Welcome to Talking Hoops With Ted Sarandis. The college basketball world has been turned upside down. There is no other way to put it. And while it may be just what is needed when it’s all said and done, it’s going to get worse – perhaps much worse – before it gets better. And it will take a long time to get better.
That’s really all one can take from what has happened already. This is going to range far and wide, and many dominoes are going to fall; the ones that already have are just the beginning.
Our Adam Glatczak touched on this, including the opportunity in front of the NCAA with this, and on our latest podcast, we went in-depth on some of this as well.
Here, we start with a rundown of the basic details we already know, then launch into some analysis. We look at how this might affect the teams from a basketball standpoint, noting that a couple of teams are favored to battle it out to win their conference.
The effect on the game itself, especially as concerns this season with fans, is going to be bad. The college game has enough problems already. The sport has to battle football early in the season for interest, and hasn’t found a way to do that well. Hundreds of players transfer every year. Conference realignment continues apace, removing or reducing long-standing rivalries fans love. Early defections for the NBA Draft don’t help, although that is nothing new. The rich are getting richer. And media covering the sport are taking hits, none more notable than ESPN’s layoffs several months ago that saw a big hit to college sports, especially basketball.
Now we have a massive scandal facing the sport. It’s about the last thing the sport needed.
The fallout from this has not even really begun, because it should be wide-ranging. Not only do we have reason to believe it will hit college basketball directly, possibly in the form of a number of coach firings, but it may well mean changes to the travel basketball scene at the high school level. The NCAA has long wanted to change this significantly, but most of what they have done has not helped or lived up to what they claim to want to do.
Interestingly, there’s potentially an added problem for Louisville – the impact this may have on their home arena, which still has hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, and the Louisville Arena Authority, who manages it. We did not discuss this in the podcast, but it is an interesting note all the same.
We close out the show by talking about a long-time college coach who passed away about a month earlier. Rollie Massimino was, simply put, a coach until the end, and he is still beloved at Villanova.
We hope you enjoy the show and share it with your fellow fans. We have much more to talk about this and related subjects in podcasts and columns that are still to come, so stay tuned.
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