To Be Or Not A NCAA Portal Bum?

The idea that the NCAA March Madness players are true “student athletes” is sheer madness, especially now that sponsors are paying many of them pro level sums to jump from one school to another via clever “portal” ruse.

WSJ’s William McGurn says as much in “Another Kind of March Madness: Tell the NCAA to Buzz Off,” & “Oh,” longs for “the days when universities regarded academic standards as their own business.” As the columnist opines: “The Final Four is upon us and with it the fiction that National Collegiate Athletic Assn men’s basketball is an amateur competition.” He goes on to note how the NCAA has a “vested interest” of its own in the dirty little secret via the “annual $1.14 billion in revenue” it gets from the March Madness Tournament, televised as it is ad nauseum on FOUR channels & the untold advertising revenues that come from it. What really got Mr. McGurn’s goat (which has nothing to do with any player’s missed 3 pointer) was the way the NCAA “inflates” its “graduation success rate” to make it look like any of these kids are cherry-picking their employers, er, schools, based on the quality of their academics rather the most lucrative deal their reps can negotiate.

Personally, I’m already sick of the spectacle, although I’ll admit the quality of play & the youthful passion that goes along with it, at times seems to far exceed the lazy-bones defense you see in some of the NBA play-off games. So, I’ll continue to watch. But, with the band-aid having been ripped off my one-time naïve eyes …

Davd Soul