TV talking heads ignore sordid pasts of NCAA Tournament coaches
In newspaper jargon, for some reason, the lead sentences to reports are referred to as “ledes.” The lede ostensibly is designed to inspire readers to read the next sentence or paragraph, wanting to…
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TV talking heads ignore sordid pasts of NCAA Tournament coaches
In newspaper jargon, for some reason, the lead sentences to reports are referred to as “ledes.” The lede ostensibly is designed to inspire readers to read the next sentence or paragraph, wanting to know more.
While I’ve already violated that writ of writin’, “never bury the lede” — never describe the car before you’ve reported that three dead bodies were found inside it — I plead insolence.
The Auburn-Houston NCAA Tournament telecast Saturday night, starring the lead trio of Jim Nantz (a Houston graduate), Bill Raftery and Grant Hill, not only buried the lede, but completely ignored it. Even before the tip, they had before them, at worst, an NCAA all-time record-equalizer.
The opposing coaches, Auburn’s Bruce Pearl and Houston’s Kelvin Sampson, in wink-and-nod tribute to how hideously low big-time, big-money, big-TV-revenue college basketball has eroded, are among the most sternly sanctioned and condemned in NCAA history.
Yet there they were Saturday night, as if both had been rewarded for cheating, thus the question: Were they hired in spite of their absence of integrity or because of it? Do the spoils always go to the spoilers?
On TV, where the truth is withheld as a matter of insane conditioning — as if the NCAA otherwise will refuse to cash TV’s checks — the national broadcasters chose silence posed as ignorance.
Auburn’s personable, corned beef-on-rye, good-time guy Bruce Pearl, now in his fourth head-coaching gig, has been in the center of recruiting scandals throughout his career. At Tennessee he was on a roll with five straight 21-plus wins seasons and six straight NCAA Tournament appearances.
But then his next latest: He lied to NCAA investigators as per flagrantly illegal inducements to recruits. Tennessee was forced to fire him. For the next four seasons he essentially was blackballed-for-cause from a college head-coaching job until Auburn in 2014 found him irrevocably stained but still irresistible. Must’ve been his résumé.
Sampson’s résumé reads like a poison warning. Everywhere he has coached he left in scandal, inspiring the question, “Then why does he remain in demand?”
But it was at Indiana where he was both head coach and head of the National Association of Basketball Coaches committee on ethics, for crying out loud, that broke the record for unmitigated gall in showing ethics his go-to-hell side.
At Indiana, even worse than his previous stop at Oklahoma, Sampson, while King of Ethics, demonstrated that he was a serial violator in pursuing scores of recruits in nearly every illegal manner east of Jerry Tarkanian, primarily through impermissible phone calls.
Not only was Sampson fired, he was given the NCAA’s “death penalty,” a five-year ban from going anywhere near a college basketball program. Sampson denied the most serious charge against him: that he had lied to NCAA investigators.
But that was no deterrent to Houston, the top-ranked Division I school this season. In fact two of Sampson’s children, by regular NCAA coincidence, are employed by Houston’s athletic department. Sampson previously was known to hire recruits’ high school coaches to deliver his goods.
But Saturday night, none of the above was worth as much as a mention on TV during Houston-Auburn. The schools came away in better financial shape, no attempt to embarrass either with the truth.
That leaves one to imagine what the state of college sports would be if blind pandering weren’t the unconditional approach to addressing the nation, if the network folks made shame-shame, once in a while, rather than rah-rah.
Couldn’t be any worse, could it?
But buried ledes — in this case, dead and buried — often leave the truth to rot. And to follow network TV expectations, it’s best to use a network-issued shovel.
