The Inevitable NCAA Blame Game

I'm not trying to rail against Whitlock personally, I read his stuff from time to time but his most recent article on the ticket scandal at KU brought me over the edge. I think it represents a lot the problem in college athletics, where the problems are being pointed to the NCAA and not the problems at hand. Until the American sporting community cleans up its own mess these issues will continually crop up. Are you willing to completely rethink how we treat sports in this country? I don't think so. You want your college football on Saturday, NFL on Sunday, and your basketball pool to get you some extra coin.

I really was planning to come to TBL today to just joke around and not enter any serious discussions. I have tomorrow off and looking forward to a 4 day Memorial Weekend, but this shit pisses me off. Whitlock goes for the LCD by attacking the NCAA. We should get rid of it? Yes, fantastic idea. I suppose we will simply move to the honor system. He makes Lew Perkins out to be a scapegoat but his article is based on using the NCAA as a scapegoat for a bunch of crooked administrators earning money on the side by hawking tickets. He points to the AAU problems in basketball but that is a youth basketball problem, one that the NCAA was way late into the game trying to control and still cannot feasibly with the power it wields.

I am not lifting the NCAA up as a paragon of virtue, but to criticize the organization for not doing what its membership(who has direct control over it) is cleary not in favor of is an armchair move. What drives sports in America today? $$$$$$, and that’s whether its amateur or not. Hell, 12 and 13 year old softball travel leagues are based off parents shelling out the cash in hopes their daughter can get a free(as in no fucking cost to them) ride to a college.

Money and human nature are at the crux of these problems, not the NCAA. You want to dissolve it? Go right ahead, but see how that tailgate beer tastes in your mouth when you know the starting QB for your school takes 3 credits worth of online classes, gets access to free cars, lives in a mansion and takes cash under the table for a host of seedy undertakings.

The popular phrase is hate the player not the game, well Whitlock just said he hates the janitor with the keys to the gym.

NCAA breeds a culture of corruption [KC Star]
Ticket Scanal Rocks KU [Yahoo]