Purdue basketball coach Gene Keady took the news about Northwestern like a guy who had just been told Janet Reno was a bookie.
“Surprised? I’m always surprised,” Keady said. “I was surprised by Arizona State. Surprised by Boston College. I was surprised by CCNY.”
Always surprised. Generations of surprise. All the way back to the ’50s. The surprise is that anyone is surprised.
“Sports gambling is a ticking time bomb,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said, “waiting to explode.”
Boom. Or maybe only bah-dah-boom.
This Northwestern thing sounds like a punch line. The Wildcats lost worse than they were supposed to? That is not even possible.
The idea of losing games by more than the spread is so deliciously Northwestern.
No, this Northwestern scandal will not rank that high in the great moments of college basketball infamy. It was the freshness of the news that caused Keady to include it immediately among those more notable bits of hoops shame.
The telltale thing was how easily he made the leap. How easily we all make the leap.
“We should make sure that when we look at gambling, we need to look at everyone involved,” said Mike Jarvis, coach at George Washington. “Not just the players, but the officials.
“Especially the officials. They potentially have the greatest effect on the game. The timer. The scorer. Look at everybody. This is not just the athlete. This is a societal issue.”
From Evanston to the Western Hemisphere. From the first guard off the bench to the last farmer in Kansas. We’re all to blame. Toto too.
It was enough to cause college basketball to spend a long day squirming. It is hard to tell what was the greater impact of the gambling indictments at Northwestern, the incredulousness or the inconvenience.
“We would have preferred not to have the announcement in Chicago right before the Final Four,” NCAA Executive Director Cedric Dempsey acknowledged.
Ah, real life can be such a nuisance.
Greeting the press upon Final Four registration is a 32-page packet outlining the NCAA’s position on gambling. The short version is, the NCAA is against it.
The NCAA is so against sports gambling that it has one full-time employee, Bill Saum, spending all his time on it. The NCAA is so against it that it puts posters outside locker rooms of a college basketball player with his head in his hands and the warning, “Don’t Bet On It!”
This has to be just in case, on the way into the shower, the student/athlete runs into a bookie.
The NCAA is so against gambling that one of its conferences, the Western Athletic, which contains one of its Final Four teams, Utah, held its tournament in Las Vegas, so against it that Las Vegas has a sanctioned bowl game.
“But no official NCAA functions are held there,” Dempsey said.
The NCAA is so against gambling that it just paid a marketing consultant to tell it how to make even more money from student/athletes. Yet the survey did not examine public attitudes about betting on basketball.
“We didn’t ask,” said Scott Taylor, whose firm did the research. “But in open-ended discussions, no one said he liked the game because it was easy to gamble on.”
Well, someone is betting $4.5 billion on the NCAA tournament alone.
“You put money in a bank, somebody’s going to rob it,” said Denny Crum, Louisville coach and philosopher.
Dempsey proudly pointed out how many “hits” the NCAA Final Four web site has been getting during the tournament. An indication of fan interest? Sure is. Nothing like those helpful partial scores to keep track of the bet.
“Betting is a fact of life,” Kansas coach Roy Williams said. “Odds, lines, tout sheets. Coaches are even promoting those things now.”
Said Keady: “The danger is on our own campuses. Bookies and wagering are within the student body.”
Dempsey would go even further than that. Dempsey maintains that student bookies are directly connected to “organized-crime families,” though he offered no proof.
The ultimate irony of college basketball and gambling is that the very structure of the NCAA tournament encourages betting–the size of the field, the brackets, the three weeks of eliminations. The NCAA tournament has surpassed the Super Bowl as the most wagered-on event in sports.
“Everyone’s playing with the bomb,” Krzyzewski said, committed to his metaphor, “but it will never explode on them. Just us.”
Tick. Tick. Tick.
