AFTER FOLLOWING college basketball forever and covering it professionally for 2 decades, I have come to the following conclusion: Throw away the manual covering the sport.

Let there be chaos. Make it official - he who cheats best wins. Really, what is the point here?

This thought has been formulating for a while. After talking to several coaches and colleagues in the last few weeks while researching a story on new, tougher recruiting rules that ran in last Wednesday's Daily News, I became more certain of my stance.

It will never happen, but I think the superpowers should declare their intentions and just battle it out for the best players - grades, morals and ethics permanently to the sideline. It is now quasi-professional. Just make it professional.

Instead, we have this sham of a system where many talk a good game, but few play it. "They" say it is all about the "student-athlete." Actually, it is rarely about what I prefer to call the players.

It is about the people who control the money - the amoral coaches (nowhere near all, but more than a few and there are others who want to be on the up and up, but can't be if they want to stay employed), the administrators who benefit by the television money, the boosters who so desperately want to be associated with a winner that they will pay (players, runners, whoever) for the privilege and the agents and their reps who start selling when kids are in their preteens and never let up.

Nobody trusts anybody. Money overpowers risk. Greed and arrogance trump temptation. Way too many hands are out. Trying to police this mess would be a difficult task if the NCAA employed the FBI. And it does not employ the FBI.

There are some wonderful people in the sport, people who try to do the right thing regardless. They are fighting an almost impossible battle against the forces that are about the bottom line - wins, money and fame.

I do not think you can legislate morality. By trying to, the NCAA (which is, after all, all the schools that don't trust one another) has a system that is so convoluted nobody really understands it. The rulebook is a maze because all the new rules are written when somebody finds a way around the old rules.

At the upper levels of the sport, it has been a big business for quite a long time. Why not just treat it like a business? Everybody competes for the best talent. The schools with the most resources inevitably will get the most talent and, if that talent is used intelligently, those schools will win the most.

Trying to level the playing field has not worked. It won't work. The rich will get richer. No amount of legislating will change that because even rules with the best of intentions are almost impossible to enforce with a staff as overwhelmed and conflicted as the NCAA staff.

Why not just sanction all of it and get rid of the hypocrisy?

Brand will be missed

 

Whatever one thinks of my Don Quixote stance, there is no question the game lost a great friend with the death in September of NCAA president Myles Brand. More than anything, Brand was a great listener.

At the 2004 Final Four in San Antonio, Brand was the first president to sit at the head coaches' meeting. After listening to the usual coaches' complaints for 45 minutes, Brand said: "Can I ask you guys something? What do you want?"

Notre Dame coach Mike Brey told me that story. Brand suggested the coaches form a committee and get back to him with suggestions for change. They did. He listened. Positive changes were made.

"Myles Brand really helped with this, God rest his soul," Brey said. "We lost a key guy in speaking for us . . . He really got into it and listened to the coaches."

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