It’s March: It’s madness

It’s crazy time for tens of millions of Americans glued to the television, billions of dollars being wagered, countless offices and organizations disrupted — now, virtually — by bracket mania. This is March Madness, the college basketball playoffs, an unparalleled entertainment and commercial extravaganza.

In short: 68 teams are slated to play 67 games. There are thrilling last-second buzzer beaters, tense overtimes, huge upsets, and extraordinary feats of athletic accomplishment as well as the human foibles of 19-year-old kids. There already were overtime games in the first round, and one of the best teams, Ohio State, was beaten.

Still, for fanatics like me, watching dozens of games over scores of hours, it’s more special after the COVID-forced cancellation of the tournament last year.

The danger hasn’t disappeared. Four teams had to pull out of their conference games last weekend, and one team had to back out of the tournament. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, to minimize the risks, is housing all teams in Indianapolis. The 64 teams in the women’s tournament will be in San Antonio.

There is a larger overhang to these games: It’s big bucks, television paying over a billion dollars to broadcast the tournament. The feature attractions, the players, get none of that. The NCAA perpetuates the fraud that these are just student athletes, amateurism.

They are athletes; many are students, some aren’t — not really. They are disproportionately Black, with the benefits accruing to overwhelmingly white athletic directors and coaches.

It’s rife with corruption. Six teams in this tournament are under investigation for serious infractions, like bribes. As John Thompson, the great Georgetown coach who died last summer wrote in his posthumous memoir: “Everybody knows within college basketball which schools are buying players — illegally offering cash and other gifts to players or the families to persuade them to attend and play at their schools. The whole system is filthy with it.”

The NCAA investigations take forever, and leading programs rarely are slapped with serious sanctions. Jerry Tarkanian, the irascible late University of Nevada at Las Vegas coach quipped, “The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky, they gave Cleveland State two more years of probation.”

This year much of the basketball media and cognoscenti are celebrating that Iona coach Rick Pitino is bringing his fifth different team to the tournament. Evidence suggests he also is a serial cheater. He was first caught violating the rules at the University of Hawaii almost a half century ago. During his stint as a coach at powerhouse Louisville, he had an affair with the wife of the team’s equipment manager and paid for her abortion; his assistant provided strippers and prostitutes on campus for players and recruits, and finally — in a rare rebuke to a big shot — Pitino was fired after revelations a star recruit got a $100,000 bribe.

But he wins, so he’s back in the game. (Iona lost in the first round.)

A special commission on these problems chaired by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accomplished little; noted sports author John Feinstein told me the commission itself was “a fraud.”

Solutions aren’t easy. Jay Bilas, my favorite basketball analyst and former Duke player, proposes paying players whatever the market bears. Bloomberg columnist Joe Nocera advocates an overall cap for the schools to compensate athletes, with part of the television revenue put aside for them later. Thompson advocated revenue sharing with players: divide up that $1 billion contract — coaches and athletic directors will get less.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) is spearheading legislation that, with other reforms, would allow college athletes to benefit from the marketing of their names, images and likeness. “I love college sports,” he said, “but it’s time to admit that something is very rotten when the industry makes $15 billion a year (overall) and many athletes can’t afford to put food on the table or pay for a plane ticket for their parents to see them perform.”

Any major change in compensation for college sports would be unfair to others, such as soccer players or the women’s tennis teams. The current system is unfair to most that don’t cheat.

Yet this doesn’t detract from the excitement of these next couple weeks with terrific narratives.

Gonzaga is seeking to be the first college team in 45 years to go undefeated. Spokane, Wash. — which I used to think primarily as the hometown of former House Speaker Tom Foley — has become a basketball mecca, with the Zags leading the way.

Duke and Kentucky, the bluest of college basketball’s bluebloods, didn’t make the final 68 team cut. They have won a combined 13 national titles. Sister Jean, the 101-year-old nun and chaplain for Loyola-Chicago is in Indianapolis. The football-dominated Big Ten, stretching now from Nebraska to New Jersey, is the dominant basketball power this season.

I’m not doing a bracket this year, after decades of mediocrity. So, with apologies to the University of Illinois fans, my pick to win it all is the Illini… unless upset by Sister Jean’s Loyola.

Al Hunt is the former executive editor of Bloomberg News. He previously served as reporter, bureau chief and Washington editor for the Wall Street Journal. For almost a quarter century he wrote a column on politics for The Wall Street Journal, then The International New York Times and Bloomberg View. He hosts 2020 Politics War Room with James Carville. Follow him on Twitter @AlHuntDC.