Indiana lost yesterday, and that’s all fans will remember – the 77-76 loss to Maryland. Moral victories, after all, don’t earn bids to the NCAA Tournament. But the Hoosiers didn’t simply lose at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, they lost while playing better than they had all season. The offense moved the ball inside and then kicked […]
When things go bad, they tend to go bad in bunches. That axiom has never been truer than for Kansas Basketball over the past 12 months. Basketball programs and businesses are like planets circle a star. As orbits erode, they become more erratic. Order is never restored. (Who says I didn’t pay attention during Astronomy?) Coach […]
Media hot take artists are in a snit over James Wiseman leaving Memphis to prepare for the NBA. The NCAA Tournament needs stars, they say, and James Wiseman is a star. What will the NCAA Tournament be like without him, they gush. Well, It will be like all of the NCAA tournaments that haven’t been blessed by […]
The NCAA has a trust problem, according to its president Mark Emmert. He’s right. Emmert is spending a significant amount of time meeting with lawmakers trying to head off a spate of legislation that will correct the course of college athletics because the NCAA can’t, or more accurately won’t. The trust issue exists for two […]
Soon to be NBA millionaire James Wiseman has been suspended by the NCAA for an additional 11 games as a player at the University of Memphis while he counts the days until his college career ends. Wiseman’s mom accepted a loan of $11,500 from current Memphis coach (he was an AAU and high school coach at the time of […]
James Wiseman finally came to the correct conclusion that suing the NCAA was not in his best interest (or that of the University of Memphis), so he dropped the lawsuit that allowed him to play last Friday against UIC and against Oregon on Tuesday night. He sued because the NCAA declared him ineligible as the […]
The NCAA does not like being dragged into court by member universities or their athletes, so in 1975 it enacted the Restitution Rule that may be used to punish schools and programs who parade attorneys into a courtroom to seek relief from a finding that an athlete is ineligible. This is exactly what happened when the NCAA […]
[None of the below applies to freak athletes who can walk onto a almost any field or court and be the best player on it. They are special and rules most of us need to respect do not apply to them.] Specialization in youth sports is a topic that crops up now and then on […]
“What you can’t have is a couple athletes on campus driving around in Ferraris while everybody else is basically having a hard time making ends meet.” That’s republican United States senator Mitt Romney decrying a free market economic model for college athletes. If “rich elitists in our suburbs” was substituted for “a couple of athletes […]
There is an old rule in the U.S. Senate – “Every reasonable thought must be answered by an idea inversely idiotic.” Senator Richard Burr (North Carolina) proves that axiom true with the tweet below: If college athletes are going to make money off their likenesses while in school, their scholarships should be treated like income. I’ll […]
