The College Basketball Sewer

I have not been able to muster up a lot of enthusiasm for college basketball during this season, and there could be any number of reasons for that, including, but not limited to, the following:

1. Pitt, on it's way to an 0-18 conference record, stinks.
2. Robert Morris, with its new on campus arena under construction, has been a team without a home this season.
3. The evolution of the sport to the elite teams becoming nothing but One-and-Done factories has, frankly, kind of turned me off on the sport.
4. The revelations stemming from an ongoing FBI investigation of sleaziness beyond description in the sport has really turned me off to the sport.
5. There are just SO MANY games on television on every single night, that I have become like the proverbial kid locked in the bakery overnight:  I just can't eat another eclair or donut, no matter how good they are.

(One bright spot, locally, at least, has been a positive turn of the hoops program at Duquesne under first year coach Keith Dambrot, but the other factors mentioned above have tended to overshadow what is happening on the Bluff.)

Anyway, items (3) and (4) above have produced a sort of cause and effect that, the FBI reports seem to indicate, has produced a level of corruption that has threatened to touch the most sacrosanct schools (Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, Michigan State, Arizona among others) and iconic coaches (Williams, Krzyzewski, Izzo, Calipari, Pittino, among others) that you just have to wonder, "Why am I bothering to pay any attention to these outlaws?", and I suppose that that is what has produced this ennui in me.

Here are just a few of the things that smack me in the face:

• Louisville has been forced to vacate (a non-punishment punishment if ever there was one) a number of victories and its 2013 NCAA championship.  Rick Pittino, fired by Louisville before the season, says that the school should sue the NCAA to have all of those wins and its title restored.  Talk about a clueless jackass.
• Pittino, by the way, was fired for the hookers-and strippers scandals of a few years back, not for any of the really big dirt that the FBI  has uncovered.
• Of course, all of the iconic coaches are denying any wrong doing.  Even John Calipari, who never even tries to hide the fact that he recruits one-and-dones exclusively for the purpose of Kentucky reaching the Final Four every year denied any wrong doing by Wildcat student-athletes.  The fact that Calipari, who I have always liked, uses the term "student-athlete" is laughable and insulting beyond description.
• Come to think of it, the term "student-athlete" as it applies to big time college football and basketball is laughable and insulting.
• The sainted Mike Krzyzewski appears to be on the list of those whose programs have been touched by the FBI investigation.  Coach K, who likes to lecture coaches and players from other schools on the proper way to behave, long ago surrendered to the One-and-Done culture of the game, so I can't wait to hear how he will respond if it is shown that he has feet of clay similar to the Pittinos and Caliparis of the game.
• Sean Miller, of Blackhawk High School and Pitt, now the HC of Arizona, also looks to be dirty in this mess.  One of the reasons that Kevin Stallings is so reviled by the Pitt basketball fan base is that he is not Sean Miller, but maybe one of the reasons that Pitt didn't hire Miller, or his brother Archie, now at Indiana, is that he, Miller, didn't want to come home because he knew that his alma mater wasn't going to be willing to pay for players as Arizona seems to be.

All of this junk casts a pall over the upcoming annual bacchanalia that is the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, aka March Madness.  How many of those 64 teams are dirty?  How many of these tournament wins will need to be vacated in the years ahead?  How many of these coaches are soon going to be fired for leading these institutions of higher learning into perdition?

And before the diehard hoops junkies out there point it out to me, yes, I know that all of this is no doubt going on in college football programs, too.

One final comment.  The apologists for the game, and you can find them all over a certain four letter network, will come back at you with a statement that goes something like this:  

"With all that is going on in the country today (school shooting massacres on an almost weekly basis, Russian meddling in our electoral process to name two), why is the FBI bothering and wasting its time on college basketball?"

Its a fair question, and the allocation of government investigative resources perhaps does need to be studied, but, the fact is that the FBI HAS conducted such an investigation, and that investigation HAS uncovered, it seems, lots and lots of hinky doings among college and university athletic programs. These things are wrong and cannot be ignored, just because you might think that the FBI should be going after Al Capone instead of John Calipari, and just maybe, the FBI is big enough to go after both of these elements.

As I said at the beginning, the whole state of affairs has left a sour taste in my mouth.