Business decisions

 So I see Dan Dakich is in hot water again, because he got in a Magic Twitter Thingy tiff with a trio of college professors about college athletes and whether or not they have the same rights anyone else in America does, and that escalated into Dakich making some crude remark about one of the profs, a woman.

Something about the prof, a former swimmer, challenging him to a race in the pool, and Dakich turning that into a sexual innuendo in classic seventh-grade-boy style.

Which only proves you can take the lunkhead out of the Region, but you can't take the Region out of the lunkhead. With apologies to all those from the Region who aren't lunkheads.

In any case, ESPN is now "looking into" Dakich's remarks, which is code for "we're gonna suspend his ass." Dakich's loyalists will of course scream "Cancel culture!", the current fetish phrase of the perpetually aggrieved right. And so it goes, and so it goes, as Vonnegut used to say.

But let's go back to the original argument.

It started when Dakich, like a lot of coaches and ex-coaches, called Duke one-and-doner Jalen Johnson a "quitter" because he did what Dakich and a lot of other coaches and ex-coaches do all the time. 

He made a business decision.

What he did was leave the Duke basketball team in mid-season to prepare for the NBA draft, which of course raised the ire of all the coaches and ex-coaches out there. Dakich is one of those; he's always maintained that college athletes are compensated enough because they get room and board and a free education for generating millions of dollars for their athletic departments. So shut up and play.

The problem with this is the way athletic departments make those millions looks a lot like the way any corporation operates. And that makes those "student-athletes" look a lot like  employees. The school can trade on their images by making them billboards for their various apparel deals, they can force them to work holidays -- remember those Christmas Day Big Ten games? -- and they don't even have to pay overtime.

And when a kid comes along who has the juice to work that system in his favor?

He gets called a quitter.

He's not, of course. He's just doing what his school does, which is making what he regards as the best decisions for his economic future. Just like coaches and ADs and university administrators do every day.

Dan Dakich and a lot of other coaches and ex-coaches can say Jalen Johnson quit on his teammates, and where is his team loyalty, and all that mess. But where's that talk when Dakich or any other coach leaves his kids at one school to take a better job at another school? That, too, after all, is a business decision. So why is Jalen Johnson a quitter, but Coach Ladder Climber is not?

And in Johnson's case, his connection to Duke is a lot less a bond than it is for the aforementioned coach's. He's been there all of four months or so, for pity's sake. Duke's a bus stop for him. That's not his fault; that's just the system under which he's compelled to play.

A system that makes the Dukes of the world hella rich, by the way. And the Dan Dakiches.