Ballers, Gamers and Scoundrels

This is Benedict Arnold …

Imagine Mike Krzyzewsi becoming head coach at North Carolina.

Picture Pete Carroll coaching the UCLA Bruins.

Contemplate Ohio State head coach Jim Tressel in the Michigan maize and blue.

Never happen. Nope, Not at all.

Sure, they’re just coaches. And anyone should be able to take any job they want. But after coaching at Duke, USC and managing the Buckeyes, respectively, those guys would never take the same job with their former employer’s most despised rival.

They wouldn’t do if their gigs were more than mere gigs. They are the faces of their teams - their schools even. They embody their university. Call me old fashion - or a stodgy soul, as one story put it - but I still believe in loyalty. I still believe in “representing” those entities that treat you well, and where you achieve success.

That’s why Mike Montgomery should be tried for sports treason.

By now you’ve probably discerned that I’m a Stanford alum, and I’m not the only one whose first thought was, “Turncoat!” when I learned Montgomery - the Cardinal’s all-time winningest coach (18 seasons, 393 wins, four Pac-10 titles, one Final Four) - had agreed to become the head coach at Cal, our most despised rival.

Excuse me while I puke!

Okay, so Mikey needed a job. It’s been two years since he was fired by Golden State with two years remaining on a $10 million deal. So the checks stopped coming in. Not mad at him for wanting to get another gig.

Montgomery was said to be trolling at the Final Four in San Antonio when Cal got hooked.

C’mon, MIke - CAL?!! Indiana had an opening, and I’m sure there’ll be others once the annual ritual of coaching musical chairs begins on Tuesday.

CAL?!!

Stanford made you, Mike! You were just another guy from Montana when the Cardinal hired you in 1986. People said, Who??

The Cardinal gave you a change to prove just how good a coach you were. It gave you a stage and, yes, you rose to it. You gave as much as you received and when you decided to chase your own NBA dream and signed with the Warriors, we wished you well.

Now we wish you nothing but Ls. Lots of them - especially when you’re sitting at the other end of the gym from the team you once coached. Wearing a yellow tie!

You tried to joke it off at your press conference, saying, “I just wanted to feel like there weren’t going to be any explosives or snipers on the way to the Cal office.” Ha Ha.

You also said there’ll be no “welcome wagon” when you and your Bears visit Maples Pavilion next season. Actually, you just might be wrong.

Despite my obvious ire and mini-tirade, I would not be surprised if you were welcomed back. I can actually see you getting a standing O when you step from the locker-room that day. That’s the kind of people we are at Stanford, Mike.

The student section will cheer you. The alums and supporters will show their appreciation.

That’s what Stanford’s all about, Mike.

And then we’ll try to kick your team’s butt. And maybe shower you with icky yellow ties.

Congrats on the new gig, Mike. See you in the fall!

The NCAA Selection show is boring. Oh sure there’s drama. What’s better than watching groups of young men in sweats watching television? Frankly, a lot.

The show announcing which teams qualify for the NCAA Tournament and where they play could be so much better. It should be better. In this Reality TV era, you can’t tell me someone can’t do something with a show with a such a captive audience and so much on the line - coaches’ futures and young men’s dreams.

Here’s one thought:

Let’s face it. All the action really happens behind a closed door and involves a bunch of middle-aged men in suits. First of all, give us some access to the war room. Okay, so they’ll never put cameras and mikes in there. But throughout the day, have someone come out and give us an update on what’s going on inside. Like the new coach’s sideline interview during NBA games. Just give us something.

But here’s my big move:

I think it is virtually impossible to seed 65 teams with an real degree of reality. It’s hard enough to seed 32 teams. This season, after the top, say four teams, isn’t everyone pretty much the same? Didn’t seventh-ranked Duke lose to Clemson today.And eighth-ranked Wisconson barely survived Michigan State. How do you accurately seed the rest of the field with any real certainty.

I say seed only the top eight teams in each bracket, then open the war room and seed the remaining teams with a lottery. That’s right, ping-pong balls or some such.

The machine would contain 31 balls. (The two worst teams, those in the play-in game, would be left out and the overall top seed would automatically get the winner). Each ball contains the logo of a team that qualifies for the 65-team field. That way teams still do not know if they’re in the Dance.

Standing before a big board featuring the 32 teams and their seedings in region, cheerleaders representing schools from last year’s Final Four teams (Hey, I’m trying to make TV here!) call out the names of the schools as each ball pops out of the machine and its team is placed in a regional slot.

What the worst that could happen? A No 8 seed would draw no team batter than it would have before - a No. 9 seed. And so what if a No. 1 or 2 seed draws what would have been a No. 9 under the current system. Shouldn’t they beat them handily anyway?

My show has more drama, more flash, a dash of sexiness and an element of luck.

Sounds like a hit!

Coaches being fired due to, what, excessive dialing? Scandals at Harvard? Please. We’ve all gotten as soft the athletes we accuse of being too sensitive, too lazy or too “me.” The latest round of NCAA college basketball scandals - the kind that led to the firing/resignation of Kelvin Sampson at Indiana, and that are swirling about Harvard head coach Tommy Amaker - are milk toast on my scandal meter. Too many telephone calls? Running up on a recruit’s mom in a grocery store? as I said before, PLEASE!

Now listen. I hate cheating. I have two kids and the very last thing I want them to think is that Daddy condones cheating. But the NCAAs “cheating” standards have sunk to the level of damn-near-impossible to meet. Yes, Sampson, a good guy by most accounts, had used all his good-will chips. But Amaker is likely the victim of Ivy League-haters who cannot stand the fact that next season Harvard might actually compete for the league crown - and the automatic berth to the NCAA tournament (ca-ching) that goes with it. I’m not buying the cheating-at-Harvard headlines, at least not yet.

But I have to chuckle at the righteous indignation being passed about these days when the true scandal in college sports remains the pitiful graduation rates among programs that will be vying for berth in the upcoming NCAA tournament.

I’m talking true March madness.

Later this month, just after the announcement of the 65-team NCAA Tournament field, the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, at the University of Central Florida, will release its annual study of graduation rates for teams that will vie for the national title. It will be called “Keeping Score When It Counts: Graduation Rates for 2008 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament Teams.”

Last year the news wasn’t all bad, at least relative to national averages. Forty-one teams (64.1) graduated at least half of its players, which was 17.2 percent higher than the national norm. (The year before, 35 of the 65 teams failed to meet that standard.) Also in 2007, one in three teams graduated at least 60 percent of their players and 24 teams graduated 70 percent. Twelve teams in the 2007 tournament fewer than 40 percent of their players.

That’s the good news. It gets a bit dicey when you break down the data to differentiate between the graduation rates for white players and black players. why do that? Just start watching the game. It’s been two decades since I noticed that at NCAA tournament games the majority of the players are black while the majority of fans (and, yes, media) are white.

In fact, more than 60 percent of the players in Division 1 men’s basketball are black. So the comparison says more about how seriously our institutions of higher learning are taking their mandate to educate our young men relative to their desire to win.

In 2007, 41 of the teams in the field (68.3 percent) graduated at least 70 percent of their white basketball players, while only 19 teams (30.2 percent) graduated 70 percent or more of their African-American players - a 38.1 percentage point gap.

Forty-nine (81.7 percent) of the tournament teams graduated 60 percent or more of their white basketball student-athletes, but only 29 teams (46 percent) graduated 60 percent or more of their African-American players - a 35.7 percentage point spread.

Finally, 57 schools (95 percent) graduated at least half of their white players, but only 34 schools (54 percent) graduated as many black players - a 41 percentage point difference.

Dr. Richard Lapchick, a long-time advocate for race and gender equality in sports and the author of the study sad last year: “We have to look at race as a continuing academic issue, reflected in the remaining huge gaps between graduation rates for white and African-American student-athletes. Men’s basketball has the worst record for graduation rates among all college sports.”

Overall, the 2007 study noted that only half percent of the black players graduate, compared with 76 percent of the white players. Lapchick called this disparity “startling.”

He noted that 2007 was “the first time that the disparity is greater for between white and African-American basketball student-athletes than for white and African-American students as a whole.”

When the NCAA committee sequesters itself next weekend to decide who deserves a coveted invitation, it will digest reams of data, including RPIs and wins versus quality opponents and all kinds of minutia. Unfortunately, one byte of data they won’t consider is graduation rates.

Frankly, I believe no team that graduates fewer than four in ten players should be allowed to qualify for the NCAA tournament. Is that too old-school for you? Too naive, you say? Too bad. I’m still one of those guys who believes schools should be, well, schools first and not simply athletic factories.

Some of the responsibility for graduating is on the student-athletes, I know. As many young athletes - and yes particularly black athletes - are using their schools as much as their schools are using them. It’s a win-in for everyone. Or a lose-lose depending on your perspective.

Let’s be real: Forty percent isn’t a very high bar. But it’s something. Requiring a team to reach that standard - in any sport - isn’t asking too much. But maybe it’s asking enough for the schools to take it at least a bit more seriously than they are now.

Or at least as serious as they take trying to qualify for the NCAA Tournament. Is that really so mad?

Tough times call for tough decisions - even when they’re not popular. But sometimes those unpopular calls turn out to be the right thing to do. Last week, Fisk University, an historically black college in Nashville, announced that it was dropping its participation in NCAA sports as one part of an effort to deal with the school’s dire financial condition. And we mean dire.

The 142-year-old institution is in debt and operating at a deficit. It spends more on its students than it brings in, and is in real danger of shutting down.

School officials cutting NCAA-sanctioned sports could save $500,000 annually. Currently, according to reports, the school spends $263.075 annually to support its Division III programs, including basketball. (There are no athletic scholarships in DIII.) Revenue? The school says it generated about $10,000 last year, and that was from an NCAA grant awarded for participating in some sports.

Talk about March Madness.

School officials said they’ll replace the intercollegiate sports with a more extensive intramural program. Predictably, some students, faculty, university employees (particularly those in the athletic department) are against the move. “Usually everyone has a homecoming football game,” university senior David Hill recently told Black College Wire. “We just have a basketball game, and now we’re not even going to have that.”

Hill, a physics major, added: “It decreases the camaraderie between students now that you don’t have a function or an event where students get together. It decreases school pride. What are you rooting for, other than your academics?”

Seems plenty to me.

Like other HBCUs, Fisk was founded with a clear mandate: to provide freed slaves and their descendants with an incomparable education and prepare them for leadership in society. The school’s mission talks about its “rich academic experience,” says its faculty and students have a “passion for learning and personal growth.”

I’m all for sports and the experiences they provide for young people. I lament the loss of organized sports in our public schools and have fed my family on the industries of professional and collegiate sports. But like many others I also recognize that our passion for sports often exceeds our reason, a notion that is supported on our sports pages nearly every day.

The lives of the Fisk students who will no longer be able to play D-III sports will not be inexorably diminished. Nor will the lives of those students, like the quotable Mr. Hill, who no longer have D-III games to attend (free, if I may add).

Schools throughout the nation - from Miami to Stanford, my alma mater - are arguing over the relative importance of sports on their campuses. As un-winnable as the sports v. education discussion may be, it isn’t likely to subside anytime soon. It just may be eternal.

Leave that argument to them. Let other schools try to wrestle profits out of their athletic programs. HBCUs, frankly, have bigger mandates than simply providing sports teams for a few athletically gifted students. Fisk is right to drop D-III sports in an effort to save its ability to educate students.

Oh, I can see the hair on the backs on some black-college graduates rising now. Sports has played a huge role in the history and growth of many HBCUs. They provided the athletes who broke color barriers in some pro sports and, in recent years, HBCU teams have often proven capable of competing with and beating teams from larger institutions. Just this weekend, baseball teams from Bethune-Cookman and Southern more than held their own against UCLA and USC, two venerable programs that should compete for the national title this season, in MLB’s first Urban Invitational in Los Angeles.

Some HBCUs should play on. Play for the pride. Play for the money. Play for the same reason every other school plays. But with many HBCUs - Fisk isn’t the only one at Defcom 5 when it comes to finances - the priority for those institutions should be fulfilling the school’s founding mandate rather than filling arena or stadium seats, especially when so many larger schools are falling short in educating student athletes.

Fisk is making the right call here, and one can only hope it helps the institution regain its financial footing.

As of its last report, the school had raised $1,032,00 toward a matching grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which pledged up to $2 million dollars if the school can raise $4 million by June 30. You may contribute by clicking here.

You probably didn’t hear them, but a lot of people screamed “Hallelujah” today when Candace Parker, one of the best basketball player on the planet, said she was going pro. Parker will graduate from the University of Tennessee this spring, and although she has another year of eligibility she’ll opt to play in the WNBA rather wear burnt orange for another season.

The hosannas came from those who’ve tried and tried and tried again to make the WNBA work, to make it matter to more than a small gaggle of fans. In their minds, Parker is The One. She’s the one who’ll make us care, who’ll make us watch, who’ll make little girls across the nation beg to tune into the summer games featuring the world’s best female players.

It almost seems preordained. Parker is the unquestioned face of women’s college basketball. Heck she may be the very face of college basketball. Period. (Is any male player more well known?) She’s one of only six players to dunk at that level (remember when a woman dunking was really a big deal?). In fact as a high-school player she defeated five boys, fellow all-American prepsters, to win a dunk contest. She’s won a national title, played on the U.S. team, and will almost certainly be one of the most high-profile Olympians in Beijing.

Moreover, the cards are aligned to team the 6-4 Parker with the baddest mother-baller out there, Los Angeles center/model/mom Lisa Leslie. The Sparks own the No. 1 pick in the upcoming WNBA draft and unless LeBron or Kobe gets a sex-change operation, they’ll chose Parker, placing her in the No. 2 media market in the nation.

So, if she’s not The One, then who is?

Answer: Nobody.

Candace Parker cannot “save” the WNBA. Just as The Last One - Diana Turasi - couldn’t save it. Nor could Sue Bird, Swin Cash or Theresa Edwards or Sheryl Swoops or Cynthia Cooper or any of the wonderful athletes who have donned WNBA uniforms during the league’s 11 seasons.

I don’t believe in saviors - not in sports, at least. And to think any one athlete can “save” a sport is ludicrous. Not even MJ saved the NBA and today, it’s not just LeBron who’s given the league new life. It’s Chris Paul. It’s Dwight Howard. It’s Deron Williams. It’s Dwayne Wade. It’s Steve Nash. It’s, well, you get the point.

Candace Parker will be great for the WNBA. But the league’s needs more than she can provide.

It needs smart management. It needs smarter marketing. It needs more compelling combatants. It needs rivalries more fans will care about. It needs a bit of luck, too.

The players have done all they can. They simply can’t be Tennessee or UConn or Texas or Duke - schools, like many others, whose indigenous fans support them season in and season out, no matter who’s wearing the uniform. Right now, the WNBA does not have those kinds of fans. At least not yet. And I’m not sure they would even if they opened franchises in Knoxville, Storrs, Austin or Durham.

What they can best hope for is that Candace Parker becomes the league’s tipping point. They can hope that she becomes the face of American pride in Beijing and that her success makes Madison Avenue swoon. (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if by the time this item is posted, one of Nike’s minion isn’t already in Knoxville with a fat deal.)

Parker and NBA rookie whiz Kevin Durant (pictured with her below) - They Got Next. They’ve got the game and the charisma to fly behind those players who’ve solidified the foundation. (And she is pretty cute - if not “hot”,” as this site attests.)

For Candace the pivotal question isn’t whether she’s good enough, but this: Will her sweetness (or hotness) be enough?

See, I’m not the only one. Blogger Mr. Irrelevant was watching TV the other night and commented that North Carolina coach Roy Williams had fielded an all-white squad. Granted the Heels were up by 40+ against Virginia Tech. But still ….

I never got it. Truly. The Bobby Knight thing. I never got it.

Oh, I get the record. I get the 902 wins. I get the 29 20-win seasons. The three national titles. The numbers speak for themselves.

But I never got the man. I never got why he had to be the way he was, never got whom he seemed to be so damn mad at all the time.

I never got the attitude. The anger. The jerk.

Men I admire spoke otherwise of him. men who played for him. Men who endured the attitude. The anger. The whip.

They said otherwise. They said he was great to play for. They said he was what they needed.

They said he helped them become men.

But so did a lot of other men, and they did it without the attitude, the anger, and without being a jerk.

Bobby Knight retired tonight. Smack dab in the middle of college basketball season, he up and quit. No one seemed to know why, or have any warning. His son Pat is now the head coach of Texas Tech. Good for him. Pat said: “He was tired.”

If Bobby Knight is indeed retired, then what do we do? Do we celebrate a maker of men? Or do we just say, well, bye?

I never got it. Some people did. Just not me. So I’ll say, well, bye.

Worthless. That’s what I think of preseason polls.

Oh, I know they’re fun for fans and they invoke a heavy dose of chest puffing among players. But they don’t mean squat. And if you don’t know that by now, well, you’ve been in a coma since early fall when Appalachian State thumped then No. 5 Michigan in Ann Arbor to ignite the most curious ( and entertaining, may I please add) college football season perhaps the in the history of the sport.

Now a conference no one outside of the players blood relatives has even heard on - the Atlantic Sun (doesn’t that sound like a casino? - has transformed the college basketball preseason polls into filthy rags. Gardner Webb and Mercer, the Bulldogs and Bears, lack-of-respectively, embarrassed some guys wearing big-time unis last week and rendered their vanquished to the ranks of the unranked. Kentucky and USC, Nos 22 and 18 in early polls, will probably climb back into the rankings before long - although one could argue that they’re right where they belong right now: out of the top 20 and starting at a long season of attempted redemption.

If you look at college footballs’ preseason rankings and four teams that were in the top ten -No. 1 USC, Texas, Michigan and Louisville - are ghosts (at worst) or understudies (at best) in the current rankings. Quite simply, none of them were nearly as good as their preseason hype. And since then teams that were nowhere to be found in the top 20 - No. 2 Oregon, undefeated Kansas, Missouri, Clemson, South Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, UConn (who knew they played football there?!) - have made 2007 a season to remember.

College basketball’s prognosticators obviously learned nothing. The preseason rankings are filled with unis - name schools whose biggest strength lies in the letters across the players chests. Nary a surprise among them. Neither Gardner Webb nor Mercer cracked the Top 25, and perhaps they shouldn’t. In college hoops, at least, those wins will count for something in March, should the two teams continue to play well and notch perhaps another couple of quality wins and do well in AS (Atlantic Sun). That’s when the venerable suits comprising the NCAA basketball committee locks itself in a room with a ton of very expensive shrimp and decides which teams receive invitations to the not-so-elite field of  65 teams that will have the opportunity to compete for the national title.

USC and Kentucky are the kinds of teams that typically qualify just by showing up for every regular season game with clean unis.  Not so GWebb and Mercer. But they’ve already opened some eyes.

The problem with the college football preseason poll is that it provides teams with an unfair advantage given the few spots in prestigious - read: phat payoff - postseason bowls. It’s like spotting the New England Patriots a touchdown every Sunday. Most seasons, those early notches prevent less-prominent teams with great records from breaking into the bowls of golf. This season is an aberration (though I hope not). LSU v Oregon (or even Kansas) in the title game will be refreshing.

Kill the preseason polls and allow the season to exist at least for a few weeks before releasing the first rankings. At least, by then, they won’t simply rank.