Jul 24th, 2010
There is consensus among college basketball coaches about how many other coaches are cheating: Everybody does it but me.
Jerry McGuire -- Coaches have got agents at hello
Which, of course, translates to the conclusion that either 100 percent of coaches cheat or 0 percent cheat, with no plus or minus margin of error.
OK, not all of them said everyone was cheating, but “trust” is not the byword of the coaching brotherhood.
This is one of the things we learned from the survey performed by ESPN.com’s Dana O’Neil, who got answers anonymously from 20 college coaches.
Here we present the award winning categories:
Best all-around quote: “Maybe I need to pee more.” – a response to rumors that coaches take players into the restroom to make recruiting pitches to avoid NCAA compliance officers, most of whom are women.
Best all-around quote runnerup: “Five.” Five percent? “No, five total, and those are my assistants.” – the number of coaches this coach trusts.
Most direct indirect incrimination: “Every time North Carolina loses a kid, someone else is cheating.” – a comment suggesting some coaches believe they could only lose a recruiting battle if another coach is cheating.
Most direct indirect incrimination runnerup: “The Ivy League a couple of years ago, before all that stuff at Harvard” – on the conference that cheats least.
Most meaningful quote: “If you snitch, you’re Abar Rouse.” – a reference to former Baylor assistant coach Abar Rouse, who taped a conversation with Dave Bliss, then the Baylor head coach, proving Bliss was breaking NCAA rules and resulted in Bliss getting run out of coaching. Rouse has been ostracized from the profession ever since.
Other Award winners:
Conference that cheats the most – Southeastern Conference
Conference that cheats the least – Big Ten.
(The Pac-10 got no mention at all, and it’s difficult to tell whether that’s a compliment or a slap in the face.)
Point of consensus: The agents and their runners are the biggest problem facing college basketball. (This was before the SEC football coaches started their verbal assault on agents. Alabama coach Nick Saban called them “pimps,” and it’s hard to construe that as a compliment.)
Most surprising part of the survey: Twenty coaches trusted a media person to keep their identities a secret.
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Press release
How to Rig the NCAA Basketball Championship for Fun and Profit is a humorous, poignant and alarming novel about a guy who plans to rig the biggest college game of them all for revenge and a whole lot of money.
Over the many years Stanley Osborn officiated, college basketball had grown into a huge business, enriching universities, coaches, equipment and apparel manufactures, donors and the NCAA at the expense of the players. The brutal treatment of refs by rabid fans and overpaid coaches increased along with the game's popularity. Coping with the scrutiny of the media and the many conference and NCAA officials was becoming tougher. Even convincing his wife and daughter that his avocation was worth his time away from home was harder each season. But most troubling was reconciling the sleazier aspects of big-time college sports with its purpose of providing fair, equitable and sportsmanlike competition as part of the higher educational experience of the student-athlete.
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