To the Editor:
This year’s NCAA March Madness tournament has been marked by great intensity and passion. The gloves are off in 2023. Intense physicality and speed are dominating the games so far. These kids are leaving it all on the floor — well, at least it’s the kids ending up on the floor in a tournament where there are more 24, 25, and 26-year-old players than ever before.
In response to the abbreviated 2020-21 season, the NCAA granted an additional year of eligibility to athletes affected. There are more sixth-year players in this year’s tournament than ever before, and some even in their seventh year. At 26 years old, Memphis’ DeAndre Williams is the oldest player ever to play in The Big Dance.
It was a considerate gesture by the NCAA to allow athletes to retake control over their playing careers, although very unfair to incoming freshmen, and teams like Purdue who rely on a combined 59.2 minutes per game from a pair of 19-year-old guards, Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer; but the break from strict regulations of the past doesn’t end there for the NCAA, which now seems less structured than the ABA of the 1970s.
NCAA rules are notoriously challenging to navigate, and now the waters are even muddier with a new policy that began in 2021 allowing student-athletes to be compensated for their “name, image and likeness.” The so-called NIL rules allowed C.J. Stroud to earn over $2.4 million playing quarterback for Ohio State. Contrast this with the NCAA of 1985 that suspended Indiana’s Steve Alford for a game because he posed for a sorority fundraising calendar. How did they even know about that? I’m imagining plain-clothed compliance officers stalking 3rd street in Bloomington — Myles Brand in pastel shorts and a bucket hat asking around at a Thursday morning lawn party.
Officially, the NIL rule does not allow teams to provide pay-for-play financial incentives to players, but are we really supposed to believe players won’t go to the schools who can offer the best NIL deals?
In 2008, Rob Senderhoff, at the time an assistant coach under Kelvin Sampson at IU, received a 30-month penalty for sending text messages to recruits. By 2013, this rule was eliminated by the NCAA. Senderhoff’s infraction would have been completely legal just five years later. These days, coaches are probably falling behind if they aren’t sending funny GIFs to their high school recruits every morning.
Sampson received one of the harshest punishments: a show-cause penalty preventing him from coaching at any NCAA-member school for five years. His violation? He was making illegal phone calls to potential recruits. Indiana’s basketball team lost two scholarships and received a three-year probation. But that was 15 years ago. As mentioned above, the rules are different now. For example, earlier this year, Darius Miles, a forward for Alabama, was arrested and charged with capital murder. A couple of months later, Alabama was awarded a No. 1 seed in the tournament.
That popping sound is the ripping seams of the NCAA’s scrap slipcover which has always been a fabricated authority.
I think it’s time we turn the regulations around on this unscrupulous organization. Let’s suspend these hypocrites indefinitely on account of violating their own rules far too many times. The student-athletes deserve better than the NCAA’s arbitrary, look-the-other-way style of governance.
Alex Stone
Franklin
