College basketball and the mafia have a lot in common. They are both a form of organized corruption, and they both have a murder to lie about.
But the good news is that NCAA coaches are doing something about it.
Early this month, nearly 300 Division I coaches met in Chicago to discuss the state of college basketball.
If that doesn’t sound like organized crime, what does?
It only took a few cases of academic fraud and a murder to get them to cooperate on a code of ethics and self-regulation.
This year, Fresno State and Georgia made themselves ineligible for postseason play because they violated the rules.
Players at St. Bonaventure refused to play the rest of the season when they learned that one of their teammates was wrongly admitted to the school. When his welding certificate from a junior college wasn’t enough to be accepted, the university’s president stepped in to admit him.
Iowa State coach Larry Eustachy stepped down after it was found that he partied with athletes on road trips.
And on top of it all, there was the alleged murder of a Baylor athlete by his own teammate. Not to mention that Baylor’s head coach, Dave Bliss, was caught on tape telling assistant coaches to frame the dead guy.
Those are just the ones that got caught.
I’m sure every school in the NCAA has violated a rule along the way. The book is the size of an encyclopedia. And that’s the problem. Rules that restrict coaches from watching pickup games or speaking with high school juniors clutter the pages.
The NCAA needs to throw out the book – denounce all the old rules and replace them with two simple rules.
First, if a school gives athletes kickbacks, its program is dropped.
Second, if a school commits academic fraud of any kind, its program is dropped.
That may seem a little drastic, but this is not an issue that is going to be solved in a three-hour meeting. The only thing the coaches hoped to gain was good publicity. They all held hands and proclaimed that they had been cured.
That’s exactly why Bobby Knight didn’t attend. This is not to say that Knight doesn’t care about the sport. Former Georgetown coach John Thompson supported Knight.
“He’s a lot of things, but he’s not someone who’s not concerned about this game,” Thompson told ESPN. “Just because he was not here does not mean he will be inactive for the cause.”
In recent years, Knight has supported the reform of the game, including a plan to cut scholarships from schools that did not graduate athletes in four years.
I give Knight credit for not going. The only reason the other 300 coaches went is because of a stipulation attached to it: Coaches who did not attend lost the right to buy Final Four tickets.
LSU head coach John Brady made no secret of that.
“I don’t need anybody telling me how to act,” Brady told ESPN. “I want my Final Four tickets. Otherwise, I wouldn’t go.”
I guess Knight going to the forum would have been like Elliot Ness going to Al Capone’s family reunion.
