Chansky's Notebook: NCAA Way? Ha!

Brice Johnson and UNC Basketball

As expected, the Rice Commission has proven to be a joke.

Back when the NCAA commissioned a group headed by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to clean up college basketball and the scandals emanating from sponsorship by shoe manufacturing giants, critics laughed at most of the eventual recommendations made by the committee.

One of them was that the all-star tournaments supported by Nike, Adidas and Under Armour be off limits to college coaches, and they be replaced by events sponsored by the NCAA. The laughter on that one started and has only grown louder now that the summer circuit is here.

At the Peach Jam classic in North Augusta, South Carolina, the participating recruits were asked if they would rather attend and play in tourneys supported by the NCAA than the shoe companies. Peals of laughter were practically their collective response.

The reason was all the swag these kids get, along with all the notoriety, as the top college recruits in the country. Clearly, most of them say their goals are to, one, go to college for a year and, two, get paid to play basketball somewhere eventually.

Even if the NCAA banned college coaches from scouting these kids at these tourneys, the teams, players and coaches aren’t going anywhere because of the money and goods they all get from participating. How would the NCAA compete with that?

The big beef is already against the NCAA, which makes billions of dollars on college basketball in exchange for giving the players scholarships and cost of attendance. Will such proposed NCAA events pay the teams to travel to these tourneys, pay the coaches of these prep teams and shower the players with fancy duds and the newest kicks on the market? Will the scouting opportunities be the same, the potential connections for future sponsorship?

Who is kidding who here? That’s why the laughing started in the first place, when the NCAA formed this committee as a smokescreen to avoid the actual issue of what has been exposed by the latest FBI probe: That almost everyone involved in these so-called amateur tournaments gets something from someone.

It was one thing to convene such a committee and have people with pathetically little knowledge of how all this underground recruiting works make some recommendations.

It’s quite another when you ask the kids themselves if they would do it the NCAA way, especially when the NCAA does so much less for them.