Shakespeare would have understood March Madness. The NCAA Tournament is basketball’s Forest of Arden. It’s a place where everything is temporarily transformed by magic, nothing is quite what it seems and anything can happen.
For one or two delightfully bewitched evenings, traditional roles are completely confused. A 12 can trump a five, and 14s sometimes beat threes. A king of the court can sprout donkey’s ears, and the peasants can rule the realm. A lowborn Butler or Kent can capture our imaginations before, as the Bard himself put it, they “vanish into air, into thin air.” They are the stuffs, jumpers and steals that dreams are made of—which is precisely as we like it.
The NCAA, of course, likes it, too. They like it because the happy madness of the first two rounds delights fans, and fans translate into TV viewers, which leads TV networks like CBS to pay more than $300 million for the rights to broadcast it each year.
But a spate of coincidentally timed scandals, which caused three schools to pull the plugs on their seasons, has stolen some of the tournament’s thunder.
These days, it’s hard to talk of March Madness without in the next breath mentioning March Badness. As You Like It has been rewritten as Macbeth or Julius Caesar, dramas full of connivers, users and backstabbers.
Georgia withdrew from the SEC Tournament and disqualified itself from a certain fourth or fifth seed in the wake of allegations by a disgruntled former player named Tony Cole. Cole claimed he had not only received money but had been part of a bogus class in basketball, in which assistant coach Jim Harrick Jr. provided the instruction and in which everyone got an A. In firing Junior and suspending Harrick Sr., Georgia effectively admitted guilt, though Senior remains (for now) on the payroll.
Michigan, too, gave up a probable NCAA bid as penance for payoffs that a now-dead booster gave to Chris Webber and others of the school’s Fab Five.
Most embarrassed of all was St. Bonaventure, which granted a scholarship to an unqualified player to be its (welding) torch-bearer. Apparently, soon-too-be-ex-coach Jan van Breda Kolff has learned something about smoothing the admissions process since his Vanderbilt days, when he failed to finesse Ron Mercer’s candidacy.
You almost have to admire the sheer audaciousness of admitting a junior college player whose sheepskin was nothing more than a welding certificate, but folks at the upright Catholic school weren’t amused. The Bonnies forfeited their conference victories, and the remaining players voted to forfeit their remaining games.
The past month’s sordid revelations were disturbing for a couple of reasons. First, there were just so many of them. An isolated scandal is easier to dismiss as an aberration. Three in one month (even if Michigan’s violations occurred long ago) look like a pattern.
Of course, the pattern has been painfully obvious to anyone who’s paid more than dozing attention. College basketball—with its shoe contracts, meat-market camps and Web sites touting junior-high stars—makes college football look like a paragon of virtue. It’s just that most of us (like CBS and the NCAA) would rather dwell on the playoffs, not the payoffs.
Some patterns should also have been obvious to the offending schools, particularly Georgia. Just as you don’t recruit a Tony Cole, who’s not exactly a stranger to scandal, you don’t employ Jim Harrick (or Jerry Tarkanian or John Calipari) without understanding that you’ve hired the Peck’s Bad Boy of coaches.
That’s the other thing that makes the recent revelations so disturbing. At St. Bonny and Georgia, they involved the university presidents, who green-lighted the admissions of the problematic players. The presidents, you may have heard, are supposed to be cleaning up the messes left by coaches and athletic directors. That’s great—except who’s minding the presidents?
Maybe we should factor good deportment into NCAA Tournament seedings. Calipari’s Memphis team, whose academic achievements would embarrass Bluto Blutarski, would slide down a few seeds. Tennessee, where Buzz Peterson has turned anarchy into relative integrity, would have made it into the field. Duke—where one assistant coach, Chris Collins, started a fight against North Carolina, and another, Johnny Dawkins, peevishly refused to shake the extended hand of Tarheel coach Matt Doherty—would be seeded lower. Gonzaga’s seeding would improve. As long as Bob Huggins coaches Cincinnati, the Bearcats would be seeded 16th.
Now that would be a tournament that dreams are made of.
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