NCAA Denies Exhibition Game to Raise Money for Florence Relief
The NCAA can generally be counted upon to be a moral lodestone, a magnetic south of sorts. Whichever way its moral compass points, you can confidently stride in the opposite direction, secure of the rightness of your course.
Case in point, the universities of North Carolina and South Carolina want to stage an exhibition basketball game to benefit relief efforts for Hurricane Florence.
It’s a day of fun for a great cause, rivals coming together as friends the same way the Boston police department once invited the NYPD to Beantown for a charity basketball game after 9/11.
But the NCAA threw the hammer down and said no.
The governing body’s excuse? Each school already has two exhibition games scheduled, and the sport’s grand poobahs won’t grant an exception for a third.
The schools didn’t want to give up either of their already scheduled exhibitions, which includes one public game that doesn’t count in the standings or statistics and another “secret” scrimmage game held in a closed gym with no spectators and no statistics released to the public.
Even Michael Jordan, a UNC alum and current majority owner of the Charlotte Hornets NBA team, backed the idea of the scrimmage, but His Airness isn’t on the NCAA’s board, so he doesn’t get a vote.
Jordan even carved out a stadium date at the Spectrum Center in downtown Charlotte to host the game on a (mostly) neutral site.
South Carolina’s exhibition is against Augusta University at home on Oct. 26.
North Carolina, meanwhile, takes on Mount Olive in its public exhibition.
While there is a point to be raised that an extra exhibition game may create an unfair advantage for the two schools as they get 40 extra minutes of what essentially amounts to the preseason to evaluate their talent at no risk in terms of ranking or March Madness consideration, the simple fact remains that this is a bureaucratic obstacle to doing real good for actual suffering people through sport.
As NBC Sports points out, what else are the schools supposed to do?
They can’t cancel pre-existing commitments just because something more important came up. The chance to play the big boys is a big moment for the small-school opponents in the public game, and the secret scrimmage is the best chance schools get to give players some run without some sportswriter offering an opinion that distracts from the potential developmental value of experimenting with a player role or a set of offensive plays.
And schools aren’t going to hold an exhibition slot open just in case there’s a natural or man-made disaster they have to respond to in time for the upcoming season.
It’s just the NCAA being needlessly bureaucratic and obtuse, exercising its pretend authority while earning a deserved reputation for looking the other way when real evil happens on its watch.
After all, there are three schools in the Big Ten that watched college sports’ governing body stand around with its hands in its pockets as the likes of Jerry Sandusky, Larry Nassar, and Richard Strauss did their dirty business at Penn State, Michigan State, and Ohio State, respectively.
Sorry, Carolina-based colleges. You’ll have to find another way to raise money for hurricane victims.
Maybe J.J. Watt can help. I hear he’s good at that sort of thing.
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