Yesterday’s bracket leak showed that the NCAA’s priorities are a mess, and they desperately need to modernize.
ICYMI: Alabama is headed to the NIT to face Creighton.
The NCAA Basketball Tournament bracket got leaked yesterday before CBS could finish their two hour long selection show, and a red phone with a light in Indianapolis must have gone off because the NCAA sprung into action. If only we saw this kind of action from the NCAA at Baylor, Vanderbilt, or Tennessee in regards to their sexual assault issues.
NCAA issues statement on hoops tourney bracket being released early: "We take this matter seriously and we are looking into it."
— Bruce Feldman (@BruceFeldmanCFB) March 14, 2016
This is the fastest the NCAA has ever commented on anything; it usually takes months of “we are looking into it” and “we want to get this right” before the NCAA says anything as meaningful as “we take this matter seriously.” You mess with the NCAA Basketball Tournament though and you mess with what the NCAA is all about… making money.
The NCAA likes to claim that it’s an organization all about student atheletes and serving them. The NCAA’s website is buzzword covered in slogans like “pathway to opportunity” and “investing where it matters”, but you can’t get to thos slogans until you pass through this doorway page.
You could look at our junk about scholarships… OR YOU COULD GET A BRACKET!!!
The NCAA just needs to admit what it really is, a college athletics corporation out to protect and make money for its shareholders, who happen to be major universities. If the NCAA’s mission was really to protect and nurture student atheletes why aren’t the sexual assault issues that have become an epidemic in college athletic departments its top priority?
The NCAA is ready to rush to action on the leaked bracket because it might cost them and their shareholders money. Surely the fact that CBS was taking two full hours to reveal a bracket had nothing to do with it. I’m shocked CBS didn’t squeeze an episode of The Big Bang Theory into the middle of the bracket reveal show. EVERYONE IN AMERICA LOVES SHELDON ONLY ON CBS HAHAHAHAHA!
The NCAA is in the amateurism business not because it makes the game better, but because it keeps their shareholders (the universities) from having to compensate athletes. It’s all about the money… I think Puff Daddy said that once. The NCAA’s response to why they don’t get involved in sexual assault issues is simply “it’s not in our purview.” If protecting student atheletes and making their lives better is your mission perhaps it should be in your purview.
I don’t know how anyone at the NCAA is able to take their job seriously anymore. In order to believe in the NCAA you’d have to be extraordinarily naive, so most of the NCAA’s officials probably just see it as a job where they are shilling for their corporate entity, no mater how messed up the priorities of that entity are.
The NCAA should be careful though, the NFL brushed aside morality issues for a long time and in the last two years it has caught up to them. The difference is that the NFL is much stronger and more stable than the NCAA could ever hope to be. If the NCAA were to get in trouble the universities might finally wake up and realize that they really don’t need the NCAA; in the end that might be the best thing for student atheletes.
Next: Nick Saban's First Spring Press Conference
I’m sorry your bracket got leaked NCAA, but it’s hard for me to give a damn while you turn a blind eye on sexual assault.