NCAA hypocrisy
Mar 26, 2009
While watching No. 1 seed Duke get whipped in front of the frenzied crowd of No. 9 seed Michigan State, I was struck by the hypocrisy of the NCAA with regard to its tournament policies. Stay with me here - this gets a little complicated.
In 1982, the former czar of the NCAA Men’s Tournament, Dave Cawood, decided to kick local TV stations out of his event. The NCAA Women’s Tournament Committee rightfully reasoned that their event would get more and better coverage if local television stations were allowed to shoot the games in their event - as these stations are allowed to do at most other major sporting events. In 1990, the NCAA pressured the Women’s Committee to adopt Cawood’s ridiculous rules. Their reasoning: The NCAA policies for the men’s and women’s tournaments must be consistent.
So in 1990, when we sent a crew to cover perhaps Kay Yow’s most talented N.C. State team in the Eastern Regional, the NCAA barred us from doing our job inside the arena, which happened to be the Palestra. To obtain video, our crew had to patch in a record deck to ESPN’s truck, on a cold night in a bad neighborhood in Philadelphia. Our station should have been rewarded for spending the money to cover and promote women’s basketball. Instead, not only were our cameras barred from the arena, but our crew and our equipment were put in harm’s way. All in the name of the NCAA maintaining policies that were consistent for both the men’s and women’s tournament.
Imagine my surprise when I checked out the brackets for this year’s NCAA Women’s Tournament, and found that several schools, including Michigan State and Rutgers, were allowed to play on their home courts! This is strictly forbidden in the NCAA Men’s Tournament. So much for having consistent policies. Not only does the NCAA Women’s Tournament allow teams to play on their home courts, they allow lower seeded teams to play higher seeded teams on their home courts. Auburn, a two seed, was forced to play at Rutgers, a seven seed. Duke, a one seed, had to play at Michigan State, a nine seed. Both Auburn and Duke lost.
Until a few years ago, the NCAA Women’s Tournament staged first- and second-round games on the home courts of the top four seeds in each region. This was deemed too big an advantage for the seeded teams. So the NCAA Women’s Committee began holding the events at neutral sites. Unfortunately, they found they couldn’t sell tickets at many of these neutral sites unless the host school was allowed to play at home. So now the NCAA doles out an unfair advantage to Rutgers and Michigan State, and penalizes Auburn and Duke, both of whom had earned the opportunity to play at a neutral site closer to their campuses. Please note: the NCAA Men’s Tournament Committee, in yet another NCAA inconsistency, gives its top seeds the advantage of playing on a neutral court, the neutral court closest to those schools.
So the NCAA Women’s Tournament Committee needs to act. It must go to purely neutral sites, with no team playing on its home court, regardless of the economic consequences. Or it should go back to letting the top seeds play at home, recognizing that they have earned the right to have an advantage by virtue of their won-lost record during the regular season.
And finally, the NCAA should abandon the hypocrisy that its Men’s and Women’s Tournaments are the same. They are not. Let us shoot the games.
