Re: F the NCAA
Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2020 8:17 pm
Illy is furiously jacking off right now. Probably trying to start a petition for Jamari as well
Jamari is making a nice paycheck in Japan right now....so that ship has sailed.
Define "nice" paycheck. He's probably making less than many people on this board.IllinoisJayhawk wrote: ↑Wed Oct 14, 2020 9:14 pmJamari is making a nice paycheck in Japan right now....so that ship has sailed.
Still better than Cliff Alexander.
A month after being accused of physically abusing players and an assistant coach — among other boorish behavior — Gregg Marshall stepped down as Wichita State’s men’s basketball coach.
He received $7.75 million to do so.
This is amateur athletics, supposedly. This is college sports, where consequences for the adults are rare and even when they do come, so does a seven-figure check.
[...]
College sports continues to argue to politicians and judges that it can’t afford to cut the athletes in for any revenue. It continues to eliminate teams citing as an excuse the loss of revenue due to COVID-19. And it continues to try to enforce a rule book that hammers on petty crimes in an effort to protect its billions and dodge taxes.
There is no one smoking gun that points to the stupidity, the misplaced priorities or the appalling institutional defense of a broken system.
The entire system is the smoking gun.
Last month, a former University of Massachusetts tennis player named Brittany Collens had a conference title stripped from her due to the discovery of an accounting error that overpaid her $252 for a dorm phone she never used because she had moved to an off-campus apartment.
Yet, earlier this year, the NCAA wrote a letter to a federal judge seeking sentencing leniency for a man named Marty Blazer, who had pleaded guilty to stealing $2.3 million from his clients, mostly ex-football stars.
To most people, Blazer is a pathetic conman, snitch and thief. He was facing a maximum of 67 years in prison. To the NCAA, he was a hero worth injecting itself into a federal hearing because he supposedly helped them in some infraction cases. (Blazer, indeed, wound up getting just probation.)
Of course the NCAA would side with a guy who ripped off their former athletes as long as he helped bust their current ones.
To college sports, Marty Blazer is worth fighting for and Brittany Collens is worth punishing.
It's how guys like Will Muschamp can ride this system to generational wealth and guys such as Gregg Marshall can allegedly choke someone on his way to the bank and why some swimmers or soccer players somewhere will soon be without a scholarship, let alone a team, because there supposedly isn’t any money.
On and on it goes, college sports corruption baked right into the ethos of it all.
It sure is fun as long as you don’t care who is making millions off of it. Which is what they are counting on.
He was asked during his press conference on Monday the differences in how players and coaches treat their commitments to their schools and football programs. It's safe to say that the second-year coach doesn't exactly show a lot of sympathy towards the players on his roster.
"As players, it's a little bit different than coaches," he said. "Sometimes we like to lump coaches in with players. As a player, you're there for three to four years and then you're done. As players, you don't have a family. It's just you. As coaches … and I'm just thinking in general terms here … coaches have wives and kids. As a job, are they going to be a job at 40 years? There are a lot of different things that are involved in coaching. With players, like I said, it's three to four years, and they have to be all in."
He went on to describe what "all in" means in terms of how players approach college football.
"It's hard as a player to go to class, get up and go to meetings, go to weight training, to go practice, come back and study, and then, oh by the way, go perform on a game day. There are a lot of things that a player has to do and so many different avenues that are pulling at them. So you have to be all in."
This comes on the heels of what was a wild few days for Satterfield. He told the Courier-Journal over the weekend that he interviewed with South Carolina on Friday, but chose to stay with the Cardinals. Athletic director Vince Tyra said on Saturday that he was disappointed that Satterfield took the interview, but that he is comfortable moving forward with the second-year coach.
Satterfield addressed the situation further during his Monday press conference and didn't exactly do himself any favors as he tried to make amends for his actions.
"I do want to apologize to the fans out there," he said. "I do understand what has transpired in the past with the head coaching football job here. It was never my intention to hurt anyone with that."
An apology is nice … but then things got uncomfortable again. He said that he won't rule out other schools that might be interested in him if they're close to his hometown of Hillsborough, North Carolina, which is just northwest of Raleigh.
If all of 2020 felt like one long Zoom meeting, college sports logged in late and hungover, wearing expensive but stained pajamas, in an enormous but filthy house, leading everybody else to ask: You live like that?
Yes, indeed. This was the year when athletic departments exposed themselves for what they really are: large businesses covered in nonprofit wrapping paper.
A coronavirus pandemic forced the whole enterprise to announce its priorities, which are even more skewed than we realized. There are thousands of people working in college athletics with excellent priorities, of course—people who value academics, relationships, integrity and personal growth. But those are not the qualities the NCAA system rewards. College sports, purportedly a celebration of amateur athletics, are an exercise in big squashing little: large conferences whipping small ones, and revenue sports hogging resources from nonrevenue sports.
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Some coaches and administrators portrayed themselves as protectors, keeping players safe from the virus and from the sort of outside influences they would purportedly encounter if they were sent home—but only the gullible believed that. Many players got the virus anyway. The NCAA moved fall championships in cross country, soccer, field hockey, women’s volleyball and men’s water polo to the spring. Football stayed in the fall because that’s where TV networks wanted it, and basketball remained a November-to-March enterprise, despite public urging from Hall of Fame coaches Mike Krzyzewski and Rick Pitino to delay the season. The NCAA is terrified of losing March Madness (and the revenue it brings in) again. Duke had to make decisions that basketball’s overseers would not: The women’s team opted out of its season, and the men’s team cut short its nonconference schedule.
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For decades, administrators insisted that monetizing football and men’s basketball was a means toward a larger, more noble end: funding other varsity sports. As those NCAA commercials love to remind us, the overwhelming majority of athletes “go pro in something other than sports.”
In 2020, though, it became obvious that the apparatus that was supposed to support a larger infrastructure has overwhelmed it instead. Around the country, schools responded to their budget crunches by slashing nonrevenue sports, like huge law firms deciding to cut costs by slashing pro bono work.
College sports have been a hypocritical enterprise for a long time; any sober assessment of the last half-century reached that conclusion. But now hypocrisy is part of the mission statement. Football has been stripped down to what it really is: lucrative TV programming. In 2020, it didn’t matter whether playing was safe for surrounding communities or even whether students were on campus.
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“I hate saying this, but I really believe that most—not all—athletic directors only want football and basketball,” says Gaines. “If you backed them into a corner and put them to a lie detector test, they’d fail miserably if they said they loved these other sports. They are just a headache. ADs want them to go away. They’ve got enough to worry about with football and basketball. Why worry about crew? Why worry about gymnastics? They’re a weight around my neck. I gotta show up at their meets and I gotta pretend I like them—and I don’t.”
College sports will change radically over the next 20 years. The question is how? Rules allowing athletes to profit off their names, images and likenesses are coming—rules that are both fair and overdue. But if 2020 is any indication, then without even the pretense of amateurism, athletic departments will continue to detach themselves from the central mission of their schools.
The NCAA’s longtime model of using football and men’s basketball to fund other sports was always legally and morally suspect. But this pandemic-altered year showed it was also just a cover. Football will get bigger, because that’s what the marketplace demands. Everything else—rivalries, traditions, nonrevenue sports, academics—will fit around that fundamental truth.