Sports Curmudgeon - Topical Rants: The NCAA -

7/20/05 - I don't know what to think. On one hand, my inclination is to whack the goofs at the NCAA upside the head for their latest move because it is either a complete flip-flop on what they had previously considered a moral imperative or it is merely hypocritical. On the other hand, maybe some folks there have finally figured out that all of their rhetoric over the past couple of decades hasn't solved their problems and so maybe it is time to move on. Are they being disingenuous or are they experiencing an awakening to reality? I don't read minds so here are some facts and my judgments.

Since the dawn of time – or so it seems – the NCAA has been opposed to gambling of just about any kind and has been REALLY opposed to any gambling that involves collegiate sports. Recently, gambling among college students in general has gone through a huge growth spurt and the NCAA has not liked that even a little bit. The NCAA and some of its cronies on Capitol Hill have fussed and fumed about the evils of gambling and threatened to take action to “eliminate” gambling on college sports. Let me repeat myself here so any new readers don't get the wrong impression. Legislation cannot and will not eliminate gambling on college sports. Legislation might be able to put the Las Vegas books out of business, but it won't affect any of the offshore books. And as to the effectiveness of legislation as a tool to eliminate gambling, existing legislation in just about every jurisdiction in the US has not put many local bookmakers out of business. Folks, prohibition did not work; legislating sports gambling out of existence will work no better.

But to hear the fussing and fuming during those hearings and press conferences, you would have concluded that the NCAA pictured all of the Las Vegas bookmakers having horns and tails. And obviously, they chose to live in the searing desert heat because of their demonic nature, no? In light of that history, an AP report ran on CBS Sportsline.com yesterday that was simply stunning. Rachael Newman-Baker, the NCAA director of gambling activities, (I'm confident that does NOT mean she runs the bracket pool for the NCAA office workers!) announced that she and her colleagues wanted to re-establish contact with the Las Vegas oddsmakers for alerts to situations where there is unusually heavy wagering on a college sporting event or where something caused the books to take the game down off the board. She said that this concept was presented to the NCAA management council last week.

This is such a huge turnaround for the NCAA that it is difficult to explain. You may recall that the NCAA went berserk when two teams – I forget which two – scheduled a game in the arena that borders the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut. And that casino does no sports betting at all let alone college sports betting. Recalling that one incident, I remember all the rhetoric about how all gambling was evil and how exposing people to gambling was enabling behavior and how wrong it was to place those scholar-athletes in the way of temptation because there were slot machines less than 100 yards away from where they would play a basketball game. Horror of horrors, the scholar-athletes may have had to walk through the casino to get to the locker rooms!

The Las Vegas books have always been “the archenemy” from the NCAA perspective because they take wagers on college sports and have done so for years. And they are not apologetic about that which makes the NCAA even more angry and self-righteous. Now the NCAA wants to make nice with the oddsmakers and that's unusual.

Maybe someone in the NCAA hierarchy has figured out that if you want to be knowledgeable about gambling on college sports, it might be a good idea to ally yourselves with people who have an even greater interest in keeping the games from being fixed than does the NCAA. The oddsmakers have a lot more at risk if there is point-shaving going on than does the entirety of the NCAA bureaucracy. In fact, the last couple of times that point-shaving activities have been detected and acted upon by the law enforcement authorities, the tip-off came from the legal betting operations in Las Vegas. In those cases, games were on the board and the books expected a few thousand dollars to be wagered on them. Instead, they found multiple tens of thousands of dollars being put down and that many of the bets were several thousand dollars in magnitude. The books aren't perfect by any means; but when they see deviations from their expectations which are that large and when those deviations repeatedly involve one specific team, that makes them stop and wonder - - and place a call to the FBI.

For all their bluster, the NCAA anti-gambling folks who are dedicated to enforcing the NCAA's high ground stance on the evils of gambling haven't exactly cracked any gambling rings on their own. They haven't found any of the point-shaving activities; it wasn't the NCAA sleuths who found out that Adrian McPherson had gotten in over his head gambling while he was the QB on the Florida State football team; they didn't find out that Rick Neuheisel was cleaning up annually on an NCAA Bracket Pool until his bragging about his winnings made the news. They don't have the manpower or the expertise to track down “gambling wrongdoing”. As I said about them once before, they couldn't track a wounded yak across a glacier.

But now, they want to try to work constructively with the Las Vegas oddsmakers on these kinds of things and that is one place where there is information that might lead to the uncovering of “gambling wrongdoing”. Robert Walker is the sports book director at the MGM Mirage casinos in Las Vegas and he believes that this overture by the NCAA will be welcomed by most of the Las Vegas gambling industry folks. Walker summarized the importance of a “fair game” to the industry by describing the perspective of the betting public:

“It's imperative that the public knows they have a 50-50 chance of winning and that both teams are trying. Otherwise, it's WWF (sic) wrestling out there … I think the NCAA is on the right page when they say they want to work with us because we do really have the same goal. There's nothing worse than finding out you are on the wrong end of a scandal.”

Let me add parenthetically here that the NCAA cronies on Capitol Hill already recognize that there is nothing worse than finding out you are on the wrong side of a scandal, so that base is probably covered already.

So, is this progress or is this hypocrisy? I'm willing to call it progress. But I don't want any folks out there to worry that soft-heartedness and brain scrambling has set in here in Curmudgeon Central. I'm willing to call this progress because at the same time that the NCAA has made this positive move, they have simultaneously announced some silly and feckless things they are going to do. I don't think that's a smokescreen; I think they are just being their own normal stupid selves. And I am willing to give them sufficient intellect to have figured out that if all this was to work as a grand sham, they would need to put together a nice neat package without the stupidity attached to it. That's why I think it's progress.

Where's the stupidity, you ask? Let's start with Ms. Newman-Baker's words in that AP report. She said – and it is reported almost as a throwaway thought – that the NCAA has not yet decided how it will communicate with the Las Vegas books. Say what? The gambling mavens in the NCAA came up with a plan and took it to the NCAA management council where it was approved. This plan calls for a 180-degree shift in position for a hide-bound organization and the approved plan did not include how to contact the Las Vegas books? That was the essential element of this new grand plan! Let me offer a suggestion to these geniuses:

2. Buy a plane ticket to Las Vegas.

[I run a small consulting company. The consulting services above are offered pro bono. If the NCAA is paying any other consultant to advise them on matters such as this, that consultant is really good at stifling the giggles during client meetings because this just ain't hard folks and collecting money to give that kind of advice borders on stealing.]

The NCAA never does anything simply. The only organization I can think of immediately that routinely goes about its business in a similarly byzantine manner is the United Nations. And so it is perfectly in character for the NCAA to spend some time pondering whether or not to contact the Las Vegas books directly or to use the casino regulators in Nevada as interlocutors.

Memo to the NCAA:

Other stupid activities were also announced. The NCAA says it is going to begin to do background checks on referees for NCAA hockey games and baseball games because there is gambling action taken on some of these games. That's not a bad idea but here is the silliness. The NCAA says that it also has been doing background checks on the basketball officials who do the men's and women's basketball tournaments. Now that is really stupid because those are the same officials who have been doing your games all season long. And here's a news flash for the NCAA gambling mavens; it is a lot more risky to try to shave points in a high profile tournament game than it is a mid-week basketball game between two ordinary teams where the TV coverage will be limited to a couple of small markets.

Oh, by the way the NCAA didn't mention this but I have to assume that it has also been doing background checks on the people who officiate college football games too. In case they hadn't noticed, there is also just a bit of wagering activity on NCAA football games…

And the final uselessly silly announcement by the NCAA – which is so in character with their approach to most issues – is that the anti-gambling folks there will develop a new website to educate the scholar-athletes about the NCAA's rules that prohibit all forms of gambling. [Forget the hyperbole here; I doubt that they could enforce a rule that prevented a scholar-athlete who is over 21 years old from buying a state run lottery ticket.] Don't you just know that will be the hottest website on the Internet in terms of hits per hour… That will rank right up there popularity with Professor Flibbertyjib's website devoted to his lifelong research into athlete's foot outbreaks in the woodpecker population of North America. The noise of the mouse-clicks here will be deafening.

But don't get me wrong, I love sports...

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		The NCAA - - Dealing with Reality?

		7/20/05 - I don't know what to think. On one hand, my inclination is to whack the goofs at the NCAA upside the head for their latest move because it is either a complete flip-flop on what they had previously considered a moral imperative or it is merely hypocritical. On the other hand, maybe some folks there have finally figured out that all of their rhetoric over the past couple of decades hasn't solved their problems and so maybe it is time to move on. Are they being disingenuous or are they experiencing an awakening to reality? I don't read minds so here are some facts and my judgments. Since the dawn of time – or so it seems – the NCAA has been opposed to gambling of just about any kind and has been REALLY opposed to any gambling that involves collegiate sports. Recently, gambling among college students in general has gone through a huge growth spurt and the NCAA has not liked that even a little bit. The NCAA and some of its cronies on Capitol Hill have fussed and fumed about the evils of gambling and threatened to take action to “eliminate” gambling on college sports. Let me repeat myself here so any new readers don't get the wrong impression. Legislation cannot and will not eliminate gambling on college sports. Legislation might be able to put the Las Vegas books out of business, but it won't affect any of the offshore books. And as to the effectiveness of legislation as a tool to eliminate gambling, existing legislation in just about every jurisdiction in the US has not put many local bookmakers out of business. Folks, prohibition did not work; legislating sports gambling out of existence will work no better. But to hear the fussing and fuming during those hearings and press conferences, you would have concluded that the NCAA pictured all of the Las Vegas bookmakers having horns and tails. And obviously, they chose to live in the searing desert heat because of their demonic nature, no? In light of that history, an AP report ran on CBS Sportsline.com yesterday that was simply stunning. Rachael Newman-Baker, the NCAA director of gambling activities, (I'm confident that does NOT mean she runs the bracket pool for the NCAA office workers!) announced that she and her colleagues wanted to re-establish contact with the Las Vegas oddsmakers for alerts to situations where there is unusually heavy wagering on a college sporting event or where something caused the books to take the game down off the board. She said that this concept was presented to the NCAA management council last week. This is such a huge turnaround for the NCAA that it is difficult to explain. You may recall that the NCAA went berserk when two teams – I forget which two – scheduled a game in the arena that borders the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut. And that casino does no sports betting at all let alone college sports betting. Recalling that one incident, I remember all the rhetoric about how all gambling was evil and how exposing people to gambling was enabling behavior and how wrong it was to place those scholar-athletes in the way of temptation because there were slot machines less than 100 yards away from where they would play a basketball game. Horror of horrors, the scholar-athletes may have had to walk through the casino to get to the locker rooms! The Las Vegas books have always been “the archenemy” from the NCAA perspective because they take wagers on college sports and have done so for years. And they are not apologetic about that which makes the NCAA even more angry and self-righteous. Now the NCAA wants to make nice with the oddsmakers and that's unusual. Maybe someone in the NCAA hierarchy has figured out that if you want to be knowledgeable about gambling on college sports, it might be a good idea to ally yourselves with people who have an even greater interest in keeping the games from being fixed than does the NCAA. The oddsmakers have a lot more at risk if there is point-shaving going on than does the entirety of the NCAA bureaucracy. In fact, the last couple of times that point-shaving activities have been detected and acted upon by the law enforcement authorities, the tip-off came from the legal betting operations in Las Vegas. In those cases, games were on the board and the books expected a few thousand dollars to be wagered on them. Instead, they found multiple tens of thousands of dollars being put down and that many of the bets were several thousand dollars in magnitude. The books aren't perfect by any means; but when they see deviations from their expectations which are that large and when those deviations repeatedly involve one specific team, that makes them stop and wonder - - and place a call to the FBI. For all their bluster, the NCAA anti-gambling folks who are dedicated to enforcing the NCAA's high ground stance on the evils of gambling haven't exactly cracked any gambling rings on their own. They haven't found any of the point-shaving activities; it wasn't the NCAA sleuths who found out that Adrian McPherson had gotten in over his head gambling while he was the QB on the Florida State football team; they didn't find out that Rick Neuheisel was cleaning up annually on an NCAA Bracket Pool until his bragging about his winnings made the news. They don't have the manpower or the expertise to track down “gambling wrongdoing”. As I said about them once before, they couldn't track a wounded yak across a glacier. But now, they want to try to work constructively with the Las Vegas oddsmakers on these kinds of things and that is one place where there is information that might lead to the uncovering of “gambling wrongdoing”. Robert Walker is the sports book director at the MGM Mirage casinos in Las Vegas and he believes that this overture by the NCAA will be welcomed by most of the Las Vegas gambling industry folks. Walker summarized the importance of a “fair game” to the industry by describing the perspective of the betting public: “It's imperative that the public knows they have a 50-50 chance of winning and that both teams are trying. Otherwise, it's WWF (sic) wrestling out there … I think the NCAA is on the right page when they say they want to work with us because we do really have the same goal. There's nothing worse than finding out you are on the wrong end of a scandal.” Let me add parenthetically here that the NCAA cronies on Capitol Hill already recognize that there is nothing worse than finding out you are on the wrong side of a scandal, so that base is probably covered already. So, is this progress or is this hypocrisy? I'm willing to call it progress. But I don't want any folks out there to worry that soft-heartedness and brain scrambling has set in here in Curmudgeon Central. I'm willing to call this progress because at the same time that the NCAA has made this positive move, they have simultaneously announced some silly and feckless things they are going to do. I don't think that's a smokescreen; I think they are just being their own normal stupid selves. And I am willing to give them sufficient intellect to have figured out that if all this was to work as a grand sham, they would need to put together a nice neat package without the stupidity attached to it. That's why I think it's progress. Where's the stupidity, you ask? Let's start with Ms. Newman-Baker's words in that AP report. She said – and it is reported almost as a throwaway thought – that the NCAA has not yet decided how it will communicate with the Las Vegas books. Say what? The gambling mavens in the NCAA came up with a plan and took it to the NCAA management council where it was approved. This plan calls for a 180-degree shift in position for a hide-bound organization and the approved plan did not include how to contact the Las Vegas books? That was the essential element of this new grand plan! Let me offer a suggestion to these geniuses: 1. Start with a phone call or two. Make an appointment to meet with some folks for preliminary discussions. 2. Buy a plane ticket to Las Vegas. [I run a small consulting company. The consulting services above are offered pro bono. If the NCAA is paying any other consultant to advise them on matters such as this, that consultant is really good at stifling the giggles during client meetings because this just ain't hard folks and collecting money to give that kind of advice borders on stealing.] The NCAA never does anything simply. The only organization I can think of immediately that routinely goes about its business in a similarly byzantine manner is the United Nations. And so it is perfectly in character for the NCAA to spend some time pondering whether or not to contact the Las Vegas books directly or to use the casino regulators in Nevada as interlocutors. Memo to the NCAA: The more people involved here, the more expertise you have at the table. When you make your phone calls to set up some meetings, call the regulators too. Don't call the regulators “instead of the books”, call them “in addition to the books.” Other stupid activities were also announced. The NCAA says it is going to begin to do background checks on referees for NCAA hockey games and baseball games because there is gambling action taken on some of these games. That's not a bad idea but here is the silliness. The NCAA says that it also has been doing background checks on the basketball officials who do the men's and women's basketball tournaments. Now that is really stupid because those are the same officials who have been doing your games all season long. And here's a news flash for the NCAA gambling mavens; it is a lot more risky to try to shave points in a high profile tournament game than it is a mid-week basketball game between two ordinary teams where the TV coverage will be limited to a couple of small markets. Oh, by the way the NCAA didn't mention this but I have to assume that it has also been doing background checks on the people who officiate college football games too. In case they hadn't noticed, there is also just a bit of wagering activity on NCAA football games… And the final uselessly silly announcement by the NCAA – which is so in character with their approach to most issues – is that the anti-gambling folks there will develop a new website to educate the scholar-athletes about the NCAA's rules that prohibit all forms of gambling. [Forget the hyperbole here; I doubt that they could enforce a rule that prevented a scholar-athlete who is over 21 years old from buying a state run lottery ticket.] Don't you just know that will be the hottest website on the Internet in terms of hits per hour… That will rank right up there popularity with Professor Flibbertyjib's website devoted to his lifelong research into athlete's foot outbreaks in the woodpecker population of North America. The noise of the mouse-clicks here will be deafening. But don't get me wrong, I love sports... << Back to the Topical Rants Index = Home = Recent = Topical = Wagers = = Archives = Pros = Scores = Contact =