Who would have thought that the focus of Final Four week would be more so off the court than on it? Some items of note:
- Did you see the Louisville guy (Kevin Ware) break his leg on TV Sunday? I didn't - and I have no intention of ever seeing the video of it! If you try showing me the video, I will not watch it. I accidentally saw a picture of it when Jen had it up on the computer or phone. I heard how bad it was, and I saw enough of the reaction of the players on both Louisville and Duke to know that I don't want to see it. I'm glad CBS didn't do what the broadcasters did 30 years ago when Lawrence Taylor snapped Joe Theismann's leg, and the coverage apparently showed slow motion replays of it non-stop. I can go without seeing the Ware injury.
- And to think college video from the week couldn't get more ugly to watch, there was the Rutgers incident. The video of the former Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice circulated, showing Rice basically playing a one-man game of dodgeball with the basketballs at practice (except he was only doing the throwing.) Even though this video has been in the hands of Rutgers personnel for months, it took world-wide exposure for them to fire Rice. Sadly, there is more psycho coaches out there that systematically mentally and physically abuse players from the lowest levels of sport all the way to the top. The more successful your team is, the more acceptable this abuse becomes (see Bob Knight). Unlike the others, Rice was caught on tape.
And to those who say the boys should have stuck up for themselves, it's always easy for us to say this. We say this about victims of all types of crimes in society, particularly physical abuse and rape. It becomes a case of blaming the victim ("I would have stuck up for myself," many say). Yet when people get put in that situation, they are often so mentally abused that they don't feel like they can get out of the situation by defending themselves from such abuse. Instead of implicitly blaming the victims, we should sympathize with them and realize their situation was not the easiest to deal with. Many of these guys have professional aspirations. If they lose their scholarship, the road to getting the seasoning required for attention from the professional ranks becomes a much more difficult one. It's easier for some of these guys to take the abuse and gut it out than it is to risk the chance of getting kicked off the team for ratting on their abusive coach.
It doesn't make it right for what coaches like that do - we just need to understand that it's not the easiest thing for these players to report their coach for such abusive behavior. It makes me think that all colleges, if they don't do so already, be required to film all of their practices for compliance purposes of player safety from abusive coaches. - Two Pac-12 teams hired coaches. One just finished a Cinderella run as a 15-seed in the NCAA tourney with Florida Gulf Coast and moved to USC for an incredible pay raise (Andy Enfield). The other didn't even have time for the ink to dry on his 10-year extension with New Mexico (Steve Alford) before bolting to UCLA. More on Alford later.
- Oh, and I almost forgot about the Auburn football scandal, which has a little bit of something for everybody - robbery, bribes, murder. Ok, not murder. Just wanted to see if you were still paying attention.
More college thoughts/rants
Sure, there are some college coaches that might have some shreds of morality, but I'm not sure who those guys are. When you hear a guy has signed an extension with a school, all that means is....well, nothing. It doesn't mean the guy is going to stay with your school for 10 more years. It doesn't mean anything.
Most (if not all) of these big money contracts these guys sign includes a buyout clause jusssssst in case they get a better offer or opportunity somewhere else.
Did you take a look at all the coaching changes that occurred this offseason in football? It was a domino effect that seemed to touch about a quarter of the BCS-based teams. Then there were some coaches like Les Miles who helped get himself an extension by "showing interest" in the Arkansas job. I put that in quotes because it's debatable whether there was any interest or if it was merely a ploy to get more money.
Going back to Alford, who the hell signs a 10-year contract with a team (which he was lucky to get to begin with, considering how little Alford has done to earn it in his NCAA tourney appearances) and then bolts days later? On the Dan Patrick Show, he said he gets a lot of calls, but the call from UCLA is different because it's UCLA. Like hundreds of college coaches in the major sports, this guy is going to preach loyalty and committing to a team when he's literally a phone call away from being wooed away from that locker room.
It's one of the main hypocritical things that bother me about college sports, right next to the free labor that the NCAA and coaches get from the players and the dumb transfer rules that cause players to sit a year when they want to transfer to a new school.
Argue all you want, but you'll never convince me that these players don't deserve at least some form of payment? You say their scholarship should be considered their payment, but how many of these guys even get their degrees? Most of these guys in basketball, especially the NBA-caliber guys, are 1-2 year rentals who
These unpaid servants of the NCAA are the ones whose talents create a product that is worth billions of dollars. And who reaps the benefits? The coaches who can bail to another school whenever they want. The NCAA administration folks, whose morals are even lower than the coaches.
And since when does a coach need a 10-year contract for a security blanket?
The most baffling thing about the Alford thing, outside of him getting an extension, was that he needed such a lengthy extension. Are these decade-long contracts really necessary for teams to show their "loyalty" to certain coaches or to prove to the coaches that they want them around for a while? Do you have any idea how many coaches in both college football and college basketball have been with their current schools for 10+ years?
Well, thanks to Wikipedia (and I know people can enter in information on that site at will, but to the best of my knowledge, the data looked accurate), I broke down both sports based on length of coaching tenure. Below are the percentage of coaches who have been with their current schools for a decade or longer.
College basketball: 52 of 347 (15%) - look at the top 10 list below. Unless you're a big time college basketball fan, good luck knowing more than two names on that list.
College football: 10 of 125 (8%)
And here are the numbers for new coaches to their respective teams entering the 2013 seasons of their sports:
College basketball: 35 of 347 (10%)
College football: 31!!! of 125 (25%) To think, I thought I was exaggerating with the quarter of NCAA teams changing coaches seemingly. Seemingly ended up being true...
I'm not sure if this data is consistent throughout the years, but that means if you picked a coach at random in college football, you're 3 times more likely to pick a team who hasn't coached a down at the current school as you were to identify a coach who's been at a school for a decade or longer.
Alford was at New Mexico for six years, so he was less than five years away from making it to 10. However, as is the case with many of these coaches, they get bored at certain jobs or get wooed by better ones.
No one is going to argue that UCLA basketball doesn't sound sexier than New Mexico basketball - no doubt, UCLA's history is hard to ignore. But you just signed a 10-year deal days before! You said you wanted to stay there and be there for years to come. Then you bolt at the first call you get from UCLA?
At the very least, if the NCAA isn't going to change its transfer rule with the athletes switching schools, they should make coaches sit out a year before transferring to a new school to at least show some consistency in its policy. However, that would require the NCAA to do something it is incapable of doing.
After all, if players who continue to get paid squat keep making these guys a collective billions, then why would they want to change anything? The system works best for those on the top of the food chain: the big conference adminstrations, athletic directors, coaches, and most importantly, the NCAA. Let the free labor reign.
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