INDIANAPOLIS — At some point on Friday, the college kids playing for free will deliver an amazing basketball game that captures the nation’s attention and many of us will log onto Twitter to type a lot of exclamation points about how great it is that the NCAA Tournament is back after more than 700 days.
Here in Indianapolis where the NCAA is trying to pull off this tournament in the middle of a pandemic, NCAA president Mark Emmert and company will exhale because - for a moment, anyway - it will change the subject from what a disaster this week has been for the organization’s reputation.
In the week-long lead-up to the tournament, three dominant storylines have emerged:
♦ Six referees were sent home because they went out to dinner and one of them tested positive for COVID-19, a break of protocol that was rooted partly in the NCAA’s failure to execute an orderly check-in procedure.
♦ Several players in the men’s tournament started a social media movement around the hashtag #NotNCAAProperty, slamming the NCAA for its failure so far to implement new rules that would allow college athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness.
♦ Then on Thursday, images emerged from the women’s tournament bubble in San Antonio showing a weight room - if you can call it that - which was really nothing more than a rack of light dumbbells. When compared to the extensive and sophisticated weight room that was set up for the men, it looked like a clear inequity, prompting NCAA vice president for women’s basketball Lynn Holzman to blame lack of space in a statement that acknowledged the problem but wasn’t exactly a mea culpa.
Other than that, things are going great!
BRACKETS:See the 64-team fields for the men's and women's tournaments. Plus, expert picks.
WE'RE NO. ...2? Vice President Kamala Harris jabs husband for picking No. 1 seeds
MARCH MADNESS:Why holding an NCAA Tournament office pool is more important than ever
To be fair, it’s a massive undertaking what the NCAA is attempting to pull off this month. The logistics of gathering 68 men’s teams in Indianapolis and 64 women’s teams in San Antonio in a COVID-safe environment are beyond most people’s ability to comprehend it. There are going to be some transportation problems, some meals that might get cold, some hotel rooms that aren’t ready on time. It happens.
But the NCAA’s ability to perfectly execute on every detail of this event isn’t the issue. It’s the lack of common sense.
The NCAA is really good at the symbolic stuff like putting John Thompson’s autobiography in the swag bags that were waiting for players in their rooms. It’s really bad at doing the substantive things that make it clear they consider players essential parts of their money-making machine.
And, as always, it leads to a completely unnecessary problem blowing up in their faces, making us question why this organization even exists if its primary function these days - putting on championship tournaments - is this half-assed.
That’s not an exaggeration, by the way.
Had COVID-19 not cancelled the 2020 tournament, this would be the fourth since the FBI uncovered massive corruption in college basketball. Not a single high-profile coach or school implicated in the scandal has been punished to date, which means the NCAA has failed in its responsibility to deliver justice.
After a decade of kicking the can down the road on the inevitable push for name, image and likeness rights, the NCAA is now getting whacked around by state legislatures and the U.S. Congress, failing to self-govern on the biggest existential issue of this generation.
Meanwhile, Emmert has all but turned the job of NCAA president into a highly-paid irrelevance, his decade-long tenure having accomplished little except for ceding even more control over the future of college sports to the commissioners of the five richest football conferences.
At this point, the NCAA exists mostly to host championships. And they start their marquee events this weekend looking sub-standard even at that.
A boxed meal that doesn’t look particularly appetizing isn’t the end of the world, and the players who compete in the tournament are going to leave here thankful for the opportunity to be part of an event they have been watching their whole lives.
The problem is the inability to admit that without the players, there is no billion dollar contract for an NCAA Tournament. It’s easier for that fact to go unnoticed in a normal year. But when this isn’t really a fun experience, when the athletes are unable to move around the city as they please or even leave their hotel floor for most of the day, getting deodorant and a jigsaw puzzle left in their room seems less like a gift and more like an insult.
And of course they’re going to say it out loud because they know, now more than ever, that being denied the right to profit off their likeness is wrong. They know that the NCAA failing to provide the proper training equipment to use is wrong.
By building these bubbles for the next three weeks, the NCAA has proven that playing a tournament in a pandemic is possible. But it’s also given everyone involved more reason to look under the surface, and they haven’t necessarily liked what they’ve found.
Follow USA TODAY Sports' Dan Wolken on Twitter @DanWolken.
