Sports Biblio Digest 2.25.18: The NCAA’s College Basketball Black Market
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also in This Issue: PEN/ESPN Sports Book of the Year; Gary Bettman; RIP the Hook Shot; The ‘Queen Bee’ of Sabermetrics; ‘Animal House’ in the Big D; The Eagles and the Arts in Philly; The Western Bulldogs
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This is Digest issue No. 116, published Feb. 25, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website.
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Last fall, a scandal began brewing just as pre-season college basketball practice got underway, and I wondered at the time if that was the right description for what was going on. For years, anyone with eyes even remotely open knew that the recruiting scene on the men’s side was tantamount to a college basketball black market.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, prompted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York City, indicted four assistant college coaches and others on charges of bribery and conspiracy, alleging that high school recruits were paid to attend certain colleges, sometimes into the six figures.
Coaches, agents, shoe company executives, AAU intermediaries and other supposedly rogue characters were accused of enriching themselves by exploiting athletes and harming the “amateur” college athletic enterprise.
Louisville Hall of Fame coach Rick Pitino was quickly fired, and his athletic director, Tom Jurich, was right behind him. This week, the NCAA vacated the Cardinals’ 2013 NCAA title for other, equally unsavory reasons, and championship banners were taken down.
That was just the start of a week that might go down as the point that the entire college basketball edifice was crudely exposed for what it has been, for far too long, with some of the blueblood name brands in the sport implicated.
Bombshell reports at Yahoo! Sports and ESPN.com revealed at the very least some of the worst allegations of NCAA violations there can be—the outright purchase of players—and quite possibly a litany of federal criminal offenses ranging from bribery and conspiracy to wire and tax fraud.
Arizona coach Sean Miller, according to the ESPN report, was heard on FBI wiretaps offering $100,000 for current Wildcats star Deandre Ayton. Miller did not coach Arizona in its game Saturday night against Oregon amid speculation he would be fired.
Players currently at Michigan State, Alabama, Kentucky, Duke, North Carolina and others might be caught up in a vortex of impermissible benefits at the very least, and dragged into a sizable web of exploitation at the very worst.
All of these things, if proven to be true, would be NCAA violations of a most staggering variety, and should bulldoze the organization’s amateur edifice for good (more on that in a moment).
I have grave misgivings about federal government involvement in what appears to be NCAA terrain, and in the sports realm in particular. The FBI recorded 3,000 hours of phone calls via wiretap involving the targets of this probe. Is this really such a high priority, given so many other pressing issues in America? Its inability to flag down the latest school shooter, for example?
All this comes two weeks before the start of the NCAA basketball tournament, giving March Madness a whole new meaning. And the reports also come two weeks after the publication of former UCLA star Ed O’Bannon’s book about his crusade against the NCAA that led to landmark legal action.
In “Court Justice,” written with Sports Illustrated sports law expert Michael McCann, O’Bannon makes a strong case for allowing players to be paid as part of a broader set of initiatives designed to close down the black market that NCAA policies have allowed:
“Imagine if the NCAA had tried to settle my lawsuit. The NCAA could have done so simply by changing its rules to let athletes market their own brands. That approach would have opened up new doors for high school kids to take social media by storm. . . . Players would have been able to market themselves for financial gain and do so in a world where payments are recorded and transactions are transparent. I’d like to think that in this kind of a world—a world where the NCAA voluntarily made the changes sought—some of these bribes wouldn’t have occurred and the Justice Department wouldn’t now be involved. ‘No, thanks,’ when tempted by shoe company peddlers holding bags full of hundred-dollar bills. These kids and their families wouldn’t have needed that kind of dirty money. They could earn it on their own, and the money would be clean.”
He speaks further with SI’s Dan Greene, saying that boosters and other third parties out of the NCAA’s control aren’t going anywhere, and the money pile figures to grow even larger.
What the NCAA does in response to this scandal might determine not only its future, but salvage any shred of credibility and relevance that's still possible.
Yes, rules have to change, but in an organization known for being hidebound and subject to “membership” desires, what is realistic? And can the NCAA honestly assess what needs to be fixed before that?
Some assistant coaches figure to go to jail if they are indicted and found guilty. Other heads figure to roll, if found guilty, in the wake of monumental violations of NCAA rules.
In the short term, how can the NCAA address such an epic debacle on the eve of its showcase event, its biggest money-making vehicle and increasingly, a tarnished symbol of an antiquated, out-of-touch organization?
The NCAA has created a commission led by Condoleeza Rice to make reform recommendations later this spring. Leading critics of the NCAA, such as David Ridpath of The Drake Group, are skeptical about what can be done:
“I don’t think a special commission chaired by Condi Rice or any rule changes is going to stop it because you’ve got a black market. You know, supply and demand. How do you break a black market? Well, you’ve got to bring it out of the shadows.”
Sports Book News
The Library of American Broadcasting Foundation has given its 2018 broadcast historian award to Michael Socolow, author of “Six Minutes in Berlin: Broadcast Spectacle and Rowing Gold at the Nazi Olympics.” The author struggled to find a publisher, getting some traction in a 2012 piece at Slate published during the London Olympics about the unlikely story of the University of Washington crew taking home the the gold medal.
Socolow, a communications professor at the University of Maine, wrote in 2016 about how another book on the subject, the acclaimed “Boys in the Boat,” was published first. Not only that, Socolow said Daniel James Brown’s account was “peppered with inaccuracies and embellishments” and he claimed that interview material Socolow collected had been used by Brown without permission.
While he understood the reputations academics had earned for “impenetrable rhetoric,” Socolow said that “many critics have no idea how many scholars—like myself—have attempted to write for wider audiences but found ourselves blocked by gatekeepers in the publishing industry.”
As the PyeongChang Olympics began, Socolow wrote at Reason about the nexus of sports, sports broadcasting and nationalism, starting with those Berlin Games and the spectacle that arose through some memorable (and notorious) radio broadcasts;
Not surprisingly, Jonathan Eig’s “Ali: A Life,” was named the 2018 winner of the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing this week, with the judges declaring that “More than simply describing a life, Eig has created a context that allows us to understand that life more fully than we ever have before.” At The Fight City, Michael Ezra offers his review of Eig's book, which he thinks doesn’t quite reach the level of being the definitive Ali biography;
At The Age, an excerpt of “A Wink from the Universe,” to be published in paperback Tuesday by Viking. It's Martin Flanagan’s account of the Western Bulldogs 2016 premiership championship season in the Australian Football League, only their second flag in league football. One of Australia’s leading writers, Flanagan recently retired from The Age, and his departure was lamented at a rival newspaper: “For decades he’s been the champion of the misunderstood, and the heart, soul and conscience of a football media whose descent into self-important bombast manages to tailspin further every season.”
A Few Good Reads
A raunchy internal culture within the Dallas Mavericks organization, including reports of predatory sexual behavior by former team CEO and president Terdema Ussery and domestic assault, was revealed in a bombshell report this week at Sports Illustrated. Owner Mark Cuban has vowed to clean up the mess;
Sherri Nichols is a pioneer in sports analytics, and a rare female in the field whose legacy is detailed at The Ringer. “She was actually kind of a queen-bee, authoritarian voice. People didn’t mess with Sherri too often, simply because she was usually right,” Baseball Prospectus founder Gary Huckaby told Ben Lindbergh;
Peter Dobrin, culture writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, writes about how the Eagles’ Super Bowl victory could give a lift to a local arts scene that already enjoys a $4.1 billion local impact;
The Vegas Golden Knights, making their NHL debut, have already eclipsed the season points total for a first-year expansion franchise, but their 84 points also has them on top of league standings. From America’s Best Racing: is gambling the Knights’ best weapon?
This is a number that shocked me: Gary Bettman has been the commissioner of the National Hockey League for 25 years, after a long stint under David Stern at the NBA. At the Toronto Star, Kevin McGran examines how Bettman has grown the NHL into a $5 billion enterprise, despite being under fire for three lockouts, his response to concussions and this year keeping the league out of the Olympics. “The public me is a caricature that people that don’t know me paint,” he tells McGran;
In Seattle, where the NHL’s 32nd team could be added soon, a season-ticket campaign gets underway this week to demonstrate fan interest in a city without professional team sports in the winter for some time;
The for-profit Grand Canyon University in Arizona is getting serious about basketball;
After getting fired as Indiana University basketball coach, Tom Crean decided to get himself educated in person by the likes of Bill Belichick, LeBron James and Jim Harbaugh, his brother-in-law: “It’s instructive to talk to people and to read books and to watch from afar. But it doesn’t replicate being there—in the room, behind the scenes, in live situations in real time;”
Cliff Hagan was an undersized forward for the Kentucky Wildcats and in his NBA career, mastering the hook shot has all but disappeared from the sport. “It’s sort of gone with the wind,” Hagan, now 86, tells Mark Story of the Lexington Herald-Leader;
Derek Jeter’s The Players’ Tribune lets athletes tell their own stories, but is it journalism? I get the premise of this piece in The New York Times by Amos Barshad, but that was never the intent of the platform. This is the age of memoir, and athletes, coaches, other sports figures have the same access to media tools as journalists to tell their own stories, with only the insight they can provide.
