A considerable number of keystrokes have been wasted by columnists lacking anything else better to write on how second-ranked UVA is bad for college basketball.
You know, pace, tempo, low scoring, loud noises, boring, LOUD NOISES!
Since we’re wasting keystrokes, what’s the harm in a few more. Ahem. Here’s what’s really wrong with college basketball.
No, it’s not UVA. It’s college basketball itself.
How many of the sport’s marquee programs are based on the lie that their players are student-athletes? Count Kentucky and now Duke, home to various and sundry one-and-dones, who by definition are college students for maybe an entire semester.
The second-semester class projects for these guys involve leaving school early after their NCAA Tournament run is done to get ready for the NBA Draft.
These programs are college programs in name only.
Post-graduate AAU program, works better.
But they’re good for college basketball.
Duke, of course, gets a star by its name for being among those programs that keeps a key player in the program after finding out that he was accused of sexual assault.
Credit to Louisville for immediately cutting ties with its suspected rapist, though you take some of that credit back for having suspended the same player a week earlier for sending a threatening message to his girlfriend, then bringing him back after losing the game that he had to miss in the interim.
Oregon gets no credit, for signing a player who was forced out of Providence after being accused of sexual assault there, saying that the charges were trumped up, then after the kid ends up involved in a series of brutal gang rapes involving two other teams members decided in the course of defending itself from a lawsuit by their accuser to snoop through her counseling records to try to dig up dirt on her.
But hey, in the meantime, the accused players, before being dismissed from the program, were able to play in the 2014 NCAA Tournament, after the program would have been made aware of what was being alleged to have happened.
At least Oregon has its eyes on the prize.
By all means, though, we can only hope that the columns about how UVA and its Pack-Line defense and kids who go to college for four years are bad for college basketball keep on writing themselves.
Here’s to the ‘Hoos getting knocked out early, to clear the way for the good, clean programs to do their thing, if not also keeping their kids out of after-hours house parties, and their tutors still gainfully employed writing at least a couple more papers for them before they drop out.
– Column by Chris Graham
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