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| How did you fuck this up? YOU’RE STANDING RIGHT THERE! |
“I wish I loved anything as much as the Masters loves itself.”
– Scott Pianowski, Yahoo Sports
NOW that the NCAA Tournament has concluded in decidedly unsatisfying action, CBS can pivot and suck up to the bastion of smugness and self-importance that is The Masters. There are no sacred cows here at In Play Lose, and one which deserves to be taken down more than any other is golf. Golf is garbage. Golf is a good walk spoiled and a waste of open space. Golf is the only sport where I actively enjoy watching guys screw up and look forward to it happening. When Jordan Spieth choked away the Masters in 2016, it was the first thing I’ve found about golf worth caring about in decades.
That it’s such a stupid game takes away from some things about it that are laudable. For instance, I love the idea of the cut. If you suck the first two rounds, they throw your ass out of the tournament and you get no money. Good. You played terrible, you deserve nothing. Likewise, if you’re not in the Top 125 for the season, they throw your ass off the PGA Tour and you have to go to Q School to get back. I appreciate that players police themselves and that they report their own infractions. All of that is good stuff. But then you have something as dumb as what happened on the LPGA Tour last weekend, when Lexi Thompson, who was well on her way to winning the tournament, was suddenly assessed a four-stroke penalty in the middle of the final round on account of a rules violation from the previous day – a violation which no one involved in the tournament had noticed and was imposed after it had been pointed out by a television viewer in an email, and you see just how stupid the rules of this game actually are. That the rules of a game can permit a viewer at home to directly affect the outcome like this is the single-most most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard of in sports.
When you are a spectator, you are there to watch and nothing more. You should never have a direct hand in the outcome. Players make mistakes, like Lexi Thompson did in that case, and officials make mistakes as well, some of which seem outrageous – in the NCAA Final, it seems impossible that the zeeb standing right there missed North Carolina’s Kennedy Meeks being out of bounds with :50 left in the game and the Tar Heels clinging to a 1-point lead. (We’ll get into that mess in a minute). But missed calls are a part of the game, ultimately, and we shouldn’t be altering results from afar – afar being, in Lexi Thompson’s case, as far away as someone’s livingroom.
• Speaking of undo outside influence on sports, one of the most awkward and preposterous of scenarios is going to come into play here in the next few weeks when the media members vote on the All-NBA teams. This is because the NBA, in their knee-jerk reaction to Durant going to the Warriors, and the superstar-driven Players Union, in their desire to get paid above all else, created one of the worst systems imaginable for determining compensation, which is to create a tier of players eligible for enormous extensions from their existing clubs based upon being named to All-NBA teams.
The consequences of this are fairly enormous. For a player, it could mean up upwards of a $70,000,000 difference in the value of their future contract. For the team, meanwhile, it also can create an enormous dilemma: do you really want to invest that much for that long in one player? One of the reasons why the Sacramento Kings were desperate to unload Boogie Cousins was the fact that they couldn’t justify to themselves doling out a $200,000,000 contract to a guy who is a complete head case and a complete pain in the ass. There are two players in particular – Paul George in Indiana and Gordon Hayward in Utah – who have had tremendous seasons, who are in the discussion among the media set for receiving votes for all-NBA, and whose future contract situations for their employers are likely going to be determined by whether or not they get enough votes from reporters and broadcasters to be named all-NBA.
And if I’m part of the NBA media – a lot of whom I follow online, and a lot of whom take this seriously – I want absolutely no part of this vote. It’s not up to me to make the news. It shouldn’t be up to me to have a hand in determining the fates of the Pacers and the Jazz and the Kings and anyone else. But the NBA has proven remarkably good over the years at creating its own absurdity. Whatever CBA the two sides come to ratify every few years is always full of loopholes and absurdities and unintended consequences. You can understand why the image-conscious set in the league’s New York offices get so upset when LeBron and Steph and the sort are sitting out games, however – their brilliance on the floor does well to mask all of the lunacy that takes place off of it.
• The Lose is down with women’s sports, and has always been down with women’s sports, and one of the things which I find curious is the fact that we here in the U.S. laud and praise and fawn all over our women’s national soccer team, who are great but who also act like a bunch of drama queens a lot of the time, and yet we pay pretty much no attention at all our women’s national basketball team, who are arguably one of the greatest teams in the history of sports. The U.S. women have won six Olympic gold medals in a row and have lost one game in that past 18 years. They’re so dominant that whomever they pulverize in the Olympics or the World Championships are basically just happy to be there. We’re a nation that loves winners and loves excellence, but the U.S. women’s basketball team may, in fact, be too good for their own good, because if all someone ever does is win, there really is no drama and no competition and, thus, there is no reason to watch it after a while.
Thus you have the dilemma of the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team, who only seem to make national headlines now when they lose – which doesn’t happen often it at all. The Huskies had their 111-game winning streak snapped last Friday in Dallas, losing 64:62 in OT to Mississippi State and it was national news, because it had been so long since UConn had lost a game that losing no longer seemed possible.
And in an instant, the sport of women’s college basketball became interesting.
The two teams played a year ago in the Sweet 16, and UConn won by 60 points. Mississippi State were listed as a 21-point underdog for the game last Friday, were +2000 straight up in Las Vegas, and a Huskies win was considered such a given that you could still get +400 betting on the Bulldogs straight up at halftime of the game, even though Mississippi State had an 8-point lead. And this was for a national semifinal, mind you. Mississippi State were a #2 seed in their regional, meaning they were considered to be one of the eight best teams in the country going into the tournament. Any #1 vs. #2 matchup on the men’s side would likely produce one of the tourney’s best games. On the women’s side, when the #1 is UConn, it’s just another blowout.
Being one who is a purveyor of everything that is done badly is only truly possible if you appreciate excellence first, and Connecticut certainly are that. But there is a sense of self-perpetuation about the Huskies at this point – if you’re the female equivalent of a 5-star recruit, there is nowhere else you’d ever even think to go to school, and unlike on the men’s side, where the best players are gone after one or two years, the women play four years of college, meaning not only does Connecticut have all of the best talent but they get to keep them all for four years time and actually develop cohesive squads. But other than the odd blip here and there, when a freak athlete like Brittney Griner winds up at Baylor, the game consists basically of UConn and everyone else.
And ultimately, that isn’t good for the game as a whole. You can certainly appreciate that sort of greatness for what it is, but when it feels as if all that UConn has to do it show up and roll the ball out and they’ll win, it almost trivializes the efforts that it took to be that good in the first place. Soccer fans will understand this feeling, to be sure – why would a casual fan even bother to follow Serie A or the Bundesliga after a while, when it’s obvious from the get-go that Juventus and Bayern Munich are going to win the league? If a team goes 111 games without a loss, it feels about as close to inevitable as it can get, but we don’t like inevitable and we only like dynasties to a point. The great upset, like Mississippi State pulled last Friday, is inevitably a triumph of the imagination and a reminder of what is possible. And it’s only when you tap into those possibilities that you can truly grow.
• Having felled the Soviet Union on the sport, the gals from Mississippi State then promptly messed up their own personal Miracle of Ice by losing to Finland. Mississippi State got beat by South Carolina 67:55 in the NCAA Final, and it might have helped their cause if their head coach, Vic Schaefer, hadn’t made one of the more moronic coaching moves I’ve seen in a long time, which was to have point guard Morgan William – who hit the game winning shot against UConn, and who scored 41 in MSU’s regional final win over Baylor – sitting next to him on the bench during the entire 4th Quarter, when South Carolina went on a 12-0 run to put the game away.
We’ve created this bastion of largesse that is the cult of the college coach in America and, as such, we have a tendency to absolve them of blame when they screw up. College coaches, being a selfish and self-preservationist lot, have of course figured this out and always do a nice job of subtly shifting the blame to their players when they lose. And since the sports media in this country that covers college sports is predominantly composed of former coaches and guys who seem to aspire to be coaches, it’s easy for them to gloss over the fact that coaches do, in fact, screw up.
They do it a lot, in fact, and sometimes on the highest stage. (An associate of Dean Smith’s once said the only two things he wouldn’t talk about were his divorce and “the Marquette game,” the 1977 NCAA Final where his strategic ploys backfired, he got outcoached by Al McGuire, and Marquette wound up an upset winner.) Some in the media attempted to ascribe ulterior motives to Schaefer’s ploy against South Carolina – he was “trying to send a message” to his player, who was, in fact, having a pretty bad game – but I’m dubious of attaching any motivation other than that he played a hunch and it blew up in his face. The aphorism Hanlon’s razor is applicable here: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
• The men’s NCAA final followed a fairly typical script in which the team that, to my eye, seems to be the better team – in this case Gonzaga – plays poorly and loses, while the team that isn’t as good – North Carolina – wins by doing whatever it can to make the game into a mediocre mess. Both teams were basically dreadful, and the officials contributed to the morass by calling 44 fouls and killing the flow of the game. Some of my more conspiratorial of friends have suggested this game followed another familiar pattern, whereby the lesser-pedigreed team ultimately got screwed over by the officials, but what more seemed the case to me was that Gonzaga blew the game in the first half, when North Carolina was terrible and the Zags had numerous chances to build a big lead, only to miss open shots and let the Heels back in the game. I had no real dog in this hunt: I would have liked to see Gonzaga win since I’m from that part of the country, but I also have always appreciated the fact that Roy Williams is one of the few coaches who wants his teams to attack and play fast and be creative in an era where most supposedly “great” coaches take the easy way out and just play defense all the time. I just wanted to see a good game, which I didn’t get.
I cared very little about the NCAA tournament this year. For the first time in over 30 years, I didn’t fill out a bracket. The Midwest Regional final between Oregon and Kansas was the first full game of college basketball I had watched all year. I used to be able to excuse the generally nervy and poor play you’d see in the NCAA tourney simply because the event was a great theatre piece. But while it’s improved somewhat with the new rule changes, the game still basically sucks. I’ve never had any delusions that college basketball was anywhere near the NBA in terms of caliber, but the margin seems greater to me than ever. You can understand why it is that the NBA is disinclined to want to draft any kid who has spent four years playing college basketball, since it’s likely the kid didn’t improve, and likely didn’t learn anything about playing the game while they were there.
And this is unfortunate, because basketball, as a whole, has benefitted greatly over the years from the lab experiment nature of the college game – coaches, when facing talent gaps, have always had to come up with different and unique approaches. Most everything that is good about today’s NBA – the pace, the spacing, the geometry – finds its origins in the lunacy that was Loyola Marymount in the late 1980s. There hasn’t been anything remotely innovative on a college floor in years. What shortening the shot clock in the NCAA has primarily achieved is cutting down the amount of time teams waste running some meaningless offensive pattern that’s been drilled into them by their head coach. They all still go into panic mode with :10 on the shot clock, having gone about making themselves eminently guardable, but at least it happens sooner.
And the whole business of college sports is so rotten that I can’t get too enthused about it – along with the fact that we basically pay lip service to the rot, like the Monday night telecast did when glossing over the perpetual academic fraud case at North Carolina. Keep in mind that Roy Williams earned a $250,000 bonus for winning the national title, while his players all got groovy T-shirts and hats.
And if you didn’t need reminding of just how fucked up the world of big-time college sports is, I recommend that you watch the recent Showtime documentary Disgraced about Patrick Dennehy, a Baylor basketball player who was murdered by a teammate in 2003, at which point Baylor head coach Dave Bliss attempted to cover his ass and got caught, on tape, telling staffers they should lie to the authorities and portray the deceased as being a drug dealer, among other things. This has always been a case of interest for me simply because I was living in Santa Fe and working in the media when Bliss was the head coach at New Mexico, before he took the Baylor job, and where Dennehy played for one season before transferring. Bliss had come to New Mexico from SMU, where his best player has since admitted he was paid amid other allegations, and while there were never any formal allegations of impropriety at New Mexico there were always rumors and innuendo floating about. One of the problems with big-time college sports is that there are always rumors and innuendo flying about, and officials turn a blind eye to the fire that accompanies that smoke. But we do turn that blind eye to it, going so far as to try and gloss over behavior that turns from unethical to criminal, much as what has happened at Penn State and, now on two occasions, at Baylor. Amazingly enough, Bliss got another coaching gig eventually, which he just resigned in light of this documentary and after running his mouth again, whereas the assistant who turned him in has never gotten another job and is now doing educational work with the Texas prison system.
Bliss was toiling away at Southwestern Christian University, lest you think the rot and sleaze of college sports only affects the big time programs. My favorite recent example of this was an article in Sports Illustrated documenting a spate of graduate transfers in college basketball. The graduate transfer rule has been around for a decade, and states that if you graduate from your university but still have eligibility to play, you can enroll at a different school in a graduate program and play immediately. No one ever gave this much thought until Russell Wilson did it and went from being the starting QB at N.C. State to leading the Wisconsin Badgers to a Rose Bowl. More and more players are doing this, particularly in college basketball, and among the great comments in this college sports suck-up piece bemoaning the scourge of graduate transfers from smaller programs to larger ones is the idea that some coaches are, in fact, attempting to slow their kids’ academic progress. Are you serious? What in the hell is wrong with these people?
As time goes on, I further and further distance myself from the corrupt, unjust, and disgusting industrial complex that is the NCAA. I just want nothing more to do with it. That means caring less and less about things like the NCAA tournament – an event that I used to love. I just can’t make myself care any more. I’m better off for not caring. Watching the NCAA Final is proof, in fact, that I probably still care too much. If I’m going to point the finger at others for perpetrating the hoax of college sports, I should also point it at myself for watching it all this time.
