Good evening, sports fans.
The UB Law Sports & Entertainment Blog will be hosting a roundtable discussion on the current state of college basketball on Monday, March 5th at 5:30 PM. This discussion stems from the attention my article “Hey, NCAA, This Is Your Fault” received, and the subsequent discussions I engaged in with so many of you over text, email, phone call and in person. Professor Drew and I figured we could build on the article’s momentum and bring our community together to exchange ideas on the issues the NCAA faces on the eve of its biggest moneymaker, March Madness. This event is not limited to law students, and in fact, many former NCAA student-athletes will be in attendance.
Depending on how many people we get, we will either be in the 5th Floor Cellino & Barnes Conference Room, or Room 106. Either way someone will be there to point you in the right direction. At 5:30 PM we will have pizza and soft drinks and and 6:00 PM we will begin our discussion. Please come, bring your friends and bring some ideas–this promises to be an exciting conversation.
The continuous ignorance and unwillingness of the college basketball world to acknowledge something is institutionally wrong here is staggering. Dan Dakich was on the radio last week and said that he thinks only about 10% of schools are paying players or are somehow involved in dirty pool with recruiting. This is a perfect example of how these people are totaly missing the point. Either Dakich is right and it is 10%, but its the only 10 percent that matter in a pool of 320 plus teams (nobody cares that Colgate isn’t paying players), or (more likely) he’s just wrong and completely naive as to what’s going on. The interesting part of the debate is that there are ways to simply make the cheating not cheating. However, many of these solutions result in insurmountable disadvantages for smaller schools. But if the big boys are paying for play anyway, these inequalities are already built in.