Set Your Tivos is back with a loaded schedule. It looks like the NCAA is kicking the season into full swing this weekend with that pesky little college football sport and its antediluvian method of determining a champion out of the way, we can all focus on what’s really important.

Saturday
Noon
– NC State at #11 Clemson on Raycom Sports and ESPN Full Court: The Wolfpack will be looking to hand the Tigers their first defeat. Just based on history, I don’t have a lot of faith in Clemson and it looks like the pollsters don’t either. I don’t think this is a particularly interesting game based on the teams playing (especially when you look at the other games you can watch in this time spot), but keep an eye on this one particularly around the end when you could see a team fall from the ranks of the unbeatens.

– #21 Louisville at #17 Villanova on ESPN and ESPN360.com: Will Edgar Sosa’s resurgence lead more disgruntled college coaches to adopt the Rick Pitino method of motivation? Pitino will need Sosa, Earl Clark, and Samardo Samuels at the top of their game if he wants to go into Philadelphia and get Louisville its first quality win of the year. Jay Wright will counter with Dante Cunningham and Scottie Reynolds as the Wildcats hope to return to form after 2 rough games on the road. We’ll be interested to see if Louisville can ride the momentum off their big win over Kentucky to finally play up to the form that we expected them to earlier in the season.

– #22 West Virginia at #15 Marquette on Big East Network, ESPN Full Court, and ESPN360.com: Honestly, I don’t know if any Big East team is going to be able to make it out of the conference with less than 4 losses. The scary thing is that both of these top 25 teams will struggle to go 8-8 in the conference this year. After a tough loss to Connecticut, the Mountaineers travel north to face the Golden Eagles. Alex Ruoff and Da’Sean Butler will need to outplay Wesley Matthews, Jerel McNeal, and Lazar Hayward if they hope to get a road win, which will be a rarity this year in the Big East.

1 PM
– Kansas at #12 Michigan State on CBS: Tom Izzo has his Spartans playing well after some early struggles. Does anybody want to work out a comparative score about how bad Harvard would beat Michigan State? Bill Self will rely on the inside-outside combo of Cole Aldrich and Sherron Collins if he hopes to steal one in East Lansing. The key to this game will be how Collins does against Kalin Lucas. If Collins can outplay Lucas, don’t be surprised if the Jayhawks extend their impressive recent run including a win over Tennessee.

2 PM
– #2 Duke at Florida State on ESPN and ESPN360.com: This could be  potential letdown game for the Blue Devils after their win over Stephen Curry and Davidson on Thursday. [Yes. Curry played well. Much better than he had in previous BCS games, but I don’t buy the starting PG, 18-20 PPG as a rookie, and NBA superstar stuff that ESPN was trying to stuff down my throat. I’ll post more on this in the near future.] I’m sure that Coach K will remind his team that the Seminoles have knocked off heavily favored Duke teams several times in the past few years (I attended the most shocking of these upsets). I would normally say that Duke should win this type of game without any problem, but with the recent history of this “rivalry” I wouldn’t be too short of anything. As usual with Duke, watch the officials closely.

7 PM
– Miami (FL) at #24 Boston College on ESPNU: As we earlier wrote this week, we have no idea what to make of the Eagles. Beat UNC then lose to Harvard the next game. The Hurricanes have been winning all the games they are expected to, but they need to start winning some of the tougher games on their schedule if they want to live up to their preseason top 25 ranking or even make the NCAA tournament. This game will likely come down to a showdown between Jack McClinton and Tyrese Rice. Well that and whether BC decides to show up for this game.

Sunday
Noon
– St. John’s at #1 Pittsburgh on Big East Network, ESPN Full Court, and ESPN360.com: The Red Storm are coming off a shocking victory over Notre Dame. I don’t really think they should pose much of a challenge to the #1 team in the country, but momentum has a funny way of affecting games like these that shouldn’t be competitive. The Red Storm lost Anthony Mason Jr (son of that Anthony Mason) three games into the season, but have a balanced attack with 4 players averaging between 10.1 and 13.0 PPG. As you’re aware (since you visit this site), the Panthers aren’t quite as balanced, but Sam Young and DeJuan Blair may be one of the best 1-2 combo in nation. Look for this one to be closer than you would expect.

1:30 PM
– Wisconsin at #14 Purdue on CBS: After years of bashing the Big 10, it looks like the conference is slowly making a comeback. The problem they have now is that they have a lot of solid teams, but no great teams (with the possible exception of Michigan State). After a big win over Michigan at Crisler last weekend, the Badgers go into Indiana looking to pull off another upset. I’m guessing most people will probably be watching the NFL playoffs around this time, but keep this one on “Recall”, “Last”, or whatever function your remote has so you can flip back and forth between the games.

8 PM
– #3 UNC at #4 Wake Forest on FSN: Without question, the biggest game of the weekend features the experienced Tar Heels going into Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum to face the extremely young  Demon Deacons. I don’t think there is much to say about the Tar Heels, but here’s a brief summary: Tyler Hansbrough hustles and pulls in the ladies; Ty Lawson is fast, inconsistent, and shouldn’t be let near a car; and Roy Williams wears goofy ties and has a tendency to make comments he wishes he could take back. Oh yeah, they also ball with the President Elect. The Demon Deacons are still kind of an unknown to most of America, but with their win at BYU (ending the Cougars NCAA-leading home winning streak at 53) may be our first glimpse at how good this team could be in the very near future. Al-Farouq Aminu may get the headlines nationally, but be sure to watch for Jeff Teague, James Johnson, and Chas McFarland who are all at least as important to Wake as Aminu is. A win here could be big for Wake in getting a high seed in the NCAA tournament. I’d like to take Wake here, but I think the BC game may have woken up the Tar Heels who may have been buying into the hype that was being thrown their way (definitely not from us).

10:30 PM
– #7 UCLA at USC on FSN: The Bruins have quietly rebounded from a couple of close, early-season losses to roll off 8 straight wins (against admittedly weak competition). The Trojans have been inconsistent with some solid wins followed by some horrible losses (Oregon State). This will be one of our East Coast offices first good looks at the Pac-10, which only has two top 25 teams currently. There are a couple of intriguing aspects in this game. How has Darren Collison  adjusting to not having Kevin Love and Russell Westbrook? How is Demar DeRozan adjusting to college hoops and is he legit? Do teenage girls still love Lil’ Romeo? If any of these mysteries interest you or you want to see one of the better crosstown rivalries in recent years, we recommend you tune in at the end of a long weekend. If none of that interests you, tune in to see what Jordan Farmar was complaining about.

Note: if you’re not predisposed to a healthy dose of introspection and self-immolation with respect to college athletics, please skip this missive. We hate ourselves and everything we stand for after writing this.

Consider the following quotation:

If you were giving the [athletic] scholarship to an intellectually brilliant kid who happens to play a sport, that’s fine. But they give it to a functional illiterate who can’t read a cereal box, and then make him spend 50 hours a week on physical skills. That’s not opportunity. If you want to give financial help to minorities, go find the ones who are at the library after school. (emphasis added)

These words were uttered last week in the New York Times by Rutgers literature professor William C. Dowling, who now finds himself embroiled in a brouhaha over the intent and implied racism inherent in his statement. Both the Rutgers university president and athletic director have condemned Dowling’s remarks, and Dowling has shot back at both by accusing them of running an athletic program that openly exploits minority athletes for the university’s gain.

Were it that Dowling was just another old white guy who is completely out of touch with racial politics as it relates to sports in the 21st Century, we might summarily dismiss understand his statement here, but that’s not the case. In fact, Dowling was arrested in the sixties during the freedom rides in the South and his statement above was elicited from a question specifically about minority activity in college athletics (Do big-time college sports provide opportunities to minorities?) – this guy is no racist. For better or worse, if you read his online c.v., you easily find that this guy is about as socially liberal and/or progressive as they come.

Rutgers prof William C. Dowling

But what his statement does is once again expose the dirty little secret of big-time college athletics, a secret that nobody outside of a few academics such as Dowling, Murray Sperber, Andrew Zimbalist and others seem willing to broach. You’ll certainly never hear Dick Vitale or Brent Musberger on fall or winter Saturdays remark as to why Michigan football players average an SAT score of 834 vs. 1271 for the student body or why Duke basketball players average an 887 vs. 1392. Instead, you’re just as likely to hear them refer to players at these schools as quintessential student-athletes who do things “the right way.” After all, exposing the academic hypocrisy at elite institutions such as Michigan and Duke calls into question the integrity of the whole house of cards, and potentially weakens the cash cow on which Vitale, Musberger and others depend.

This is a complex and difficult issue, and we don’t purport to know all the right questions to ask, much less the answers. But to paraphrase Lenny Kravitz, does anybody out there even care? Sure, the standard college fan’s MO is that our guys are solid, upstanding citizens who go to class and caress kittens in their spare time, while your guys are animalistic thugs who don’t even know where classes are held and spend their evenings involved in gunplay and misogyny that would make OJ (Simpson) proud. But it’s not simply a matter of folks caught unawares – what’s quietly whispered among other students and faculty is that the athletes as a general rule are treated differently than the rest of the student body. Class attendance usually isn’t optional, but certain departments and professors are considered amenable to the greater good of the university athletic department, and as such, athletes find themselves in Communications, PE and Sociology majors a disproportionate amount of the time. This doesn’t even contemplate the seemingly endless allegations of university-cum-enabler academic fraud, from Florida State to Tennessee to Minnesota to Georgia and many, many others.

Nobody Here is Worried about Beer & Circus

And yet… despite our knowledge of this institutionalized hypocrisy by the universities, and despite the internal dyspepsia we experience when watching various players in interviews struggle with the English language, and despite the intellectual and moral disconnect of passing judgment on other schools’ troubled players while minimizing and mitigating our own, we still watch the games. Michigan puts 110,000 fans into the Big House every fall weekend, and millions more watch from home. People like us write blogs devoted to the whimsy of whether Florida will win the SEC East or if Keven Durant will go pro. Yet it’s telling that we’re still waiting to hear where yet another incident of beer & circus mentality at a university has led to decreased fan interest to the point where they turn their backs on the athletic program. Incredibly, if anything, it appears that severe NCAA sanctions embolden fans’ ire toward the dime-droppers and the NCAA rather than those students, faculty and administrators perpetrating the crimes in the first place.

The simple truth is that while all of us love to announce to the world that this stuff bothers us, the truth is that as college sports fans, we just don’t care. Or put more specifically, we don’t care enough to demand change, and we say this to be honest rather than flippant. Like many things in life, such as our gender’s insistence that we value other characteristics in women besides attractiveness, the reality is that all of the other stuff is secondary to the girl’s hotness. Sure, we like it when she’s smart, caring, personable, etc., just as we hope our team’s players will behave responsibly on and off the field/court. But what we really want is to win games (and get with the hottie) so that we can exult in the reflected glory of our team’s success, and whether we do so in an ambiguously irresponsible or immoral manner is less important than the results measured in Ws and Ls. So while we completely agree with Dowling’s point that a better way to assist minorities would be to find true student-athletes who excel in both the classroom and the gym, the harsh reality is that such a priority shift would likely turn the teams that we love into Stanford football (1-11 last season) or Dartmouth basketball (9-18), and what alumnus living outside of the ivory tower wants that?

Update:  Dr. Sperber referred us to an article he recently wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “On Being a Fan.”  This article crystallizes the internal conflict of “doublethink” that we feel when we spend our time watching and rooting for college teams while recognizing the hypocrisy of the system.  Sperber states this much better than we can:

Such critics have always had logic on their side. But most have overlooked the inescapable reality that fan attitudes on college sports are beyond reason, even irrational, and that frequently they stem from childhood experiences and family bonding: Many of my students at Indiana said that their earliest memories included sitting on the couch with their family in front of the TV and rooting for the Indiana University Hoosiers. For many other fans, the attachment to a team connects to positive feelings about their college days — indeed, that is the basis of my own loyalty. To overturn such deep emotions with logic and reason is almost impossible.

Some news flotsam and jetsam we’ve accumulated this week…

• It was an expensive week for Ohio State paying its head coaches, as Thad Matta got a $500k raise (to $2.5M per annum) and contract extension through 2016.
• Tennessee forward Duke Crews has been suspended indefinitely for violating team rules. How long is “indefintely?”
• We mentioned it briefly above, but it deserves its own note. Former Hawg PG Corey Beck was shot Sunday morning during a robbery attempt – he is listed in good condition.
• Free Shoes University is embroiled in another cheating scandal – the question is which sports are involved?
• Porsches, Polo & Ponies. SMU basketball avoids NCAA sanctions – wait, SMU still has a basketball program? Oh, right. Matt Doherty. So the answer is no.
• Plissken at the Buzzer gives a thorough and interesting breakdown of Memphis’ schedule (following up on Andy Katz’s top 10 last week) and how that will affect the Tigers’ NCAA seed next March.
• Melo is giving back to Syracuse, as Jim Juli Boeheim convinced him to fork over $3M toward a new practice facility for the Orange.
• Injury Report – Louisville freshman Clarence Holloway will miss the entire season after open heart surgery (!!), and NC State’s PG Javier Gonzalez will miss the next twelve weeks with a shooting thumb injury.
• BC’s success in the ACC on the gridiron and hardwood have increased its applications from traditionally ACC country.
• Construda still loves Luke Recker, oh these many years later…
• We guess Shawn Stockton isn’t as good as his uncle John.
• According to Jeff Goodman, 2008 #1 player Greg Monroe has narrowed his list to LSU, Kansas, Duke and Georgetown. Although Gary Parrish disputes this in a meandering article about Monroe’s eight finalists.
• Speaking of Parrish and Goodman, the former riffs on Bama’s point guard situation after losing Ronald Steele, and the latter notes that Bruce Pearl is in search of outside shooters and Arizona is looking at possible successors for Lute Olson.
• It’s NEVER too early for a projected field of 65.
• MascotLove: College Hoops Heaven takes a look at the top 15 mascots.