The NCAA Final Four tournament is nearing completion for another year with the national championship game to be played on April 5. In the course of watching as many of the 64 games as possible, I was subjected to a set of ments by the NCAA regarding its student-athletes.
Most student-athletes do not enjoy all the benefits that NCAA Division I basketball players do. Alongside college football’s Bowl Championship Series, March Madness stands among the NCAA’s most lucrative sports properties. Accordingly, athletes in elite Division I programs enjoy state-of-the-art facilities, the best in equipment and apparel and the mass appreciation of an enormous fan base.
The commercials broadcast during the Final Four tournament are meant to emphasize that student-athletes exist in a range of sports and are ed by the NCAA in their endeavours. If only that were true.
One look at Division I basketball programs emphasizes the fact that its member universities and the NCAA care only about the appearance of ing student-athletes and little else. How else to explain the re-emergence of coach Eddie Sutton, leading an Oklahoma State team to the Final Four only years after being implicated in a major recruiting scandal at Kentucky?
Sutton’s problems at Kentucky began in his first season as coach in 1985 with a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series by the Lexington Herald-Leader. The newspaper stated that 26 former Kentucky basketball players received cash and/or gifts from boosters. A three-year investigation by the NCAA only revealed that most around the program were tight-lipped about the situation. As a result, the university was punished for not cooperating with investigators.
Nearly one month after the conclusion of the NCAA’s first investigation of Kentucky during the Sutton era, another scandal emerged. In Los Angeles, an Emery air freight envelope sent by Kentucky to recruit Chris Mills burst open, revealing $1,000 in $50 bills. In the subsequent investigation, academic rules were also found to be breached, including charges that a player’s ACT score had been changed. In all, 17 violations were found by the NCAA, who stopped just short of imposing the “death penalty” on Kentucky’s basketball program, mostly because this time the school cooperated fully. Sutton was kicked out of Lexington shortly after.
The violations that nearly buried Kentucky basketball occurred under Sutton’s watch, but somehow he’s back in this year’s tournament. While the NCAA will openly laud its student-athletes in its ments, it continues to do them a disservice by allowing dubious people like Sutton, Jerry Tarkanian and Jim Harrick to ply their trade and put collegiate athletic programs at risk as a result. Subsequent years and appearances in Final Four tournaments will erode the shame associated with corrupt programs and coaches until they can be reborn again at press conferences announcing new recruits, licensing deals or March Madness victories in order to keep up appearances.
So why ruin a good thing?
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