St John’s lost to Seton Hall in over time Saturday afternoon 81-74, dropping them under .500 and back into last place in the BE. (Last place I can live with, but .500 is a big number: only one SJ team in the past sixty years has failed to garner an invitation to the NIT with a non-losing record.) Once again at this point absent the win it was all you could hope for: a fun and exciting game to watch. I think I might even have sat up in my seat at one point. Neither team played particularly well and I’m not much in the mood to rehash it, and certainly not 24 hours later. On the bright side there’s only two games to go and only a couple more of these stupid things to write after which I’m retiring. As Donny Marshall’s terrifying eyebrows noted yesterday, when you get to the end of your career you want to play every minute so I’m really relishing this one. Not.

Ponds had 25 points and six assists, most of that in the second half. Came within a bunt hair of stealing he ball at midcourt on the Hall’s last possession, which if he had would have been reminiscent of Hatten’s steal versus dook that I referenced a couple of posts ago. But he didn’t, because he’s no Marcus Hatten, not yet anyway. And while I understand wanting him to have the ball in his hands at the end of games I don’t really understand all the standing around and pointless dribbling that went on the last ten minutes or so. If I wanted to watch standing around and pointless dribbling I’d watch old tapes of Phil Greene. Marvin Clark doubled doubled (19 and 10) including a couple of thunderous dunks, which I didn’t know I had it in him. Ahmed had 12 and six but missed a huge free throw and a bunny off a very nice pass from Ponds. Simon (8/4/5) threw his usual contingent of boneheaded passes, Trimble shot poorly, and Owens was once again relatively pointless before fouling out. I find it hard to believe that Yawke didn’t play at all because usually he shows up against Delgado and his team mates are clearly worn down at the end of games. Lou used to find minutes for dopey Paul Berwanger and pointless Tom Weadock and he had a full contingent of players. Whereas this team has no front court to speak of and what little it has doesn’t take off its warm ups. I don’t get it.

I hate to keep harping on the same thing but once again the officials were atrocious, mostly John Gaffney. It wasn’t just the free throw differential – Seton Hall shot twice as many as did St John’s in regulation, during which 40 minutes four St John’s players played about 130 and shot a single free throw between them. Of the other 12 three came on a single shot by Ponds and five others in the last six minutes (counting over time), and meanwhile Miles Powell and Kadeem Carrington scored more from the FT line than that by themselves. The real issue was the respect afford Angel Delgado, who if he fails to make it in the NBA, he should become a hit man, because he gets away with murder. He routinely travels. He routinely jumps over guys backs (the one time it was called was in over time with St John’s down three and he conveniently fouled Bashir Ahmed, which if anyone thought he was going to hit the front end of that one and one he wasn’t). He routinely gives players fore arm shivers. On one play he lowered his shoulder and knocked Tariq Owens into the third row; surprisingly Owens was not called for a foul and according to Mullin the refs told him that Owens had flopped, which if that was a flop the Titanic flopped when it got hit by the iceberg. On one loose ball under the basket he seemed to be punching Bashir Ahmed in the head in an attempt to recover possession. And most egregiously he routinely plants himself in the lane to the extent that I’m surprised he did not sprout roots. Before I stopped rewinding and timing him Delgado committed three three second violations – one of six seconds and one of seven seconds and one, unbelievably, of 11 seconds: that one was between 10:10 and 9:59 in the first half and you can check the video tape if you don’t believe me. I find it impossible to believe that stupid John Gaffney can see Ahmed set a phantom moving pick through a forest of players from the other side of the court but that he failed to notice a seven foot 250 pound guy standing under the basket for ten seconds at a time. If he’s wasn’t on the take he might as well have been.

The big news this week obviously was the revelation – and I use that term loosely, because it’s like saying that this week there was a revelation that water is damp – that various successful college basketball programs – and some unsuccessful ones – cheat. Some suspects are obvious: no one’s surprised for example that Kentucky cheats or LSU, they’re in the SEC, the only surprise there is that there are evidently some SEC programs that don’t cheat. The surprise is the blue bloods that were mentioned – not that they cheat but that they were mentioned: Duke and Mike Schrewshrenski, North Carolina and Roy Williams, Michigan State and Tom Izzo, even Villanova and classy Jay Wright. Jay Wright, imagine! To put that in perspective schools currently on NCAA probation include the Mississippi Valley State University men’s and women’s cross country teams, Lamar University men’s golf and the entire athletic program at Kalamazoo College. Meanwhile Syracuse was given two years probation for 20 years of violations and Louisville three for operating an on campus brothel.

Weirder still are the bad teams that cheat and still stink: it calls to mind Mike Jarvis paying Abe Keita. Case in point is rat faced Kevin Willard, who sold his soul for Isiah Whitehead and still has yet to have won an NCAA tournament game. Which in turn calls to mind Sir Richard Rich, whose perjury condemned Thomas More to the guillotine in exchange for which Rich was named attorney general of an obscure British protectorate: “Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?” Never mind Wales, but for New Jersey?

On the one hand it’s heartening that every one involved is so cynical that they can’t even be bothered to act surprised. (I am shocked — shocked — to find that gambling is going on in here.). Nearly every report I read and heard this weekend – except for that shameless whore Dick Vitale, who claimed on Twitter last week that Rick Pitino was an innocent set upon by disloyal staff – said essentially, yeah, everyone cheats and everyone knows that everyone cheats and it is what it is: that corruption is baked into the system. Which to a certain extent is true – college basketball has been beset by a variety of scandals going back to the fifties, some of it mundane (“Did I ever tell you about the points we were shaving up in Boston?”) to the sort of activities that led to Jack Molinas being assassinated in Las Vegas. But those things were always anomalies. Today the corruption in ubiquitous and mundane.

Over on ESPN resident intellectual Jay Bilas – let’s face it it’s not hard to be the smartest guy in the room if you’re in a room with Stephen A Smith and Tony Kornheiser – floated, as he always does this time of year, the idea of paying what he blithely terms student athletes. Let’s leave aside for the moment Bilas’s utter hypocrisy: he makes millions of dollars commentating on teenagers who he claims are being horribly exploited, which if as we are sometimes led to believe the NCAA is akin to slavery, that makes Jay Bilas the play by play guy for the diaspora. Leave aside that he played for dewk – as dirty a program as there is, Myron Piggie to the white courtesy telephone – benefiting from their cachet while simultaneously whitewashing (sic) their criminal behavior. Leave aside that he works for a network that makes billions dollars from that same corrupt enterprise, an enterprise that the network itself helped create through slavish shrill deafening hype, routinely lauding the exploits of known cheaters like John Calipari and hiring known cheaters like Mike Jarvis to glad hand on camera with criminals like Sonny Vaccaro. It’s really quite stunning when you think about it.

So anyway what Bilas seems to be saying is that there’s this giant corrupt criminal enterprise known as college basketball and the way to make it less corrupt is to let more people in on the corruption. To let a few more people wet their beaks as it were. That seems at once an absurd solution – you wouldn’t make robbing banks legal because people rob banks – and yet a logical one from a libertarian perspective: the way to eliminate common relatively harmless crimes like marijuana use and prostitution is to decriminalize those behaviors. The problem though is that the kids who are going to be wetting their beaks are allegedly attending university to learn how to behave in the world and lead happy productive lives. Teaching them that cheating gets rewarded seems inapposite to that, in a way that seeing Sean Miller and Rick Pitino in handcuffs might not be.

The other issue is logistics. Who gets paid? How much do they get paid? Do starters get paid more than walk ons? Is their a salary cap? Do all sports participate? Do women’s lacrosse players get the same stipend as Alabama football players? (“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be … denied the benefits of … any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”) And who ensures compliance, the same corrupt NCAA that currently oversees the morass that the solution is intended to ameliorate? And leaving that boondoggle aside, how would any of this stop a kid from accepting benefits above and beyond the mandated stipend? The answer is that it wouldn’t. The only benefit I see is that it would sweep the corruption back under the rug, which I don’t know maybe that’s where it belongs. And if a couple of kids lives get ruined along the way – like say Luther Wright or poor dumb Lenny Cooke – what’s that really when compared to important things like the integrity of the game.