The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
NCAA needs rebuild of its rulebook
STORRS — Game after game, the UConn basketball team falls with a dull thud. Game after game, the sight of empty seats and scent of mediocrity fills the senses.
The real noise, the real agent of change, must be found off the court.
When Randy Edsall tweeted out #PayThePlayers on Friday, the UConn football coach drew plenty of attention around the country.
The sentiment to pay players in major college sports is hardly new. What brought vigor to Edsall’s words and a spotlight on Edsall was his ability to tie a new NCAA football rule to a rancid basketball moment.
Edsall’s tweet pointed out a recently adopted NCAA proposal will allow schools to employ more people than the NFL in their “scouting departments,” yet still not pay the players with all the television
money given to the conferences. “We’ve become a farm system,” Edsall tweeted.
That, by itself, was good, strong stuff. Yet the power in Edsall’s punch grew exponentially with its timing. Edsall dropped his words on a day when college athletics was rocked by a Yahoo Sports report that an FBI investigation into corruption in the sport has identified more than 25 players and 20 programs possibly breaking NCAA rules.
So credit Edsall with a hot take. And contrast it with the cold fish NCAA president Mark Emmert delivered.
“These allegations, if true, point to systematic failures that must be fixed and fixed now if we want college sports in America,” Emmert said in a statement. “Simply put, people who engage in this kind of behavior have no place in college sports. They are an affront to all those who play by the rules.”
Here’s the No. 1 problem. The NCAA rules suck.
Oh, I’m sorry. Did I put that indelicately?
Let me try again.
The NCAA rules have sucked for decades.
“With these latest allegations, it’s clear this work is more important now than ever,” said Emmert, who cited the Commission on College Basketball, chaired by Condoleezza Rice, he has appointed. “The Board and I are completely committed to making
transformational changes to the game.”
The real joke is in the words “latest allegations.” Paying basketball players is almost as old as playing with peach baskets. Money in paper bags doesn’t leave paper trails. And without subpoena power, the NCAA has done even worse than journalists at proving stuff. The NCAA has put together a rulebook thicker than the Bible and busted schools for every two-bit violation it can find.
In the meantime, enough money to bankroll small third-world nations has poured into pockets uncaught. And if you think this one FBI investigation nearly tells the story of what has gone in major college basketball you are incredibly naïve. The FBI investigation doesn’t even completely cover the present.
The UConn present? Fans have stopped booing at Gampel Pavilion and the XL Center. And that is the worst sign of all. Memphis blew open a 53-34 lead with 14 minutes left Sunday. Coach Kevin Ollie rushed to call a time-out. There was silence. Anger has turned to apathy.
If Ollie survives this season, the $10 million remaining on his contract surely will be his life preserver.
Credit the FBI for doing the heavy lifting and giving the NCAA a chance to get it right this time. And if the NCAA doesn’t get it right, believe this much, the FBI has better things to do than babysit major college sports for the next decade. If the NCAA doesn’t put a workable solution to get money into the hands of the most marketable players, the black market will re-emerge in a year or two.
Crooked agents will return like rats. Crooked assistant coaches will have their hands out. Head coaches will do their best to see nothing.
After getting smacked around publicly for 24 hours, Emmert did seem to warm to some realities Saturday.
“We need to act and have changes in place before tipoff of next season,” Emmert told CBS Sports. “Failure to do that will really erode everyone’s confidence in what this wonderful game is truly all about.”
Part of that is hogwash, of course. If the NCAA acted quickly, good grief, half the NCAA Tournament field could be washed out within two weeks. And here’s a news flash, Mark. Everyone’s confidence in the wonderful game already is eroded …
We will have to wait to see if first-year UConn assistant Raphael Chillious is touched in any way by FBI allegations from when he was on the staff at Washington, but the NCAA inquiry into UConn has nothing to do with the FBI investigation. We know part of the inquiry involves the recruitment of Zach Brown, and sources also have indicated questions have been asked about Hamidou Diallo. But questions, sources said, have been about at least a handful of different recruits.
Even after a month, there is no indication if this will turn into something of significance or fizzle into something minor. There is evidence of one thing. If the UConn coaches cheated, they sure have done a lousy job of it. The 83-79 loss to Memphis on Sunday assured UConn of its first back-to-back losing regular seasons in three decades.
Wiretaps caught Arizona coach Sean Miller discussing paying $100,000 to ensure young star Deandre Ayton signed with his team. Miller will be sacrificed along the way, just as Rick Pitino was at Louisville. Turns out the biggest coaches aren’t bigger than the game after all. College athletics will do anything to survive and Emmert and the rest of the great power structure seem to finally realize something must be done to save itself.
The answer is some form of the Olympic model. Schools paying hundreds of thousands outright to college athletes isn’t going to work. There are too many schools that cannot afford it short term. And the ones that could can will not be able to sustain it forever. There are too many questions involving Title IX and spreading all that money around equally. There are too few answers about the future of traditional television to ensure where the billions will come from.
So keep the cost of attendance subsidy for college athletes and then allow them to strike individual endorsements. Let them be Michael Phelps or Lindsey Vonn. Let the biggest names cash in on deals. Let the marketplace do the work. Will boosters, in the name of Joe’s Clam Shack down the street, get money to players. Of course, but they already do. To document it all, keep it above board, will be better than anything the NCAA has now. We’ll all live.
“I’m very proud of those guys,” Ollie said of his team after a 23point Memphis lead turned into a four-point loss. “They didn’t lay down. Just got to stay positive.”
The positive is maybe a new NCAA system could allow UConn basketball to get back into the game. Because it’s not working in Storrs right now, not even close.