HOUSTON (AP) – Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim doesn’t like using the term “clean” to describe a college sports program, because the opposite of that would mean “dirty.”
Nothing is that black and white in the NCAA. For proof, check out the Final Four, where Boeheim’s team will play North Carolina in a semifinal pitting one program serving sanctions for lack of institutional control against another that’s dealing with one of the biggest academic scandals in the history of college sports – a case that could be resolved soon after the nets are cut down.
It’s a story line that speaks to the almost mandatory detachment of coaches from certain parts of their programs, in part to give them some “plausible deniability” when something goes amiss. It’s about the impenetrable rulebook of college sports, and how hard it is to keep a program from running afoul of anything in that book’s 405 pages. And, it’s about the realities of a sport that concludes each season with a tournament that bankrolls a significant chunk of the college sports budget via its $10.8 billion TV contract.
“The coaches and administrators put parameters around all this that allow them to view themselves as ‘pretty good,’ given how the system works,” said Tom Palaima, a Classics professor at University of Texas, who has long railed against the supersized role of sports in college.
“Sports fans compartmentalize it. That way, everyone is able to live with themselves,” he said.