A few weeks back, when a reader asked if I could change one thing to “fix” college basketball, my answer was unequivocal: I would wave a wand and make injunctions go away. This was mostly a joke, an excuse to quote Jim Downey in One Battle After Another, and not a realistic desire. Even in the hypothetical, asking the US judicial system to stop functioning seems extreme.
Still: If I could, I would.
It may say something about how world has changed — about college sports, obviously, but also about our society, and the people who wield power within it, and whether institutional trust is being earned — that right now I am at least as annoyed by our judiciary’s treatment of the NCAA as I am by the NCAA itself.
The NCAA is supposed to be the villain. This used to quite obviously be the case. For decades, colleges clung to their outdated, romantic, exploitative athletics model. Amateurism failed long before it was abandoned. The NCAA was somehow simultaneously overzealous and careless at enforcing its own rules. It nitpicked the dumbest shit. It took years to make even the smallest, most minor, most reasonable change. It had to be dragged wailing and thrashing, by forces outside its control, into the diminished but still crucial place it now occupies.
The NCAA’s post-NIL role should be simple but essential: It should be the coordinating technocracy responsible for registering participants and crowning annual champions (college football obviously excepted). Rulemaking should be almost entirely focused on the game itself. The org’s sudden dearth of bureaucratic responsibility — no more transfer destination restrictions, byzantine waiver appeals, impermissible benefits, IARP, no more chasing kids and their childhood AAU coaches around to find out if they received free flights to a recruiting visit or texted a coach’s Palm Pilot too many times in one month — feels like chaos to some. It feels like a karmic organizational neutering to others. But it should be a relief. All those years, so much nonsense. So many hearings and committees! So much waste. Pare it all down, strip out all the Victorian concern-trolling about players earning money they deserve, and what are you left with? Who is a college athlete. Who is not. Who gets into the tournament. Who doesn’t.
Focus. Clarity of purpose. Anyone who has worked multiple freelance gigs at once, and then shifted to a full-time job, knows this feeling. It feels weird at first. But then it feels great.
The NCAA’s five-in-five rule change was the organization’s first real day on this new job, whether Charlie Baker & Co. realized it or not. It was also sensible policy. Here’s when your clock starts. Here’s when it ends. The whole idea was simplicity. Plain language, obvious parameters. No more quasi-former-pros trying to poke holes in opaque bylaws every time someone flamed out in the G League.
Even the decision to put the rule in place immediately, and cut off the class of 2022, was defensible, at least as these things go. Either you set the cutoff now, and face a likely lawsuit from just-graduated players seeking a fifth year they didn’t get to have, or you set it next summer, probably get sued again anyway, and drag out the mess for another 12 months. This is the same reason, presumably, the NCAA seems so keen to fight this current torrent of legal actions, even as the losses pile up. Law firms have dedicated college sports practices now. The litigious appetite can’t be sated. It must be defeated. At some point you have to stop marching and pick the hill you’re going to hold.
I don’t know whether that was the right decision or not. All I know is that the NCAA can’t seem to do anything — even to actively embrace its narrower mandate and make a simple rule about who is allowed to play college basketball — without a legal disaster ensuing.
On Aug. 10, when US District Court for the District of Colorado Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney denied the NCAA’s stay and kept the 2022 class eligible (for now), she said the organization “is in a bind of its own making” and “made its own choice which comes with its own consequences.” It’s not entirely clear what the NCAA should have done otherwise, or why it deserved to be scolded from the bench. For making a rule? A rule about which players are allowed to play?
For decades, you could look at university brass and ask why they couldn’t be better. Now: What can the NCAA do?
