Weekly Word: The state of college basketball, the new Big Ten commish and more
The Weekly Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s Weekly Word, we discuss the state of college basketball, the new Big Ten commissioner, Purdue topics and more.
YUCK
I love college basketball, love it. It’s been my livelihood most of my adult life, taken me all over the country and sometimes beyond and given me a platform to know many good and/or interesting people. If none of that was true, I’d still love college basketball for all the same reasons you might.
I love college basketball, but I gotta admit, I hate what college basketball is becoming.
The NCAA’s bungling of any measure of control on NIL and the open-transfers concession it made as a mistake-multiplier have turned this into “Lord of the Flies.” Coaches messing with other peoples’ players during the season, recruiting becoming mere auctions for certain players, some guys getting paid just to make visits. That’s not NIL grey area; that’s just old-school cheating. I hate what the toxicity of social media is doing to college sports, something that’ll only get worse as it gets easier and easier to bet on games, and I loath the awful officiating. I hate that TV controls everything.
Parity has always been sort of a punchline, but this sport has become nothing short of cannibalistic. If you are a low- or even mid-major program, if you have a great or even good — maybe even just OK — player, you’d better enjoy every second of it, because you ain’t gonna have him long. Yet you still have to field a team so you still have to recruit those players for someone else’s ultimate benefit, unless you can somehow win with the transfer market’s crumbs and assorted last-chancers. That’s probably overstatement — every game has a winner, so whole conferences can’t go 0-25 across the board every year. On such topics, NCAA Tournament selection culture these days has given the schools with money reason to avoid the schools that need money like the plague when they’re scheduling. That’s the sort of thing that gets wrestling programs dropped.
That said, I love the fact that players are getting their long-time-coming moment, but hate the fact that Miami unabashedly bought a Final Four team this year with no consequences whatsoever, and at this very moment there are dozens of schools with Scrooge McDuck-type money trying to do the same thing. I hate that the fact that stuff that’s still illegal under NCAA rules has just become so normalized now that it’s just glanced right over by people talking about and covering the sport, illegal stuff that’s becoming street legal, kind of like driving 75 in a 65. Not that impropriety wasn’t always whitewashed by some national writer who’s in on it all, but has to write “The 10 Most Feared Recruiters” article, perhaps in slideshow form to max out clicks.
Coaches hate it all, too. Not that anyone should necessarily weep for men making millions to navigate shifting landscapes. You’ve seen some of the old guard start to get out, Jay Wright being the one that really spoke to the conditions on the ground these days. My guess is you start to see some of the younger ones start to think TV looks like a hell of a deal. Or insurance, or entrepreneurship, or franchising a Qdoba.
I hate the fact that young coaches aren’t being shown that to move up, you need to win, network and provide a positive experience for your kids, but rather to bend rules, tamper with players and cut deals. It’s a people business and always will be. The cut-throats may not know it right now, but they are isolating themselves in a business that requires allies.
And I hate those damn AT&T commercials.
College basketball has a lot of issues right now and change can only come from within.
Will it?
Can it?
Thanks for listening to my rant. Now carry on …
Tony Petitti. (Photo by Alex Trautwig/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
THE BIG TEN’S NEW BOSS
I don’t know anything about Tony Petitti but I just read that the Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” occurred on his watch, so that’s cool. Quite a footnote for the Big Ten’s new commissioner as he takes on one of the biggest and best jobs in sports. His clout quotient just ent through the roof.
What’s funny about this hire, though, is so much of the heavy-lifting is done. The billion-dollar media rights deal was completed under Kevin Warren’s watch, as was the addition of the Big Ten’s Pacific Pair, though TV probably deserves as much credit for USC and UCLA coming on board. BTN is an established monster now and many of college sports’ biggest issues lie above the pay grade of any one conference commissioner.
But here’s what Petitti will have to do …
He will need to be strong in his role sitting across the figurative table from Greg Sankey as this Big Ten-SEC Cold War keeps churning. That means being aggressive with the further expansion, but not bloat. Only properties that would make the Big Ten better. Who, I don’t know. Keep building leverage on Notre Dame if you can, but also keep assessing the leftovers from the infamous Alliance that Warren built only to shank when push came to shove.
Outside of expansion, there’s the opposite: Retention. Fostering harmony and good will among rivals ought to be a priority, because as this landscape keeps shifting, you never know what things look like in eight years or so.
Northwestern’s not leaving the Big Ten, nor are Purdue or Minnesota, but does that day eventually come when Ohio State and Texas and Alabama and USC start critically thinking about sharing their money with Vanderbilt and Illinois.
Warren’s tenure-defining gaffe — under impossible circumstances — left the Big Ten fractured. Those wounds have probably healed, and barring Nebraska’s next tantrum, that time has passed. Nevertheless, it would be good business for Petitti to make sure everyone’s on the same page but also make the money-makers secure enough in their positions in the Big Ten that minds don’t start wandering.
Purdue Flag (Photo: Chad Krockover)
RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK
• It tells you of the insanity of the transfer landscape that spring football practices are going on while Purdue keeps recruiting players to join the very team out there on the practice field.
I’ll say it again: The coaches who can teach with efficiency and effectiveness are going to have advantages because every year, everyone is going to be onboarding really influential players with distinct urgency.
• It will be interesting to see if Matt Painter’s emphasis on quickness this spring changes how he views guard recruiting, because as good as Gicarri Harris and Travis Perry are in their own (different) ways, neither are Allen Iverson.
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