Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

The anatomic framework of college sports as we know it hangs in the balance Thursday, June 20, in the much-anticipated class-action hearing of the landmark Ed O’Bannon trial. Sports trials rarely come this big, or this potentially transformative, and by the time we’re all through here – we’ve still got a long ways to go, mind you – amateur athletics could bear zero resemblance, or very little, to the way it operates today. There is a lot on the line. Thursday’s courtroom meeting, wherein plaintiffs arguing on O’Bannon’s behalf will attempt to have their suit class-action certified by Judge Claudia Wilken, probably won’t render a conclusive verdict. The back-and-forth arguments will merely serve as pieces of evidence in the larger evolution of the case, and if one side’s platform is strong enough at Thursday’s gathering, Wilken could issue a ruling. But she probably won’t, which means we still have time to discuss the pawns involved, what’s at stake, the philosophical and legal implications at hand, and the likelihood college athletics could be completely made over sometime within the next few years.

Getting Wilken to rule in favor of class-certification would put O’Bannon and his plaintiffs in the driver’s seat in this critical case (Getty).

Before we get started, I’d be remiss if I didn’t throw out one probably unpopular but incredibly important fact: The NCAA isn’t about to vanish into thin air. Mark Emmert’s opaquely tangled amazon of rules and bylaws is here to stay for at least a couple more years. College sports needs a governing body, and the NCAA, for all its flaws, has fulfilled that basic function, with different degrees of success, throughout its existence. More important is whether the NCAA can continue to exist in the same way it always has. O’Bannon and his partners say nay. They believe athletes deserve a slice of the broadcast rights money shared between the NCAA and its members – the same money that pushed the turnstiles of conference realignment, blew the old Big East to smithereens and forced us all to reconsider the concept of athletic conferences in college sports. O’Bannon sees school and conference administrators and the NCAA getting fat off multi-million dollar TV contracts, the athletes whose competitions make those agreements possible in the first place receiving no financial compensation beyond room and board, the archaic notion of amateurism and its dubious historical origins – and he wants something to change. A lot of things, actually.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

Most Team USA basketball gatherings come with a lulling standard disclaimer: we, the United States of America, produce the best basketball players in the world. We’re better than you. I like saying that today, because as the game sinks its teeth into burgeoning hoops hotbeds in far-flung locales across this here planet we call Earth, other nations are catching up. Before you know it, there will be Yao Mings and Dirk Nowitzkis and Tony Parkers sprouting up left and right, and my proclamation won’t sound so secure. Maybe we’ll actually enter international basketball events with serious doubts over our talent and athletic advantages. After all, hastily throwing a group of NBA superstars without a savvy coach to meld them into one consistent whole can, as we learned through humbling defeats at recent Pre-Coach K Team USA Tournament events, pose losing-sized problems and nation-sized freakouts. Not to worry: the day where Spain and Argentina and Russia become our competitive equals on the hardwood are a long way down the road. Our hegemony over Dr. Naismith’s game is safe for now.

Familiar names line the U-19 Team USA Roster. Elfrid Payton is not one of them (AP Photo).

Ensuring that relative strength extends down on through the youth ranks is especially important, and if you’re interested in seeing at least a prospective few of the next generation of Dream Team legends – some players opted against participating in the Team USA festivities – Tuesday’s announcement of the final cuts on the U-19 Team USA roster might be something worth looking into. Check out that list. Depending on how closely you follow recruiting, most of these names should be familiar to you. The most recognizable name is Marcus Smart, and you definitely don’t need me to tell you why. Rasheed Sulaimon had a nice freshman season for Duke and looks ready to help the Jabari Parker-upgraded Blue Devils make a real run at the Final Four this season. Jerami Grant could be this year’s version of Michael Carter-Williams in that, much like MCW, he is a highly touted recruit who played backup minutes as a freshman (he started a few games while James Southerland was overcoming his mid-season academic eligibility roadblock), but will benefit from a massive spike in floor time his sophomore year. Montrezl Harrell is an electric frontcourt presence you probably remember best for doing this in the midst of the Spike Albrecht-spawned insanity of the first half of the national championship game. For the recruitniks, Jahlil Okafor and Justise Winslow need no introduction. Across the board, even when you account for all the players who opted against participating, there are well-known, well-established, stars-in-waiting talents ready to compete –and hopefully, hammer home the idea that our international hoops dominance, so prominent under Coach K’s guidance, is birthed in the grassroots levels – for national pride against some of the best foreign amateurs in the world.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

The 2012-13 college basketball season was excellent. Truly, it was – from the buzzer beaters to the rotating wheel of No. 1 seeds to Florida Gulf Coast and on through every grinding Big Ten showdown and Doug McDermott scoring explosion and Russdiculous moment stashed in between. It was great. You name it, last year had it all – but for one critical distinction. It didn’t have elite freshmen talent. There was no Anthony Davis or Kevin Durant or even a John Wall to satiate the eager eyes of casual fans who pay only a passing glance to college hoops right around NCAA Tournament time to get a better feel for that year’s upcoming NBA draftees. They want to know who can make their teams better at the next level; the excitement and mystique of college basketball is beside the point. Who cares if college basketball is awesome regardless of how “loaded” the top of the draft is?! We want franchise-changing one-and-done pros! I don’t see any this year! This makes me angry!

Players like Gordon at Arizona and other top-ranked 2013 stars at other select programs are why this freshman class has the chance to be one of the best in recent memory (AP).

Readers of this site, I’d like to presume, do not follow that train of thought. While Nerlens Noel, Ben McLemore, Trey Burke, Otto Porter and Victor Oladipo are the crème de la crème of this year’s lottery group, none are likely to evolve into max-contract team-defining superstars, and guess what? The 2012-13 season still rocked. College basketball doesn’t need transcendent star power to retain its elemental excellence, but even the purists among us can easily admit: It’s more fun when the Durants and Davises and Derrick Roses of the world are pushing their respective teams to new heights. There, you win, NBA fan.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn.

Most present-day criticisms of the NCAA nitpick its ethical and moral standards. They excoriate a system where athletes hand over the rights to their likenesses and athletic talents, yet are deprived of a slice of revenue those talents generate. They berate a byzantine rulebook filled with inane bylaws and regulations. They attack “amateurism” from every rhetorical angle. The verbal takedowns have hit a fever pitch in recent years as the NCAA’s handling of various high-profile impermissible benefits has provided convenient ammunition for fire-breathing columnists and national commentators. As long as amateurism is upheld as the foundational pillar of NCAA enforcement, and athletes remain removed from any monetary benefits on top of what’s offered in one-year renewable grant-in aid scholarships, the organization will be forced to tolerate a bombardment of scrutiny with no recourse to shift the public discourse away from its doggedly indignant mindset.

Losing a high-ranking enforcement official like Newman Baker is a continuation of a scary trend within the NCAA’s enforcement wing (Getty).

Lamenting the NCAA, the institution, has and will continue to be a prominent feature of American sports media. Now there’s a new dimension to attack, and it goes deeper than flawed ideals or morally corrupt philosophies or anything about the NCAA’s actual legislative structure. These days, the NCAA has far bigger concerns than angry middle-aged sportswriters railing on amateurism, because before long, it may not have enough staff members to maintain amateurism’s grip on college athletics in the first place. Yahoo!’s Pat Forde delved into the deteriorating culture inside the organization a couple weeks ago – how over the past 18 months, the NCAA has seen some of its top investigators pack up and leave for compliance positions at various universities. The end result, as Forde writes, is an environment where athletes, coaches, boosters, agents and whoever else might be inclined to step outside amateurism’s restrictive boundaries are encouraged to go right ahead and do their worst. They can, in other words, break rules without bearing a passing concern for the consequences on the other end. The coast is clear. The people that prop up amateurism, and wield the power to cripple athletic programs with scholarship reductions and postseason bans, are quickly leaving the premises. Moving on. Fleeing the scene before the bottom drops out.

This is a problem.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn.

One top-10 recruit’s eligibility issues on one national championship-capable roster typically wouldn’t feel like anything to work up a sweat over five months away from the start of the season. Chris Walker is one of the top players in the class of 2013. His addition arguably makes the Gators the most wholly-talented group Billy Donovan has coached since the 2006-07 national championship starting five. Florida would be better with him than without him. These things are all true, and they are all real. But academic eligibility issues like Walker’s – he still needs to complete three core courses and improve his ACT score before becoming eligible – usually (re: usually) tend to untangle themselves before the start of the season. It’s not like Walker attended high school classes that didn’t actually exist. And besides, what’s the worst that could happen? Walker is ruled ineligible for the non-conference season, only to enter Florida’s lineup around New Year’s for a repeat mashing of SEC competition? When you really bore down into what the Gators bring back, and who they welcome for the very first time, Walker’s possible ineligibility is less than crippling specter. More like a minor buzzkill in an otherwise tantalizingly positive summer season lead-up.

Unless Walker’s academics keep him out for a large number of games, Florida fans best be relaxing, instead counting all the positives the Gators have going for them right now (Getty).

Viewed on its own merits, Walker’s situation is an annoyance. A tic slowly sucking the preseason optimism out of Florida fans. Nothing more and nothing less. This particular situation is different, because Walker’s ineligibility isn’t the only thing the Gators are anxiously tracking this offseason. There are other concerns, and when you add everything up and lop Walker’s prospective ineligibility on top, what once looked like one of the four or five best teams in the country in the rushed postseason Top 25 deluge has a fistful of questions to get past before season opening in November. Senior point guard Scottie Wilbekin has been suspended indefinitely by coach Billy Donovan for an unspecified violation of team rules one year after a similar punishment forced him to miss the first three games last season. We can only presume another brief multi-game absence, or some form of serious punishment, is in the offing. There’s also senior forward Patric Young, who underwent a procedure in April on his ankle, and whose game – frustratingly unrefined and only incrementally improved offensively – hinges heavily on his sheer athletic capability. Forward Will Yeguete likewise had his right knee scoped out one month later, the second such arthroscopic procedure in a four-month span.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

Job resignations don’t get more prescient than former UNC chancellor Holden Thorp’s decision last week to leave the school for the smaller and less hectic D-III pastures of Washington University in Saint Louis. Thorp’s stated reason for leaving – that the burden of making crucial decisions about a major college athletics program, lopped on top of his educational and administrative responsibilities, had worn Thorp thin over the past three years – is the perfect precursor for the recent news surrounding the Tar Heels’ athletic program. The academic scandal that surfaced last year to widespread dismay and doomsday-forecasting, then faded from the national spotlight, appears to have turned a resentfully bleak corner. A public records request from the Raleigh News & Observer issued last year, around the time of the initial reports of academic malfeasance within UNC’s athletic department, was granted just this month, and the findings only further validate Thorp’s clairvoyant departure. Emails between Tar Heels’ athletic-academic officials and Julius Nyang’oro – the former head of the former, erm, extinct African-American Studies department that allegedly greased the rails for scores of athletes (including football, and possibly men’s basketball, players) to stay eligible through fraudulent, or even non-existent, classes – turned up evidence of even greater systemic failures than we might have initially thought. The details aren’t pretty. This exchange between former football academic coordinator Cynthia Reynolds and Nyang’oro offers a window into the sort of deep institutional collusion UNC potentially left unmonitored within its athletic department.

What once looked like a swath of compelling but forgotten circumstantial evidence could lead to heavy punishment (Getty).

In one email from September 2009, Cynthia Reynolds, a former associate director who oversaw academic support for football players, told Nyang’oro in an email that “I hear you are doing me a big favor this semester and that I should be bringing you lots of gifts and cash???????”

When allegations of academic propriety were first brought to the fore, reaction was critical and uncompromising. All the signs of a collectively coordinated academic fraud were plain: shoddy transcripts, rinky-dink classes, a rogue department head with a dubious academic track record. Slowly but surely, the whole thing poofed into a cloud of oblivion. Nothing to see here, folks. We’ve got this under control. The media heat may have cooled, and powerful interweb columnists may have loosened their clench on UNC’s academic reputation, but the actual evidence never disappeared. Julius Peppers’ specious and internet-leaked transcript was still lying around on some investigator’s desk. The African-American Studies department’s comically easy jock classes did take place. Holden Thorp bolted the premises for a reason. The condemning evidence never went away, and now, after a year’s delay, when the dust had cleared and UNC athletics had emerged from the foreboding smog of NCAA sanctions and leaky academic oversight, the forgotten demons are reappearing.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

The relationship between the NCAA and the schools it governs has grown more tense and distrustful over president Mark Emmert’s tenure. This is a simple observation – anyone who watches, reads or writes about college sports can’t go more than a few weeks without catching wind of some new bureaucratic squabble. But without digging deep and realizing the systemic disconnect that defines the relationship between the NCAA and the people its rules actually affect, it is impossible to comprehend just how incompatible the organization has become with everything college athletics, and their place within the larger academic missions of their respective universities, should be. Outgoing North Carolina Chancellor Holden Thorp’s comments Thursday upon leaving his post at UNC and moving on to D-III Washington University in St. Louis get at the core of what has been the NCAA’s most glaring issue under Emmert (and even before that): Sports people aren’t making sports decisions. People in academia are.

Being a president at a high major university means getting involved with important matters better-reserved for more qualified athletic department officials. Thorp saw the need for a redistribution of power, and resigned from his position to avoid further consternation (AP).

“Either we put the ADs back in charge and hold them accountable if things don’t work,” Thorp said in April during a campus forum, “… or let’s be honest and tell everyone when we select (presidents) to run institutions that run big-time sports that athletics is the most important part of their job.”

That sounds crazy, when you really think about it. Proposals to change inane bylaws and recruiting restrictions and scholarship limitations are being voted and ingrained into the NCAA’s rulebook by high-brow yes-men, the type of people who get up on stage at an athletic council meeting, get cozy behind a microphone and insolently mock everything from entire athletic conferences to religion stereotypes to individual coaches. College presidents, powerful leaders with academic backgrounds, are the ones taking the reins on the same issues athletic departments and coaches spend months and years wringing their hands about. If this presidential control model seems insanely ill-fitting, or just plain dumb, blame the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a group founded in the early 1990s to address the growing unease among educators of athletic departments’ lax enforcement of rule and regulations. Their solution – such as it was – was to hand control to the presidents and chancellors, esteemed educators with no specific experience dealing with the dizzying complexities of college athletics. The leaders of massive public universities would work with the NCAA to come up with reasoned solutions on how to address the problems athletic departments let linger far too long. ADs and other athletic department officials had it all wrong. Let’s hand this over to the presidents. They’re smart, right? They can handle this. They know exactly what they’re doing.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

College sports’ problems cannot be hemmed in around one single issue or theme. There is a vast array of various issues eating away at the very core of the intercollegiate athletic landscape, loath as we are to discuss them all in equal measure. The usual discussions about the usual problems tend to fall under one of two hot-button umbrellas: the NCAA and conference realignment. Mentioning either tends to boil the blood of all fans; not even the dividing lines of team or conference or regional loyalty can’t break up the unifying hate. Conference realignment talk has cooled off in recent weeks thanks to the ACC’s landmark grant of rights deal, which should halt the league-shifting turnstiles among major conferences. The NCAA knows no relief from outside vitriol, though, and you can rest assured the scorn will continue to rain down as long as “amateurism” and a crookedly impractical rulebook and Mark Emmert remain visible parts of the organization. We talk about these things a lot because they make it easy to do so, and because we – fans, media, whoever – understand the moving parts, the underlying tectonic plates, the incentives. We get this stuff. It’s practically straightforward, and morally persuasive (and if you have a lot of friends that enjoy watching and talking about college sports, almost by necessity a part of your cocktail hour conversation arsenal) to shake our firsts and raise a hellstorm about.

The underrepresentation of point-shaving among the biggest and most enduring issues afflicting college sports is startling (Getty).

It’s time we pay more attention to another issue: point shaving. You’ve heard of it before, yes? The supposed-to-be subtlety of intentionally performing below your capability to artificially doctor a game’s final score for a financial reward. If it sounds simple, that’s because it is. An ill-intentioned money-hungry go-between reaches out to an influential player on a low-profile mid-major team, offers a relatively small sum (say, $1,000) to back-rim a few jumpers and commit a couple not-unintentional turnovers, just enough to stay under the posted point spread. The player, a typical college student with typical college student financial constraints, happily agrees to consciously muddle his performance. Who wouldn’t take that deal? With little rhyme or reason for unprompted external suspicion, and a near-impossibly onerous burden of proof to demonstrate a sustained effort to manipulate a given game’s point spread, of course I’ll make that happen. That shudderingly simple and coherent line of thinking is what led San Diego star Brandon Johnson, the perfect real-life fit for the prototypical point shaving target-manna athlete, to cast his lot with bookies and an assistant coach with nefarious motivations and intentions.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

Watching under-performing forward Tarik Black walk away from his final year of eligibility at Memphis (and jump to Kansas) hurt. It was a shot – not lethal or even multi-wins-altering, but a shot – at Memphis’ very bright outlook in 2013. Waving farewell to hyper-talented if half-bloomed wing Adonis Thomas, who declared for the NBA draft after an underwhelming sophomore season, was another blow. The departures were starting to pile up, and the Tigers, populated with a quality three-man returning backcourt though they were, needed something to balance the scale. Michael Dixon’s reported commitment does more than that. If the rumors are true — and as of Wednesday afternoon, after ESPN’s Jason King got text message confirmation from Dixon denying what Memphis fans were no doubt all too ready to assume, that’s really all we have right now; rumors — the scab-picking losses of Black and Thomas and gives Josh Pastner another dynamic backcourt scorer to put Memphis in tip-top shape right as they dive into a new league, the AAC.

The possibility of having more speed, quickness and play-making flair to Memphis’ backcourt could shake up the inaugural AAC title chase (US Presswire).

This is all really encouraging stuff (again, to reiterate: nothing is official just yet) for Memphis fans, and I would like to perk up and say I agree, that it’s just as rosy and auspicious as it all sounds, but alas: the hard news. Dixon can only play for the Tigers this season if his appeal for an NCAA waiver is granted. If something seems curiously wrong here and if you are wondering why Dixon should have to sit out another season after being kicked off the Missouri team last year after being charged with sexual assault, your concerns are valid. They also have a simple answer. Dixon, you see, didn’t play in any games last year, but was enrolled in classes to begin the fall semester. That academic involvement could push Dixon’s highly-anticipated return – and after averaging 13.5 points and posting a 122.7 offensive rating in 2012, with the chance to enter a Memphis backcourt that would almost immediately join the likes of Louisville and UConn in tier of elite AAC guard posses, who doesn’t want to see Dixon skip the procedural one-year transfer penalty? – to next season, which wouldn’t challenge Memphis’ likely status in the preseason Top-25, or even really raise questions about the Tigers’ ability to jump headfirst into the Conference USA-reduxed AAC. In the event Dixon can’t play upon arrival, Memphis would still be formidable, still be picked to finish in the top half of its new league and still almost surely earn Pastner his second consecutive NCAA Tournament birth. But you can bet your bottom dollar the Tigers want Dixon around, this year, with this team. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

College athletics was verbally assailed from every conceivable broad-issue dimension last week. You know this: Religion, academics and the spending habits of one (very important) conference commissioner were the highlights of Ohio State President Gordon Gee’s incendiary comments from the school’s December athletic council, all captured on tape and released to a predictably irate interweb last week. The most poignant barbs were directed at the SEC and the quality of its academic institutions, along with Notre Dame’s stubborn negotiating tactics, which Gee attributed to the large contingent of “damn catholics” active in the Irish’s athletic department. He also, in mind-numbingly idiotic fashion, went all in on his own conference, including urging Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany to “keep his hands out of our pockets” and Wisconsin’s former “thug” of a head football coach, Bret Bielema, now at Arkansas. For a man of such power and outsized influence, for someone who’s been praised for his ability to rake in exorbitant sums through fundraising (and roundly mocked for his snobbish bow-tie purchases), for someone expected to project poise, public tact and the utmost aplomb in any and all public speaking situations, Gee instead turned himself into a national media punching bag, further cheapened his already disgraced national reputation (this isn’t the first time Gee has spoken out, and immediately regretted it afterwards, mind you) and prompted the trustees at OSU to issue a stern admonition that Gee just shut up before you embarrass us any more than you already have.

Coming from Gee, insentive slander is nothing we haven’t seen before (Getty Images).

In college basketball land, where a mostly quiet stasis tends to settle in around this time of year, an occasional once-or-twice-in-a-decade recruiting talent like Andrew Wiggins disrupting the calm every now and then, there was nothing particularly incendiary – besides the general religious and academic wisecracks, of course – to get worked up about. Before Gee’s full audio script was laid bare for public consumption, no one would have guessed the Ohio State President had any specific reason or ulterior motive to let his deranged blather spill into the most passionate compacted locale of college basketball diehards in the country. But then again, when was last time logic or rational thinking ever helped anyone try to understand one of Gee’s ill-mannered public monologues?

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