I enjoy going to college basketball games, and this year has been an interesting one at Princeton, where we have an admirable newish coach and a rapidly improving men’s team. (Our women were a lot better this year, winning the league in a walk.) Princeton finished second in the Ivy League, due to two three-point losses to a genuinely impressive Cornell team. Cornell now goes on to the “Big Dance,” the 65-team NCAA Division I championship tournament. It has been a long time since an Ivy champion has actually won a game in the tournament, since we don’t give athletic scholarships, but both the players and fans are excited to compete with the Big Guys. Cornell will play Temple University later this week, and I actually give them a good chance to win — if they do, they will probably get Wisconsin, which would be tough.
This is to say that I am hooked to some extent on the NCAA Division I tournament, though I am full of ambivalence about my enthusiasm. I think the amount of money most universities spend on intercollegiate athletics is absurd, and the salaries paid to the most prominent coaches obscene. I know the literature on the economics of intercollegiate athletics pretty well, and understand the extent to which the so-called “revenue sports” carry the non-commercial sports at some universities. But I also know that relatively few universities “make money” on their revenue sports. And I consider it appalling the extent to which many of the most competetive athletes are tenuously integrated into the university as an educational institution. The Binghamton story is surely at one end of the spectrum of abuse, but no careful reader of the sports pages can be surprised that such scandals recur periodically. From time to time, the university presidents pledge to reform and control the situation, but my own judgment is that it is beyond reform, and likely to get worse.
The most recent evidence of what’s wrong with this picture is the article in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “Money May Drive Bracket Expansion,” which describes the developing discussion of whether the Big Dance should get bigger. The leading alternative appears to be an increase from 65 to 96 teams. The tournament was last expanded in 1985, but since then the number of Division I men’s teams has increased from 284 to 343. So, by one theory, there ought to be more spots in the national tournament.
But no one thinks that the contemplated increase is even remotely related to fairness. It is about money. Big money. The issue is renegotiating the contract the NCAA has with CBS to televise the tournament — a six-year, $6-billion contract. More teams in the tournament, more games, more television, more exposure. More money — for the NCAA and for the colleges and universities involved in Division I.
The man in charge of all of this for the NCAA is quoted as saying “simply put, it’s what’s appropriate to operate in our best interest.” “Our”? The issue will actually be decided by the 18 presidents and chancellors on the relevant NCAA committee (and I can guess what they’ll decide), but many coaches are already lobbying for an expansion to 96 teams. The famous Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim says that “any coach that is against expansion is not a good brother”. (“Any coach who is against,” coach.)
The Times found a couple of coaches who are not good brothers, though. The Cornell coach thinks that enlarging the field will water down the prestige of winning tournament berth. And the Davidson coach responded astutely: “Isn’t this whole thing a window into society? We’ve diminished so many other things. We’ve diminished test scores. We’ve diminished admission policies. We diminish so much for reasons that are not accentuating excellence and performance. It’s almost too inclusive.” Quite right, brother! The Nebraska coach has the last word in the article, however, and he is surely on target: “Let’s just be real. It doesn’t matter what you think or I think. It’s going to come down to dollar and cents. … if it makes sense financially, it’s going to happen. If it doesn’t, it’s not going to, no matter.” Indeed.
At at time when higher education is undergoing one of its worst financial crises, it is depressing to think that so much money, energy, and ingenuity is going into generating more money from intercollegiate athletics. At least no one quoted in the article is pretending that there is the slightest relationship between the Big Dance and the research or educational challenges currently facing higher education. But then, there is no reason to think that CBS would be interested in them.
But let me be honest. I am sure to watch more than just Cornell-Temple on CBS…
