Friday, March 25, 2005
Hoop dreams, nightmares
Tick, tick. The NCAA men's basketball tournament has become synonymous with gambling. By some estimates, 30 million Americans will bet $3.5 billion, the gross nation product of Haiti, on this year's games. So much money is on the line that "March Madness" could be defined as the anger we feel when teams we picked to go to the Final Four — Kansas or Syracuse, say — are upset in the first round.
About half of the $3.5 billion is wagered in relatively harmless office pools, which may make up in camaraderie what they cost in productivity. Such pools are legal in some states, as long as the organizers don't skim profits. They're illegal in other states, but not exactly a high law-enforcement priority.
Of greater concern is the other half — the vast sums wagered in Las Vegas, over the Internet and with bookmakers. History has shown that big money and college sports are a recipe for scandal:
• Every decade since the 1940s has featured college game-fixing schemes. "A bomb waiting to explode," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski called it after Northwestern basketball players were implicated in a 1998 scam.
• In an NCAA survey, about 20% of male athletes said they had bet on college sports, and about 2% of men's basketball and football players said they had been asked to affect the outcome of a game.
The NCAA recognizes the threat. Every team in the tournament was shown a video warning of the danger of consorting with gamblers or making bets. Next Friday, NCAA and FBI officials will meet with the four remaining teams.
In Washington, where it usually takes a scandal to prompt action, legislation to ban wagering on college sports is on the shelf for now. And at this point, a ban would be about as effective as Prohibition was.
We won't presume to predict which teams will reach the Final Four this year in St. Louis. But this much is a safe bet: The next game-fixing scandal is just a matter of time.
No one should be shocked when it erupts, and only then will some seemingly inexplicable upsets and near-upsets become less inexplicable.
Failing grades. There's another ugly underside to big-time basketball at too many colleges and universities: a longstanding failure to take seriously the "student" part of the NCAA's cherished catchphrase, "student-athletes."
Of the 65 schools that started the tournament, two-thirds failed to graduate even 50% of their men's basketball players in the latest period for which records are available. Nationally, the basketball graduation rate for the 117 big-time men's sports programs in Division I-A dropped to 39%, down three points from the previous year.
Only in the past year has the NCAA finally moved to toughen academic requirements for college athletes and penalize teams that don't shape up. And the plan doesn't take full effect until 2008-09.
If those rules were operational today, half the teams in the round-of-16 play that started Thursday would be under NCAA sanctions — if not on the sidelines. The new effort establishes a 1,000-point scoring system to measure whether scholarship athletes remain at school, stay academically eligible and eventually graduate. In the first such measure, posted last month, Kentucky, Louisville and North Carolina State fell woefully short of what will be the required standard and have already been flagged by the NCAA. Five others — Washington, West Virginia, Texas Tech, Oklahoma State and Utah — were closer, but still didn't make the grade.
The standard is modest, projecting only a 50% graduation rate as the cutoff. When fully implemented, teams that are failing academically will be penalized by having the number of scholarships they can award reduced; chronic offenders will be barred from postseason play.
The NCAA was founded in 1906 to clean up abuses in college sports. After a century, it's long past time to make sure those who play really are students as well as athletes.
At the summit. Taking care of academics is not incompatible with championship athletics. The University of Tennessee is among a handful of schools that received the maximum score of 1,000 for its women's basketball program in the NCAA's new academic progress ratings.
Tennessee graduates 71% of its women's basketball players; that's 12 points higher than the Tennessee student body as a whole. And its coach, Pat Summitt, has the winningest record in basketball history.
Tuesday night, Summitt's Lady Vols won the 880th game since she took over the program in 1974. That put her past the 879 wins of men's coaching legend Dean Smith, now retired. Along the way, she's won six NCAA championships and 24 conference titles.
Summitt has created a program that draws an average 13,468 fans for the fast-paced women's game, better than all but 20 men's teams in the country. And she has established a model for other colleges coming late to the notion of taking women's basketball seriously.
Twelve of the 64 teams that qualified for this year's women's tournament hit the 1,000-point bell in the academic progress ratings; five teams in the men's tournament did as well. Academics and athletics can go together — if colleges and coaches care enough to make it happen.
