David Webber, Columbia MISSOURIAN, March 25, 2023
For Mizzou fans, the 2022-2023 men’s basketball season is likely to be remembered as the season first-year coach Dennis Gates took us on a journey of escalating hopes due to outstanding performances of four new Tigers whose first season in Columbia will be their last.
It may also be remembered that our run in the men’s NCAA tournament ended unexpectedly by the historically scholarly, but non-athletic, Princeton upsetting our Tigers. But to the rest of nation’s basketball fans, their largest memory of this season may be early elimination of two of the No. 1 seeds in both the men’s and the women’s March Madness tournaments.
NCAA basketball is in the midst of a gigantic shift that has leveled the playing floor among major athletic programs. Seven of the Sweet Sixteen men’s teams have not been there before, and only four of the final 16 have previously been NCAA champions. Another sign of increased parity is that in the men’s tournament many of the big name programs such as Kansas, Kentucky, Indiana and North Carolina did not make it to the Sweet Sixteen.
Some observers welcome increased parity in college sports, some see reduced loyalty of coaches and players and faster turnover of players as a problem. College basketball has had “one and done” for over a decade, so there are fewer NBA quality players staying for four years. On the other hand, the pandemic has caused the NCAA to allow a fifth year of eligibility, so many teams have super senior players and that, theoretically, results in better basketball.
The current instability of team rosters is largely due to two policy changes. First, the creation of a transfer portal allowing players to look for an alternative team and, second, the court-ordered adoption of name, image and likeness (NIL) provisions that permit student-athletes to earn money outside of official university control. Athletic departments are becoming large marketing machines, have larger budgets, better facilities with which to woo recruits, larger TV contracts and more free-wheeling boosters all working to promote their university sports team as a brand.
A generational change in basketball style is likely partly responsible for increased parity. My non-scientific observations led me to hypothesize that fast-paced, high octane running style with an eye on 3-point shots such as Mizzou’s approach this year has been more successful than the slower, “get the ball inside” style.
Freshmen were ineligible to play intercollegiate sports until the year I started college in 1969. In 1968, college freshmen athletes where required to sit out a year so they could adjust to college; in 2023 student-athletes can use the transfer protocol to change universities several times, often playing immediately.
My strongest qualification for writing a column about NCAA basketball is that I was a graduate student at Indiana University in 1975-76 when Coach Bob Knight led the Hoosiers to a NCAA Championship and a 32-0 season — an achievement that has not been matched in men’s basketball.
I was a faithful student of Knight’s weekly TV shows and remember many of the lessons he preached. Among them are: “fans seem to forget that the other team wants to win, too;” “the will to win is the most overused adage in sports — it is the will to prepare to win that makes the difference;” and “the mental is to the physical in sports as 9-to-1.” Knight was a proponent of the Saturday-Monday scheduling of games because students would miss the fewest classes and he was a large contributor to the IU library. Yes, he gently slid a chair across the floor at a Purdue game and was known for using salty language that would hardly be noticed today.
Knight was widely known for opposing most rule changes, but even he changed and acquiesced to the more lenient acceptance of junior college players winning his second NCAA championship in 1987 with two JUCO transfers, one of whom, Keith Smart, making the last second winning shot in the final game.
College basketball has changed drastically since then. There is more traveling, which has expanded school’s recruitment zones while taking students out of more classes. The SEC has Mizzou traveling to Georgia, Florida and South Carolina regularly, hence racking up more travel time than the old Big 8 or Big 12 trips to Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma. The proposed Big Ten conference expansion to include UCLA, USC and perhaps Stanford and Oregon will make that conference stretch from sea-to-shining sea. So much for reducing the carbon foot-print of universities due to increased transportation of teams, equipment and fans.
College basketball, and football, has become a fourth function, along with teaching, research, and service, of many universities and colleges. Promotion and protection of the brand is a priority — as it has to be to meet the payroll of multi-million-dollar coaches and staffs. Major college sports are their own industry more like the NFL and NBA. Athletic staffs tend “to hire their own” making them closed organization out of sight to regular academic observation and review.
College basketball and football as spectator sports will be fine; it is the higher education of student-athletes that needs closer inspection and perhaps protection. Sports are part and parcel of American culture, but they need not be a dominant force in higher education.
David Webber joined the MU Political Science Department in 1986 and wrote his first column for the Missourian in 1994.
Webber Rough and Polished 