College Players Will Get Chance To Argue Against Slavery

Derek Thompson:

College sports is a multi-billion-dollar business. Do its workers deserve to be paid?

It's a simple question taking a convoluted journey through our legal system. But student-athletes are closer to getting their day in court, since a judge ruled yesterday that NCAA athletes can legally pursue a cut of the billions of dollars flowing to college sports through TV deals.

In 2011, civil-rights historian Taylor Branch made a monster case for paying college athletes in The Atlantic. He predicted that law suits like this could could destroy the business model of the NCAA. To dig into the economics of paying college athletes, I called up Dave Berri, a sports economist with Southern Utah University and the author of The Wages of Wins, who cheekily called the NCAA's rule against paying its own athletes "the best business model in the world." A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows:

THOMPSON: A judge has have given the green light to a class-action lawsuit brought by former college players to compel the NCAA to pay student athletes out of its TV revenue. Big deal? Or no big deal?
BERRI: It definitely means something. The NCAA has been opposed to the idea of sharing its revenue with its players for about 100 years.

Make the economic case for why college athletes ought to be paid.

The players are the workers who generate the money.

The NCAA is producing an enormous amount of revenue. The players are producing that revenue. It's ridiculous that we're not paying them. It's ridiculous what the NCAA does with respect to its players. They were selling [former Auburn quarterback and current NFL star] Cam Newton jerseys and Newton didn't get any money. At Michigan [basketball], the Fab Five used to say, 'We're walking down the street with no money, and you're selling our jerseys for profit.'

Okay, make the economic case for why the NCAA is right to not pay its athletes.
I don't have one, besides: They would like more money. And they don't want to share.

There is no excuse for the NCAA raking in billions of dollars and players getting paid with an education they didn't want.  It is criminal.  I highly recommend reading the article by Taylor Branch.

Kansas Or Kentucky?

My heart says Kansas, but my head says Kentucky.  I'll predict Wildcats by 7.

NIT Final Tonight

I'm sure everyone will be tuned in to see whether the Minnesota Golden Gophers or the Stanford Cardinal will take home the NIT Championship.  Well, a lot of folks in Minnesota probably won't notice, as they will be discussing the real Gophers' chances in the Frozen Four.

NCAA Tournament Predictions

So far, my hockey predictions are worse than my basketball predictions.  0 for 4 last night.  Just like in basketball with Duke, one of my teams in the final, Miami, got beat in the first round.  Ouch.

Club Trillion On Charles Barkley

From Grantland:

14. Charles Barkley is delightfully bad in the studio

I know that the same can be said about him when he's working NBA games, but it's especially true during March Madness. What makes it that much better is that Barkley is usually the last of the analysts to chime in with his thoughts, so by the time it's his turn to talk all of the obvious points have been mentioned. As a result, Barkley, who clearly hadn't watched a single college basketball game before the tournament, ends up saying things like, "I think the team that (insert something obvious, like "plays defense" or "scores a lot of points") will have a good chance at winning the game."

The Round Mound of Rebound is a terrible analyst, but he makes up for it by being hilarious.  When he opens that big trap, you have no idea what's going to come out.  That makes it worth watching.

NCAA Bracket Update

Duke really blew a hole in my bracket, but oh how sweet was their loss.  My South bracket and Midwest bracket are wreckage.  I guess taking Belmont to the Elite Eight was not the best strategy.  So it goes.

David vs. Goliath

Malcolm Gladwell breaks out a little bit of common sense when looking at how underdogs prevail:

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

Uh, no shit.  If you are the ragtag Continental Army fighting the redcoats, it is suicide to neatly line up and let the redcoats mow you down.  Likewise with insurgents in Iraq, or even with less athletic teams playing more athletic teams.  That isn't exactly brain surgery.  It is also why I found it so tiring when people complained that Iraqis were cowards for not fighting the US army straight up.  It's not hard to figure out why we were bound to do poorly in Iraq, at least compared to expectations, if people are dumb enough to expect our opposition to be stupid enough to try to fight our fight.

As for basketball, Gladwell points to the full court press as advantageous for underdogs.  While it may help, less athletic teams may easily get schooled by their more athletic opponents while pressing.  I'd go with 3 point shooting and ball-control offense if I'm the underdog.

Here's to the underdogs today.

In Cinderella's Locker Room

Jordan Conn reports from South Dakota State's NCAA qualifying trip through the Summit League conference tournament:

Madness doesn't officially begin until mid-March, but in the early days of the month, at gyms in Hartford and Missoula, Macon and Hot Springs, scenes like this one unfold. Freshmen twitch; seniors sit silent, aware that in 40 minutes their careers could end. This year, 308 of the 345 teams in Division I entered postseason play with a theoretical chance at the national championship. Still, the late-season reality for mid-major conference powers can be cruel. Even after a season of league dominance, their tournament hopes hinge on winning a single-elimination event. But for South Dakota State, which fell just short of a regular-season title, the conference tournament is a chance to erase past failures.
As tipoff approaches, head coach Scott Nagy sits in the team meeting room, head buried in his iPad, reading and playing Sudoku. Nagy is nervous in these moments, but he avoids thinking about the game. He trusts his players and his preparation. To ease the sickness in his stomach, he seeks distraction, not focus.
Nagy accepted the SDSU coaching job when he was 28 years old. It was an unthinkable opportunity for a coach so young, a chance to lead a perennial power. Well, a Division II power, at least. Despite playing at a low level, the Jackrabbits have always enjoyed wide fan support. "We're a little state," says longtime fan Jeff Svennes. "We don't have much, as far as this stuff goes. In South Dakota, Jacks basketball is it." After winning at least 20 games in nine of Nagy's first 10 years, the Jackrabbits transitioned to Division I in 2004-05. They flopped. While the women's team won 21 games in its first D-I season, Nagy's men won 10. The next year, they won nine. In 2006-07, the program hit rock bottom. Two players were charged with rape (both were acquitted). The team won six games, its lowest total since 1944-45. After one particularly ugly loss, Nagy lambasted his squad in the press conference, calling players out and saying he believed he'd lost his team. Afterward, fans called for his head, and Nagy thought he might be fired. But the administration stuck with him, and the next year, the Jackrabbits improved. Season after season, they kept improving, until they wound up here, with Nagy sitting in the locker room, confident that after three more games they'd be bound for the NCAAs.

This is what makes the NCAA tournament fun.  It isn't the Dukes and Syracuses, it's the South Dakota States, Ionas and Detroits.  It may only last through Friday, but the first round sure is fun.  Remember Morehead State upsetting Louisville last year?  I do too.  Go Jackrabbits.

More On The Business of College Sports

Charles Pierce looks at the massive changes taking place in college basketball:

Pitino saw the future of the whole game as a player at the University of Massachusetts when a gangly freshman named Julius Erving showed up at practice. He wasn't one of the legends who was already there. He wasn't Dean Smith or Lute Olson, or Denny Crum at Louisville. He was the next generation. In fact, he was part of the first Next Generation.
Pitino was there, coaching, in the late 1970s, when college basketball was first taking off, largely because ESPN was launched, and because CBS lost the NBA and needed some sort of basketball to fill in the time between the NFL and the PGA. The game peaked dramatically over the following two decades, helped in no small part by the advances in technology that made following the college ball, and concocting wagering pools on the NCAA tournament, easier for a mass audience. What used to be a vague cult on the fringes of the sports consciousness — I went to my first Final Four in 1973, and paid nine bucks for my ticket — exploded into a destination event.
Then, over the past several years, as the economy tumbled, and as the structure of college sports became as stable and reliable as an Italian government, the game lost some of its glow. Syracuse is leaving the Big East for the ACC and two big paydays a year with Duke and North Carolina. West Virginia's moving to the Big 12, and its fans surely must already be saving the egg money for those trips to Texas A&M and Oklahoma State. Nothing makes sense anymore.

I love the comment about the $9 Final Four ticket.  Television has warped college sports into a giant business in no way tied to higher education.  The massive amounts of money involved in the sport just make no sense.  The changes to the conferences and scheduling of games at all hours of the day, nearly every day of the week just bring that point home.

NCAA Tournament Bracket

Well, with the bracket out, I'll have to make my picks.  I know I won't match up to last year, when I managed to put in my best performance ever (11 out of the Sweet 16, and picking the champ).  This year I expect to hack up the bracket like normal.  One notable thing about this year's tournament, 11 12 of the 68 teams are from Catholic schools, and for the second straight year, Xavier opens up against another Catholic school (last year Marquette, this year Notre Dame).  Iona appeared to be the only major surprise pick, slipping past Drexel and into the tournament.  Also, Michigan gets a first round matchup against a school Brady Hoke should actually call Ohio.

Ok, to my fearless (and foolish) predictions:

First Four games:  Obama will get a chance to watch Western Kentucky, Iona, Lamar and South Florida win in Dayton.

East bracket-First round: Syracuse, Kansas State, Harvard, Montana, Cincinnati, Florida State, Gonzaga and Ohio State. 
Second Round:  Syracuse, Harvard, Florida State and Ohio State.
Semifinals Syracuse and Ohio State. 
Finals: Syracuse

Midwest Bracket-First round: UNC, Creighton, Temple, OU, SDSU, Belmont, St. Mary's and Kansas.
Second Round:  UNC, Temple, Belmont and St. Mary's
Semifinals UNC and Belmont
Finals: UNC

South Bracket-First Round: UK, UConn, Wichita State, Indiana, UNLV, South Dakota State, Notre Dame and Duke
Second Round: UK, Indiana, UNLV and Duke
Semifinals: Indiana and Duke
Finals: Duke

West Bracket-First Round: Michigan State, St. Louis, New Mexico, Louisville, Murray State, Marquette, Florida and Missouri.
Second Round: Michigan State, Louisville, Murray State and Missouri
Semifinals: Louisville and Missouri
Finals: Louisville

Final Four winners: Duke and Syracuse, with the Orangemen prevailing in the Championship game.

A Near Era In The Big East?

NYT:

The last time that Louisville and Cincinnati met in a league tournament title game, the Cardinals beat the Bearcats in the Metro Conference final in 1981. The three-decade gap, the defunct conference and the far-flung location of the two teams in relation to Madison Square Garden provided a fitting parallel as the Big East peeked into its future Saturday night.

Billing the game, Louisville Coach Rick Pitino proclaimed, “Conference USA has come to the Big Apple.” That notion will be even more true as stalwarts programs like Syracuse and Pittsburgh exit the Big East and ones like Houston and Central Florida enter......

In the first meeting in the Big East tournament final of a pair of teams that were not original Big East members, the most notable items may have been the unsightly uniforms or the bizarre feel in Madison Square Garden.

While the game had been long sold out and the seats eventually filled in, the atmosphere lacked the partisanship created by more traditional and local Big East teams like Connecticut, St. John’s and Villanova.

“My thing was it felt so different when the game ended,” the ESPN commentator Jay Bilas said. “It’s not going to be the same again.” He added about the league’s future, “It will be really good, but it won’t be as great.”

With West Virginia gone after this season and Pitt and Syracuse expected to leave after the 2012-13 season, the Big East will lose more than hallmark programs. While the Big East will likely remain a top-echelon league with programs like Memphis and Temple, it will lose the geography and intimacy that defined the league of Dave Gavitt, John Thompson and Lou Carnesecca. The double round-robin conference schedule has long been gone, as the league bloated itself with teams in order to stay alive and satisfy the monetary pull of football.

Times change, and business trumps tradition in sports, as in the rest of life.  I'll make a guess that of all the changes which bother traditionalist conservatives these days, the end of the old Big East doesn't make the list.  This is a loss to those on the Northeast Corridor, and the changes started when Boston College went to the ACC.  Yet, it's good to see somebody complain about a loss of a tradition, even if it is only a 30 year-old tradition.  Cincinnati and Louisville, on the other hand, have seen a raft of conference changes, from the Metro to the Great Midwest to Conference USA to the Big East.  Change is pretty common for those guys.

Nate Silver Vs. The RPI Index

FiveThirtyEight:

The focus on quality wins, it turns out, contradicts another criterion that the selection committee weighs heavily: the Ratings Percentage Index, or R.P.I. The system, developed in 1981 in the era of the DOS prompt and the Commodore 64, tends to give computer rankings and other objective attempts at analysis a bad name.

Over the long run, R.P.I. has predicted the outcome of N.C.A.A. games more poorly than almost any other system. And it shows some especially implausible results this season. Southern Mississippi, for instance, was somehow ranked ahead of Missouri, even though it has endured seven losses to Missouri’s four (some of them against middling teams like Houston, Texas-El Paso, Alabama-Birmingham and Denver).

The committee’s use of R.P.I. is not quite as obsessive as you might think: more advanced systems like those developed by Ken Pomeroy and Jeff Sagarin were just a mouse click away, they told us — and it was perfectly well within the rules to look at them. The discussion of each team, moreover, was exceptionally thorough. It was clear from the officials we met that the committee has plenty of basketball knowledge and cares passionately about getting things right.

But R.P.I.’s fingerprints were all over the process. When a computer monitor displayed the teams that we were considering for the bubble, the R.P.I. ranking was listed suggestively alongside them. The color-coded “nitty gritty” worksheets that the committee has developed, and which often frame the discussion about the bubble teams, use the R.P.I. rankings to sort out the good wins and the bad losses.

In truth, almost any other computer ranking system would do a better job of what the N.C.A.A. is trying to accomplish.

Ouch.  That doesn't build confidence.  All I can say is a small school needs a tremendous record to get in the tournament, while a major conference team can have a losing conference record and still get in.  I'll back my father's suggestion: Scrap the conference tournaments (they are pointless and often screw the regular season conference champion in small school conferences) and put every team in the tournament, just like in high school basketball.

Back When Harvard Wasn't A Basketball School

As Harvard waits to find out who they'll play in the NCAA tournament, Jeffrey Toobin reflects on his time covering the Crimson as a student:

For two seasons, I covered the very much N.C.A.A.-less varsity for the Harvard Crimson. (I wrote a column called Inner Toobin, wherein I would throw around phrases like annus mirabilis on the sports page. It was insufferable.) Of course, the year started with the apparition that is Jeremy Lin ’10 single-handedly (more or less) reviving a Knicks franchise that has been down since almost the John F. Kennedy ’40 Administration, as we used to call it. Now the team is going to the Big Dance. Who knew?

In my day (the customary phrase to introduce gasbag alumni reminiscences), the hoopsters played in a not-so-glorified gym with the poetic name of the Indoor Athletic Building. (What would an Outdoor Athletic Building look like? We mused undergraduately.) At halftime of every game, a local travel agency sponsored what was known as the Bermuda Shoot. After a drawing, a spectator would take a shot from half-court to win a trip to Bermuda if he (or she) made it. Once, a guy did. It was the loudest cheer I heard in those two years.

I did get to cover a game from courtside at the old Boston Garden, which was a big thrill for me. On that day, Harvard lost to Boston College, 86-83, which was a closer game than most of us had expected, since B.C. was favored by about a dozen points. Much later, it emerged that gangsters had paid off four Eagle players to shave points. The scandal earned a mention in Goodfellas.

Hopefully the Crimson can represent well in the tournament.  A first round win would be pretty cool.

After Losing

Charlie Pierce writes about the 24-1 Murray State Racers:

There are college basketball fans of a certain generation — OK, it's mine — who grew up watching the game when it was an immutable physical law that UCLA simply did not lose. They won the NCAA championship every year. They beat teams long before the ball went up for the first tip. There was the Alcindor Dynasty, and then the Wicks-Rowe Interregnum, and then the Walton Dynasty, when the Bruins won 88 games in a row. I still remember being in the Gym Bar in Milwaukee on a snowy afternoon in 1974, when Notre Dame finally beat them, and feeling that something in the great tectonic plates underlying the sport had shifted. (Maybe it was the schnapps.) Two months later, I watched them blow an 11-point lead in regulation and a seven-point lead in overtime to lose to North Carolina State, UCLA's first tournament loss in eight years. They'd dropped what was precious, and they played like just another really good basketball team that had David Thompson dancing on its head.
In 1976, Indiana won every game, defeating along the way the best team Al McGuire ever had at Marquette and the best Alabama team that ever took the floor. On their way to the title, the Hoosiers defeated nos. 2, 5, 7, and 9 — something that is unlikely ever to happen again, now that the tournament is seeded. Fifteen years later, UNLV almost got there, but the Rebels got fairly well rogered for most of the game against Duke in the Final Four and, at the end, when they had a chance to win, they'd forgotten how. Being undefeated is an illusion, more fragile than most.
"It was a great experience, especially for this school," Canaan recalled. "We rode it out as best we could, and we got a lead chip off our shoulders. Now we can go out and play the game we love without having to worry about how it'll feel if we lose."

I remember when UNLV made it to the Final Four undefeated before Duke knocked them off.  The only other team I remember getting through the regular season undefeated was the 2003-04 edition of the St. Joe's Hawks.  That was a team I loved to watch play ball.  Plus Phil Martelli is never dull.

Small But Strong

Joshua Lars Weill points out four tough mid-majors, including two of my favorites, Creighton and St. Mary's:

The emergence of Doug McDermott as a force to be reckoned with has, unsurprisingly, also been a boon to the Bluejays, who sit at 20-2 and 10-1 in the very viable Missouri Valley. But it’s not just McDermott’s play that has Creighton ranked in the nation’s top 15. Rutgers transfer Gregory Echenique, a burly 6’9” forward from Venezuela, has anchored the low post for Creighton, hauling in almost eight boards a contest. With two players of that caliber on his team, coach McDermott's decision is looking smarter all the time.
The St. Mary’s Gaels
Each year, a few Australian high-school basketball stars come to the United States, and ach year, it seems at least a few of them decide to matriculate at tiny St. Mary’s College of California. Maybe it’s the sunny locale or just the chance to assimilate alongside fellow countrymen, but whatever the reason, the Gaels’ Down Under connection has been hugely helpful on the basketball court.
weak on power conference teams—the Gaels...
This season, St. Mary’s is 21-2 with a win over West Coast Conference rival Gonzaga, and they're currently ranked 16th in the country. Certainly, their schedule's been weak weak on power conference teams—the Gaels lost to Baylor in their only real test—but on balance St. Mary’s looks like a solid team.

Both teams should make the tournament, even if they get upset in their conference tournaments.  I caught the end of the Gaels' game against BYU.  It was a battle, but they managed to hold on.  Personally, I thought they were getting homered.

Lorenzo Charles Dies

I missed this story last week:

Whittenburg's shot was an air ball. But Lorenzo Charles jumped and caught it, as if it had been the most carefully planned alley oop pass ever thrown and he dunked it. North Carolina State won the championship in one of the sport's greatest upsets. Lorenzo Charles was a hero, a star in a state where they take their college basketball stars very seriously. Lorenzo Charles died this week when the bus he was driving crashed in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was 47 and the bus had no passengers.

That has always been my favorite play from college basketball.

The Butler Way

The Washington Post looks at the philosophy behind the Butler University basketball program.  It sounds a little like the "Block O of Life," but hopefully is more than just words:

The Butler Way is rooted in five principles: humility, passion, unity, servanthood and thankfulness. It’s as familiar to Butler’s players, and anyone connected with the Bulldogs basketball team, as strains of “The Victors” are to any rabid Michigan football fan.
“The minute I walked into the locker room, Coach [Brad Stevens] sat me down and talked about it,” said 19-year-old Michael Burke, a freshman manager for the team from McMinnville, Ore. “It represents doing the right thing all the time, putting the team first and not striving for individual success. It’s a culture. And it’s not just something we talk about; we embrace it. Even for someone like me — a manager — I’m part of the Butler Way.”
Slogans, of course, have no more to do with athletic success than fight songs or face paint. But in the case of Butler, players insist there’s a direct link between the Butler Way and victory on the court.
After last year’s loss to Duke in the NCAA title game, Butler wasn’t expected to advance particularly far in the tournament this year after losing its star player, Gordon Hayward, to the NBA.

I would love to see the Bulldogs pull off the win, even though I picked UConn to win the title in my bracket.

Frozen Four and Final Four

Well the Frozen Four and the Final Four are set. 

In the Frozen Four, Minnesota-Duluth, Notre Dame and Michigan made it in after the #1 seeds were defeated, while North Dakota also advanced.

In the Final Four, Butler and VCU surprised the experts and advanced, along with Kentucky and UConn.  So in VCU's case, they were one of the final at-large teams which had to play in the first four, and Butler was the only team to make the tournament from the Horizon Conference.  VCU's Colonial Athletic Association put in 3 teams (VCU, Old Dominion and George Mason) and one made it to the Final Four.  Other conferences : Big East 11 in tournament, 1 in the Final Four.  SEC 5 and 1, ACC 4 and 0, Big Ten 7 and 0, Pac 10 4 and 0.  Also, for those Big East haters out there in Big Ten country, even if UConn loses in the semifinals, the Big East will finish with the same winning percentage as the Big Ten, who failed to advance a team to the regional finals, let alone the Final Four.  Apparently the Big East isn't the only overrated conference in the country.

Dad has been saying it forever, and I have to agree, get rid of the conference tournaments and let everybody in.  I bet the big conferences would end up looking even worse, and the smaller conferences would bring in more money.  I wonder why that isn't going to happen.

NCAA Bracket-Update

11 of 16 in the Sweet 16 is pretty good for me.

Congratulations to the Eagles

Morehead State pulls out the big win.  That was nice to see.