Though I'm about to sound like an anti-sports dweeb, the truth is that sports have played a larger role in my life for most of my life than academics. This includes high school, where I was a two-sport varsity athlete at a large public school, multiple-time district champion, and an All-State athlete in a large, competitive state. This also includes college, where I was an NCAA Division I runner, multiple time All-Conference, multiple time All-East in both Cross Country and Track and Field, and am still, about a decade after graduation, in the all-time record books for a couple events. This is to say nothing of the fact that the center of my childhood was soccer games and baseball games and pickup football and basketball; and when my parents could finally get me inside the house by dark after a long summer day, I would sit in the living room with a set of colored pencils and draw action portraits of Bo Jackson, Kenny Lofton, Barry Bonds, and the rest of my favorite sports stars.
What I mean by all this is threefold: 1) I love and have loved sports deeply for my entire life; 2) I believe wholeheartedly that sports have an invaluable role to play in the development of young people and in a rich and fulfilling life; but 3) if you're a die-hard fan of Such-and-Such State who's about to be offended by what I have to say below about the NCAA and college basketball, and you're about to call me a poncy egghead dweeb, put up your athletic credentials first, cowboy, and let's get out the measuring stick.
The unavoidable truth is that the NCAA is among the most destructive forces in higher education--destructive not just for colleges and universities, but for 'student-athletes' in particular--and the NCAA basketball tournament (a.k.a. 'March Madness') is the epitome of that destructiveness.
Those who have watched the Tournament year after year will have picked up on three central elements of it that give away where the NCAA stands:
1) Insane commercialization, advertising time-outs, endless sponsorships, high-priced corporate boxes, all of which make March Madness the NCAA's most lucrative event (the NCAA files taxes as a 'nonprofit' entity).
2) Those nauseating NCAA 'student-athlete' propaganda ads featuring 'student-athletes' looking through a microscope or hunched over a book in the library, designed to make it look like the NCAA supports students qua students.
3) The abundance of forced profiles the media do each year on the handful of teams in the tournament that represent elite liberal arts colleges, the Ivy League, or other academically strong institutions where the athletes still aren't given a total pass (I find myself wondering to this day how many classes per Spring semester Allen Iverson went to at Georgetown back in the day). It's as if the world is acknowledging that there's something special about institutions whose primary commitment for ALL students is academics having success in a field of institutions whose 'student-athletes' are more like 'athlete-students' (the exception proves the rule).
As evidence of how completely tone-deaf the NCAA is to the fact that the world is increasingly aware of its various exploits in restricting the earning and working freedoms of 'student-athletes,' designing massive tournaments and events during the academic school year that require 'student-athletes' to miss weeks of class at a time, exploiting unpaid student labor to make billions of dollars, and generally being a stain on US higher education for so many more reasons I don't currently have time and space to enumerate, there's this:
This year's NCAA 'student-athlete' ads feature college students in labs and libraries doing academic work when a mascot and cheerleaders and student band rush in and start disrupting the student in his or her working environment. HA HA think the NCAA, that fight song is so loud that she can't get her reading done; and look! That trombone just knocked over her petri dish, ruining her experiment. Hilarious! At the end of these ads, the spokesman says something to the effect of 'OK, maybe you don't need us to be your cheerleaders in the classroom, but think of us as your mascot.' In other words, the NCAA wants you to think of it as an iconic representative of academic striving and classroom work: a mascot for the student.
If you think about this for two seconds it becomes clear how totally ridiculous this is. The NCAA ads make a joke out of the reality: that the NCAA doesn't support, but directly and powerfully disrupts the academic potential of 'student-athletes.' This was made even more lucid by a short spot that aired recently during the halftime segment of the Bucknell-Butler game: the producers put up a HA HA tweet from a student: 'watching Bucknell-Butler in psych class #productivity.' In other words, the NCAA and the thoughtless and shameful television networks complicit in (and contracted to) make a grand, moneygrabbing spectacle of March Madness are so boldly indifferent to the central (academic) mission of all the universities on whose backs the NCAA and the networks make their money that they make jokes about students' desire to watch the games directly disrupting a college class. For those of us who teach college classes at this time of year, it's clear that the students playing in the games aren't the only ones who are taken away from coursework for a couple weeks in the middle of the semester.
While myself and others have taken the NCAA to task more thoroughly, what I want to get across in this post is how complicit we all are who indulge in March Madness as thoughtlessly and with as cavalier an attitude about it as the producers who bring us the NCAA ads and the 'LOL skippig class' tweets. College sports should be for and about the students foremost; not about the NCAA's profiteering, the TV networks' collusion in this, the boosters and donors, etc. But most of all, it should be about the students ABOVE THE FANS. These students and their sports activities shouldn't be, as they currently are, primarily a product for you to enjoy come March. Especially since they get nothing of the profits made off of them as a product.
In short, if you're consuming March Madness without at least giving a little thought to how fucked up this situation is, you're either clueless, or engaged in a form moral cowardice that you're too weak to face.
