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Power play Trying to kill exempt events is simply a money grab by major conferences
The NCAA hasn't actually done the deed. The lords of college basketball may yet come to their senses and vote down a proposal that would effectively kill off some of the brightest highlights of the early-season college hoops schedule. But events like the Maui Classic, the Great Alaska Shootout and the Preseason NIT -- as well as such fundraisers as the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic -- are in mortal peril. Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, recently told The Washington Post that promoters of these so-called exempt events "enhance the growing commercialization of college basketball, which already is running amok." Hate to break it to you, Sheldon, but college ball is in its current sorry state precisely because of the behavior of the oligarchy you so enthusiastically defend. Sure, most tournament promoters are remoras who attach themselves to the game to make a buck. Some of them I wouldn't trust to run a chalupa stand, let alone stage a respectable college sporting event. But for the major-conference commissioners, through their patrons in the NCAA and the ACE, to deplore "commercialism" is rich indeed. If the promoters are kettles, the scions of the major conferences are pots, tarred just as black by their own predatory motives. Notwithstanding what they'll tell you, they don't want to eliminate the early-season tournaments to reduce missed class time or minimize the exploitation of athletes. They want an extra game, which would, of course, take place on their home floors, which would enable them to collect not only more cash (in TV rights fees as well as ticket revenues) but more wins, which would increase their leagues' opportunities to bag yet another bid to the NCAAs -- which of course would lead to even more cash. This is such a nakedly brazen power play that no one among the majors is willing to lead the public charge on its behalf. As one conference commissioner recently confessed to my colleague Seth Davis, "You won't see one conference stand up and sponsor the legislation because everyone's worried about a backlash. So we clouded it in the legislative process. That way it's faceless." Re-read that quote, and tell me if you can find a trace of a whiff of a scintilla of high-mindedness anywhere near it. If it's such a noble cause, why the Mafia tactics to ram it through? In December five promoters filed a federal suit to snuff out the legislation before it comes to a final vote in April. And last week a new combatant joined the fight with a lawsuit of its own -- a plaintiff that's no arriviste operator, but the curator of the NIT, which predates even the NCAA tournament. (While they were at it, NIT officials also challenged the NCAA rule that bars a team offered an NCAA bid from turning it down to play in the postseason NIT. Now that should be fun for any antitrust lawyer to litigate. And if the NCAA's defense will be to insist, Hey, we're not a commercial entity but an educational one, I'll do my best to muffle my guffaw.) The schools from the big conferences already won't play a mid-major or small Division I school on its floor. If the pending rule against the "exempt events" passes, there will be very few times they will do so even at a neutral site. This new injury would add to years of accumulated insults against the little guys -- from the way the major powers hoard at-large NCAA bids to oblige even their mediocre members, to the practice of divvying up the tournament billions among conferences according to how many of a league's teams make the NCAA field and how they perform there. Of course, that latter policy helps account for the pressure to cheat -- the very pressure that has turned college basketball into the cesspool that the major-conference commissioners purport to deplore. Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Odyssey, which will be published in January 2002 by Warner Books. He can be
reached at thehooplife@aol.com.
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