(02-25-2018 11:41 AM)58-56 Wrote: (02-25-2018 08:50 AM)ken d Wrote: There are two kinds of basketball programs in D-I. Those who have cheated and those who would have cheated if only they were good enough to compete for the talents of the top players.
I suppose that means there are two kinds of men, and two kinds of women: those who have cheated, and those who would cheat if they weren't so godawful ugly.
Whether sex or basketball, not everyone cheats.
Not everyone cheats. That is true. But, everyone sins. I promise you that every institution cuts corners on keeping the jocks eligible. Virtually all of them offer some form of illegal perk. But no, not all of them permit the cash to flow as obscenely as others. Face it guys, our whole society is corrupt. People get paid to look the other way while drugs are sold. People use influence and power to put political and legal pressure on their rivals in business or politics, beauty pageants are won by the daughters of the wealthy because of the entry fees for the larger pageants, public high schools fudge on the addresses of jocks they want to compete for them, or businessmen hire their parents to get them to move within the district. So whether it is small stuff or big stuff somebody is always trying to game the system.
Our society suffers these things because at its core decency and appropriateness have long vanished. Churches are social clubs and not havens of assistance for the widows, orphans, poor, sick, and foreigners within our gates. Segregation still exists if you can afford a private enough club to hide behind, and law is settled usually by the one who can afford the best attorney. The poor who are broke to begin with will never dig out from under the endless fines and fees that will accompany the result of a public defense.
The trick to a happy life in the United States in 2018 is to not aim too high, do your job, don't complain about anyone else at your workplace, let alone management, and don't outshine the idiot above you. Attend church to be seen in the right place by all of those who use their attendance to bolster their leadership in the local community, and whatever else you do have the same prejudices as wealthiest in your community but only express them on the links where nobody can be quoted. Why? Because if you ever shine a light on their hypocrisy you will be the one labeled and punished, not the guilty.
I've mentioned it before but I followed up on allegations of impropriety for almost 2 decades and only ever found one coach of a major program who apparently had not violated any rules. Bill Curry was about as clean as you would find, but then that's why the Bama faithful wanted him gone. Not beating Auburn was just a convenient excuse. I don't know if he was clean at Bama or not, but he was clean at Georgia Tech. Nobody else recruiting the area I covered whether from the SWC, Big 8, ACC, or SEC, or the main Big 10 schools were clean. The really disgusting part is that since that time things have only gotten worse. We were no longer talking cars and cash, but bling and women and any other form of immorality that would have, should have, turned the stomachs of alumni everywhere. But the media was making oodles on these schools and the leaders of the schools didn't want their images tarnished on their watch. So, the media didn't follow up, the NCAA looked the other way, conferences got more sophisticated in dealing with petty conflicts within their own ranks to avoid extra scrutiny, presidents looked the other way during recruiting so as to maintain plausible deniability, assistant coaches took the battle damage for the head guys, and everyone let the money roll. So nobody dared to speak up. If they did they were quickly labeled as a disgruntled and malignant person, or discredited some other way.
How do you think things got so out of control at Penn State, Michigan State, Baylor, and with the Winston era at F.S.U., or the Franklin era at Vanderbilt? A callousness had to grow within the institutions before behavior that grossly abhorrent had been tolerated long enough to warrant a cover up or institutional indifference!
Our sports are just one huge screwed up example of our whole society's rottenness. From the Supreme Court ruling that imminent domain could be used for private development if it raised the tax base, all the way to the junkie on the street we witness how corrupt things are every day, and do nothing. We do nothing out of a sense of futility, helplessness, fear, moral indifference, or because we participate willingly in it in some fashion or another.
After all at the end of the day if you have hung a print of the winning touchdown, or the shot that made your team a champion, and you knew what the players were receiving in the way of perks, illegal inducements, or worse scheduled hook ups, or local police protection for the commission of property crimes or sexual assaults, then you are complicit in all of it. Just like you are when you witness bullying, unwanted sexual advances, harassment, or corruption in your work place and do nothing.
Part of our problem today is that we want justice for our family, but when society's ills affect our neighbor it is suddenly just their problem. Because we don't stand together for what is right, we live with the affliction of corruption daily. It's sad, and I don't know what it will take to change it, but I do know whatever it is that brings change has to start with each of us saying enough! And then encouraging our neighbors to do the same.
So I find a certain level of hypocrisy in most of these threads. If you are asking for change then so be it, I'm on board. But if you are just seeking vengeance against another program or region because you feel that will give you an edge, or benefit your own program, then the threads are disingenuous. There are very very few, clean athletic programs where the student athletes are expected to perform normally in the classroom. I'll give those schools the permission to cast stones. The rest just need to join the stone tossers and demand cleaner programs. If we don't then we have gotten what we deserve. And the oldest claim in the world is still invalid. "We only did it because everybody else was doing it too!"
But if we start with sports, then let us gain the guts necessary to carry the clean up to our city, county, state, and federal governments. When those entities are clean then cleaning crime from the streets will be a lot easier to accomplish. But if we won't do it over the most trivial of matters then we won't do it over the big ones.
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2018 NCAA Tourney without the Cheaters?
