Friday, February 23, 2018

The other shoe

It hasn't dropped yet. But Yahoo! Sports has found out what it looks like.

That would be the shoe/concrete Croc/steel-toed boot the FBI's investigation into college basketball corruption is about to hammer the sport with, just in time for March Madness. The report hasn't been released, but Yahoo! has obtained documents revealing the who, and it's not good news for either the NCAA or the dozen Division I men's basketball program specifically named as possibly engaging in corrupt recruiting practices.

Among them are some of this entirely corporate enterprise's most corporate programs: Duke, North Carolina, Texas, Kentucky, Michigan State, USC and Kansas. Among the 25 players linked to impermissible benefits are Tom Izzo's best player (Miles Bridges), perhaps the nation's best guard (Collin Sexton of Alabama) and Duke freshman standout Wendell Carter.

As the late Dick Enberg would say "Oh, my!"

As a lot of others of us would say, "S*** just got real."

Me, I think it's going to be interesting to see, first, how the schools named respond to this, and, second, how the notoriously inconsistent NCAA responds. College buckets at the corporate level, remember, are all about the revenue stream. Will the NCAA banish some its top March Madness draws -- the Dukes and Carolinas and Michigan States and Kansases -- from Da Tournament, thereby severely cutting into the market value of a major cash cow?

Or will the NCAA let them all play and then (per Louisville and Notre Dame) make them vacate games/tournament appearances (a relatively toothless punishment) once the checks have cleared?

We shall see.

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