sports goes back to Teddy Roosevelt; no new ground needs to be broken here.  If President Obama holds these ideas in something more than a rhetorical context, I hope he will take the initiative to add his voice and his prestige and his energy to making the system into a better one.  I doubt that he needs to worry about accidentally making it worse; I am not sure it could be much worse.

Finally, the other annual sporting event that happens around this time of the year is the Iditarod.  Here is a comment from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times giving us a status report from the middle of the race:

“Norwegian mushers were a surprising 1-2 when this year’s Iditarod Sled Dog Race in Alaska reached the halfway point.

“Race-watchers say they’d never seen dogs trained to cross-country ski before.”

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

 

 

For far too much of the year, we are subject to essays on Bracketology – the study of how the ultimate NCAA Brackets will be populated.  Now that we know which school is in which slot, I presume that any discussion of the outcomes of the NCAA Brackets would fall under the heading of Bracketeering.  The intended landing spot for today’s rant is somewhere between Bracketology and Bracketeering.

I have to begin with a bit of advice for your office bracket pool; unfortunately, the advice is a bit of a downer.  No matter how much time and effort you put into your understanding of this year’s Bracketology such that you have insights into the ultimate workings of this year’s Bracketeering, you are not going to beat out Gladys in HR who does not know a bracket from broomstick or a basketball from a basset hound.  Here is the good news, however.  If you finish second to Gladys in the office pool, you can claim bragging rights for the simple reason that no one ever sees or hears from Gladys all year long and no one ever goes to HR voluntarily.

As you ponder this year’s Bracketeering, let me give you some advice about the 4 play-in games that will happen tonight and tomorrow night.

• The winners of those games get to advance to the main bracket of 64 teams.
• None of those 4 winners will make it to the Final Four.

Everyone – except Gladys in HR of course – knows that a team seeded 16^th in its regional bracket has never beaten the team seeded 1^st in that same bracket.  Everyone also knows that someday this will happen – just as “Someday my prince will come…”  [ /Snow White].  Could this be the year?  Sure, it could.  Is this going to be the year?  Highly unlikely.  And even if this is going to be the year, you would only have a one in four chances of picking the right earth-shattering upset.  Good luck with that.  The best you can hope for is that if such an upset happens, you did not have that #1 seed advancing all the way to the final game on April 2.

I think this year’s Bracket Pools should have a consolation prize built in.  Anyone who picks all four of the “eight-nine games” correctly should get his/her money refunded.  Those are four inscrutable games; even a crystal ball would not work here; I think you would need to sacrifice a goat and have someone read the entrails to figure those four out.

There are no great college teams this year; that has been evident since late December.  Oklahoma and Arizona St. were both ranked in the Top Five at one point this year.  Here is where they stand today:

• Oklahoma is a 10-seed and has lost 8 of its last 11 games.
• ASU is in a play-in game tomorrow night.

So, maybe this is the year to pick two double-digit seeds to make it to the Final Four.  That has never happened; maybe this is the year it will.  Hey, you only live once; it only costs ten bucks to enter the office pool anyway – – and remember, you are going to lose to Gladys in HR no matter what you do.

The way the NCAA Bracket has been populated, we could see Villanova play West Virginia in the Sweet 16.  You can be sure that Villanova coach, Jay Wright, will be wearing a perfectly tailored designer suit on the sidelines.  The big question for that game is this:

• Will West Virginia coach, Bob Huggins, break out a brand-new West Virginia polo shirt for the game?

If you want to watch a game where the scoreboard lights up, let me give you two possibilities:

1. UNC/Lipscomb:  They will meet on Friday in Round 1; you know that UNC loves to play fast and that the Tar Heels can score in bunches.  Lipscomb is often in the 80s and it has lost games by giving up more than 90 points a couple of times this season.  The Total Line for this game is 164.  I smell an OVER.  [Aside:  If Lipscomb pulls the unlikely upset here, be ready for a tsunami of “Big Daddy” references.  If you are younger than 40, Google is your friend…]
2. Kansas/Penn:  They will meet on Thursday in Round 1; you know that Kansas plays fast and has plenty of firepower.  You may not know that Penn has scored in the nineties 4 times this year plus Penn has gone north of 100 points in a game twice.  The Total Line for this game is only 146.5 …

There will be a Geezer Moment on Thursday afternoon when Miami plays Loyola-Chicago in the first round.  Loyola-Chicago won the National Championship in 1963 beating Cincinnati in OT in the Final Game.  Cincinnati had won the National Championship in each of the two previous years.  Since then, Loyola has hardly been a tournament “regular”; they have only been in the field 4 times since 1963.  However, us Geezers can think back to that exciting finish in the Final Game starting Thursday afternoon.  Loyola-Chicago are known as the Ramblers; too bad they could not play Georgia Tech in that first round game…

There is another Geezer Moment that will happen tonight – although this nostalgia is not as uplifting as the return of Loyola-Chicago to the tournament.  There was a time in the 60s and 70s when UCLA dominated college basketball.  No school since then has approached that level of dominance.  Tonight, UCLA will play St. Bonaventure in a play-in game and the winner will slide into the 11^th-seed slot in the East Bracket.

• Sic transit gloria mundi …

The Midwest Bracket is top heavy with Kansas, Duke and Michigan St. all in there.  Similarly, the South looks tough with Virginia, Arizona, Kentucky and Tennessee all there.  The other two brackets seem a bit softer.

If you are looking for potential first round upsets – – in addition to Loyola-Chicago upsetting Miami in a Nostalgia Special, consider:

• Providence (10) over Texas A&M (7):  Providence played very well in the big East tournament.  If they can carry that over to this week, they could advance.
• South Dakota St. (12) over Ohio St. (5):  S. Dakota St. as a team shoots just over 40% from three-point range and Ohio St. has a few clunkers on its résumé this year.

One final note about the Selection Committee if I may…  They take a lot of heat every year about the way the put teams in the brackets and the teams they leave out of the brackets.  One of the recurring themes yesterday on sports radio was that the Selection Committee had only one job and it failed to do that.  According to callers – and a host or two – the only thing the Committee is there for is to find the 68 best teams and then put them in the brackets.  Excuse me, that that is pure nonsense.  The Committee has 31 automatic entries to the tournament and they exercise exactly no control over them.  If indeed, the NCAA tournament was populated with the 68 best teams – by whatever advanced analytical methodology you happen to prefer this week – you would not have teams like Penn, Bucknell, Montana, Lipscomb and Georgia St. in the field.

Finally, here is a definition from The Official Dictionary of Sarcasm:

“Airbrush:  An artist’s tool invented by Playboy Magazine to give your girlfriend and inferiority complex.”

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

 

 

The NCAA Tournament Selection Committee has adjourned for the year leaving us with about 24 hours of moaning and wailing regarding teams that got snubbed – or were poorly placed in the bracket.  I did not see nearly as much college basketball in the late part of the season as I normally do – because I was out of the country for a little over 2 weeks – so I have even less interest in the who got snubbed question than I normally do.  [Aside:  Normally, I do not care about it much at all.]  However, three schools that are often cited as “Snubees” are:

• Louisville
• Oklahoma St.
• USC

With regard to Louisville, one of the arguments made is that every loss suffered by the Cardinals this year was to a team that is in the tournament.  OK; that means they have no bad losses on their résumé; at the same time, Louisville lost 13 times this year meaning they have shown they are not quite as good as a whole bunch of teams already in the field.  Oh yeah, and then there is that recent NCAA decision to strip Louisville of its 2013 championship …

I saw Oklahoma St. lose to Kansas last week and there was no doubt which was the better team on the floor.  Add that showing to the fact that the Cowboys lost 14 games this year and I reach a point where I wish them well in the NIT.  [For the record, they play Florida Gulf Coast in the first round of the NIT later this week.]

USC did finish second in the PAC-12 and lost 11 games for the season – which is not great, but it is better than the records posted by Louisville and Oklahoma St.  However, they are only 6-5 since February 1^st and they have lost to Arizona and UCLA twice each in that stretch.  The Trojans have the strongest case of the three here – – but it is hardly something that would cause me even a minor case of agita let alone generate outrage to see them out of the tournament.

Since I mentioned the NIT above regarding Oklahoma St., the tournament will involve 32 teams and will incorporate some interesting rule changes.  Presumably, these are rule changes that someone in the NCAA rules hierarchy thinks could be incorporated into college basketball one of these days.  So, let me comment on them.

• The three-point line will be moved back 20 inches to the distance that it is in International play.  I like this change; I think the three-point line is too close to the basket.
• The free throw lane will be widened 48 inches to the NBA width.   I have no problem with this, but I also see no need for it.  When the NBA widened its lane – twice – the reason was to keep Wilt Chamberlain from dominating the game as much as he did.  College basketball has not had that problem recently.  Oh, and by the way, the officials never call 3-second violations in the smaller lane so, what is the point here?
• Games will have four 10-minute quarters instead of two 20-minute halves.  Bonus foul shots will come on the 6^th foul of each quarter.  The timing change means two extra buzzer-beater shots per game.  The number of fouls a team can commit before entering the bonus is doubled.  I do not like this change.
• When a team gets an offensive rebound, the shot-clock will reset to 20 seconds instead of 30 seconds.  You know what this rule will insure?  There will be more mistakes made by shot clock operators.

Tiger Woods finished second – one stroke back – in the Valspar Championship yesterday.  Golf writers and the folks who count the money for the PGA are ecstatic; Tiger Woods changes the public’s interest in golf in a hugely positive way.  Moreover, the public acts on its perceptions.  Out in Las Vegas, Tiger Woods was listed at 100-1 to win The Masters 10 days ago; this morning, his odds have dropped to 10-1 and according to the Westgate Superbook, more money has been wagered on Woods than on any other player potentially in the field.  Remember, he finished second in the tournament last weekend not first…

It appears that Jake Arietta has found a home in MLB for the next 3 seasons.  Surprisingly, he signed a 3-year deal worth a reported $75M with the Phillies.  I say that is surprising for two reasons:

1. The Phillies are rebuilding but are not yet “rebuilt”; Arrieta is 32 years old.  It will be interesting to see how he fits in once the Phillies have finished their reconstruction.
2. Arietta is a Scott Boras client.  The Phillies and Scott Boras have done very little business since the year that JD Drew sat out and played independent league baseball rather than sign with the Phillies.  That was back in the mid-90s…

I have often said here that there is not much NBA stuff that is interesting before March 15^th.  Last weekend was an exception to that statement; the Houston Rockets rode a 17-game winning streak into Toronto to take on the Raptors who happened to lead the NBA East at the time.  The result was a 3-point win for the Raptors in a game that did not have the urgency of a playoff game, but it had the same intensity.  There are 1230 NBA regular season games; perhaps, 15 of them are as good as the Rockets/Raptors game was last weekend.  You do not have to be a math major to look at those numbers and recognize that buying season tickets in the NBA is not a good deal.

Finally, here is a comment from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times:

“Dubuque assistant women’s basketball coach Justin Smith was hailed as a hero for rushing up from his seat and slamming on the brakes of the team bus after the driver passed out while going 70 mph on a Kentucky freeway.

“Basketball purists can’t decide whether to call it a textbook fast brake — or getting a much-needed stop.”

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

 

 

Earlier this week, there were reports that middleweight boxer, Canelo Alvarez, had a tainted sample regarding a “banned substance” – clenbuterol.  I have no desire to get all pharmacological here, but clenbuterol is a bronchodilator often used by asthmatics as a treatment; it is also used by body builders as part of their “cutting cycle” wherein they seek to lose weight but not muscle mass.  There is evidently insufficient clinical evidence to say that it is an important part of such weight loss regimens, but the IOC – and more specifically – the sport of boxing has put it on the “banned substance list”.  So, you would expect that Canelo Álvarez would be facing some sort of disciplinary action…

His explanation is that he ate “tainted meat” and that was the causative agent that put whatever it was in his bloodstream that caused the failure of the test.  [Aside:  It is too easy to make a comment here using the name of any of a half-dozen fast food pushers and the phrase “tainted meat”, so I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.]  In fact, it appears as if the boxing mavens have accepted this explanation and have moved on.  Oh, there is one other factor that might have some bearing on the matter:

• Canelo Álvarez is schedule to fight Gennady Golovkin in Las Vegas on 5 May.  Their first fight was huge; this fight is likely to be the biggest boxing event of 2018 – unless Floyd Mayweather decides to challenge the winner of that fight for a payday sometime in December.

So, let me recap all of this.  Clenbuterol is a “banned substance” but its “banishment” is not nearly as ironclad as it might be were it discovered in the bloodstream of a ham-and-egger who is fighting in a 6-round undercard match.  The fight is big money and big money trumps any sort of drugging/doping test anomaly that might occur in the lead up to the big money fight.

Here is the bottom line:

• Boxing just threw in the towel – so to speak – on PED usage and PED testing in the sport.

As you may recall, back when it was first revealed that the FBI had been investigating college basketball coaches and shoe companies for paying high school prospects under the table to attend certain schools, I wondered what Federal Law had been broken and even if sent to some part of the US Code I wondered if such crimes warranted years of time and effort by the FBI.  I will not rehash here why I do not think that paying these kids or their families to influence their decision is an egregious form of bribery or fraud but clearly the FBI and the US Attorneys do.  While I was gone, news broke that the FBI had used wiretaps to garner information about players and payoffs and schools and the people involved in these activities.  That information means that the FBI had to go before a judge to get warrants to install those wiretaps and collect whatever information they collected.

Presumably, in their representation before whichever Federal Judge(s) who authorized the warrants, the FBI spelled out which laws they believed were being broken – other than the obvious tax evasion laws by the payment recipients who did not declare it as income.  I guess it is too idealistic for me to wonder why one of those judges did not ask – merely for clarification sake – why the FBI was expending this level of effort and resources on a “crime” that really only affects college basketball teams.  I continue to think that in the Pantheon of Federal Crimes, whatever anyone did here is akin to jaywalking in the world of people who are not hardened criminals.

An ancillary part of the story from about a week ago was the Arizona basketball coach Sean Miller was one of the people whose phone calls were recorded and that he discussed a “bribe”/payment of $100K to guarantee that prized recruit Deandre Ayton did indeed sign on with Arizona.  The school suspended Miller for a game and proceeded to do its own investigation; Miller – of course – proclaimed his innocence; after a one-game absence, Miller returned to the bench to coach the team and the school said that it awaits further movement in the criminal investigation.

There appears to be credible evidence that over the past 2 seasons, there could be improprieties regarding top recruits and “financial emoluments” at schools to include:

• Duke
• Kentucky
• Michigan St.
• NC State
• UNC
• USC

I think the important thing to recognize here is that if all of this FBI generated evidence shows that all these schools were doing “bad things” for all these years, it happened completely outside the scope of NCAA scrutiny.  The organization that has devoted itself to maintaining the ideal of amateurism and fair play and the “student-athlete” did not have any inkling that any of this stuff was going on until the FBI clued them in.  There are two possible reasons for that blindness:

1. The NCAA enforcers/investigators are feckless incompetents.
2. The NCAA mavens were too busy counting the hundreds of millions of dollars that the men’s basketball tournament generated every year, and which funded their cushy lifestyle.

Those two choices boil down to incompetence or corruption – but you are free to pick Door Number Three which is “BOTH INCOMPETENT AND CORRUPT”.  It would certainly not bother me one little bit to see those sorts of labels hung publicly and boldly on the NCAA and the fat-cats who live off of it.  But at the same time, when all of this is put into the past tense once and for all, I have to wonder why the FBI spend years and manpower on this instead of investigating things like:

• Drug dealers/syndicates
• Doctors who over-prescribe and fraudulently prescribe opioids for Medicare/Medicaid patients
• Human traffickers
• Hate groups
• Cyber criminals.

I guess it is pretty clear why no one would ever think of considering me to be the Attorney General…

Finally, in light of these FBI revelations, I think it is fitting that I close today with a statement made by a man who made his living skirting NCAA regulations with impunity.  The late Jerry Tarkanian was the head coach at UNLV in the Rebels’ heyday and he spent most of his time there in the crosshairs of the NCAA gumshoes.  Here is Tark’s observation about the NCAA rules and how they are honored by schools:

“Nine out of ten schools are cheating.  The other is in last place.”

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