Misery Has Company For Border Rivals
The analogy isn’t perfect, but I find it apt. The level of outrage from Missouri and Kansas fans should be, but isn’t and won’t be, as different as Saints and Chiefs fans reactions to late calls against their teams in the conference championship game. The Tigers were slapped with a year’s bowl ban for the actions of one tutor with 12 football players, seemingly without the schools knowledge, about as clear a miss as the pass interference no-call in the NFC title game. Kansas learned Friday that Silvio De Sousa won’t be allowed to play for them because of confirmed-in-court actions by adults working on his behalf, or seeking out his services. About as obvious as Dee Ford being off-side. Yes, it sucks, but it’s reality.
The furor in the Kansas case is that the player likely had no knowledge of what went on, so why should he pay a price? We’ll get to that later. In Missouri’s case there is warranted frustration. They cooperated with the NCAA after discovering that a tutor in their athletic program provided improper assistance to athletes in several sports. None of the violations involved current players. Seniors on this year’s football team would miss out on their chance to cap their careers in another bowl game.
All these things are true, and in the end, I would fall on the side that the punishment does not fit the crime. But I am not as indignant as some for a couple of reasons. First of all, I am old enough to remember a time when a one-year bowl ban WASN’T considered a severe punishment. If this is a signal overall that the NCAA is going to return to a time when there were real teeth to their sanctions, and this is just a beginning, then I can cede the point.
Because their WAS wrongdoing. It wasn’t egregious. It was one tutor. It was just 12 athletes, but nobody is trying to say it didn’t happen. Tutoring of college athletes almost certainly needs to be monitored more closely. We know darn well that many of the players recruited don’t much care for school, or really have the aptitude for it. Yet, what used to fairly common, a player being ineligible for academics, is as rare as a unicorn. Is everyone just smarter? Uhhhh….
Also, everyone is in lockstep saying that it was “one rogue tutor”. It likely was just that person helping the athletes above levels allowed. But I am going to strongly state that I’m not all-in on the fact that no one else knew. Monitoring academic progress is an important part of the job for coaches, particularly assistants, and support staff. And if all of a sudden, a player who was on the verge of flunking out is making B’s after working with said tutor, you might want to look into it. But the favorite game of college athletics is the look-away, and I don’t mean pass.
The other thing that has to be asked when the outrage is shouted, is what should punishments be for actions like this? Nothing? Missouri is appealing this ruling, and they may have it lessened, and they may go bowling, and that would be OK by me,. But there are many questions left to be answered.
The Kansas situation is far more serious, far more layered, and far less one that should be cause for outrage by the athletic department, the coaches, and the fans. If you aren’t in the no-look camp, you might refresh yourself with this well-researched story by Jesse Newell in the Kansas City Star from last October, which he retweeted about yesterday…
https://www.kansascity.com/sports/college/big-12/university-of-kansas/article220372245.html
We all know what a mess we have at the top levels of college basketball, and unfortunately KU is right smack in the mix. I wrote a blog last September titled “Even Pollyanna Has to Wear Shades” about the current state of college athletics. It takes a double-dose of Pollyanna, and blackout shades, to try and feel good four months down the road.
Silvio DeSousa is indeed a victim here, and likely an unwitting one. But there is a whole lot of “Hey, look over there” in the outrage being spewed right now. If we scream loud enough about the “mistreatment” of poor Silvio, maybe the attention is diverted from all the sleeze and on to the wicked NCAA.
Is DeSousa not being able to play a result of the misdeeds of others? Very likely. Although I will not go in lockstep with everyone in saying it is in any way certain that he didn’t know anything about his guardian, Fenny Falmagne accepting $2,500 dollars from shoe company runner James Glassnola, and agreeing to accept another $20,000 according to sworn court testimony from Glassnola. I seem to recall that nobody really believed that Cam Newton didn’t know anything about the cash his dad got, Cam’s supposed ignorance getting him right back on the playing field for Auburn. It is also pretty clear if you pay attention to the court case detailed in Newell’s article, that there was plenty of KU knowledge of much of what was shaking out
We live in a different world now, and we should. If a player gets to play at any school while his parents, guardians, or representatives open the till, what is the message? Well, what it was with the “Cam Newton” defense was clearly, take the money, you probably won’t get caught, but if you do the athlete might miss a few games, and that would be that. I thought that was a landscape we were supposed to be running away from.
For those who feel that we should just further compensate scholarship athletes, who by the way ARE now getting paid six thousand dollars and more per year, their justification being all the money that is made “off the back” of the athletes, my response would be the same as it always has. The jersey sales and likeness of players are merely valuable because of the brand of the school. There are new stars every year, but the only thing that matters is that the jersey says “Kansas” or “Duke” on the front.
16,300 fans pack Allen Field House for every home game to view changing players whose only thing in common is that they wear a KU uniform. If it were the stars they were coming to see, they could stuff arenas for AAU events with the same players. Ah, but those gatherings draw mere hundreds, the fans sometimes virtually outnumbered by coaches.
Last years K.U.“victim”, top recruit Billy Preston, was the latest flavor of the month. If he was going to be a big reason why KU grosses hundreds of thousands of dollars for a sold-out home game, then why did he and his Erie Bayhawks teammates, which include former Kentucky blue-chippers Alex Poythress and Terrence Jones, draw 1,024 fans to their last home game? The answer is obvious.
If you truly want to turn college athletics into minor league sports, have at it. The Erie Bayhawks would almost certainly be a top-ten NCAA squad, but nobody goes and watches them.
Instead of throwing our collective hands in the air, perhaps this is a time to make what might be a last stand at having some sort of reasonable facsimile of college sports being played by student-athletes. I’m far from naïve, but creating a system where athletes who want to get paid can do so by going pro, and those who want to play college sports abide by some not very stringent rules, is worth aspiring to.
There once were fairly strong sanctions in major sports, and they did seem to be a deterrent. Kansas fans who can remember their title in 1988 also know that the defending national champions were ineligible to try and defend the title the next year for what might have been considered a trivial offense, buying a plane ticket. But if that got you a penalty, there certainly would be some fear involved in trying much.
The NCAA shut down a national power football program at SMU for doling out cash and cars. I’m quite sure that put the fear of God into boosters elsewhere, at least for a while. Shoe companies becoming such a factor in basketball certainly muddied the waters, but merely letting young stars skip college should mostly take care of the grease there, not to mention the FBI sending people to jail.
But fans have to help too, unless they want to go root for the Topeka Sizzlers, or the Kaw River Canoers. Fans were a big reason there was pressure to cheat. They wanted wins, and they lost their sense of shame. People grew to not care that their school “do things the right way”. Just make sure we bag that McDonald’s All-American, and snatch him away from Kentucky.
College basketball will be just fine if the top fifty players go pro every year. If Kansas is ranked 4th in the country with a squad that would get pummeled by the 2008 team, nobody will care. Frankly last year’s Kansas Final Four team wouldn’t have fared well against the title team, and I was at the Riverwalk both times, and there was just as much Crimson and Blue.
So, if you just want to play the victim when you are the perpetrator, and use a player who probably IS getting a raw deal as a human shield, that’s your choice. But, also remember a whole lot of outrage is not based on feelings for Silvio De Sousa, it is rooted in wanting him on the court for Kansas. De Sousa will be fine. He is certainly good enough to make a nice living playing basketball somewhere. He has already moved from Africa to the U.S. to pursue that, so playing in Italy or Spain is not going to bother him.
It has become an annual ritual for K.U. to have an eligibility issue, if not more than one. That has to stop, and obviously not just at Kansas. And in my mind, stopping it is not in moaning about the system, it’s about cleaning it up.