The Super Bowl host-city curse lives on. In the 2010-11 season, the Super Bowl was coming to Dallas, and Tony Romo broke his collarbone, the team finished 6-10, and their new stadium wasn’t quite ready yet. In 2011-12, the Super Bowl was coming to Indianapolis, and during that season, Peyton Manning was sidelined with a neck injury, the Colts finished 2-14, and Adam Sandler released Jack and Jill. (The curse works in mysterious ways.) In 2012-13, the Super Bowl is on its way to New Orleans, and the NFL has dropped the hammer on the Saints for their involvement in Bountygate — a full year suspension for coach Sean Payton, an eight-game suspension for general manager Mickey Loomis, a six-game suspension for assistant coach Joe Vitt, a $500,000 fine, the loss of second-round draft picks in 2012 and 2013, and player suspensions likely to follow soon. (Former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams was suspended indefinitely.) Payton & Co. are making one last-ditch effort to beg for mercy by filing an appeal with Commissioner Roger Goodell. (Yes, they are strenuously objecting to their suspensions.)
Plenty has already been said about the New Orleans Saints' bounty scandal and the severity of the punishments, but I want to step back and give you a quick Sports Law 101 look at what gives the commissioner the right to suspend the Bountygaters, and what rights the Bountygaters have to challenge the suspensions.
With the first weekend of the March Madness behind us, those who want to punch Austin Rivers in the face (what did he ever do to you?) or otherwise obsessively hate Duke are still celebrating what has been called “the biggest upset in college basketball history,” “a stunner,” “a monumental choke,” and “a dreary Disneyfied inconsequence that features all the bigotries of century-old pulp fiction and none of the romance.” (Actually, that last one may have been about John Carter.)
But I want to focus on a different storyline. Because there’s a legal angle behind every sports story — and because I’m not ready to stop looking at college basketball lists — I’ve put together a power ranking of teams based on NCAA violations and run-ins with the law. I’m talking major NCAA infractions, not violations for supplying chocolate milk to student-athletes. (I recognize that some believe that every NCAA rule is the equivalent of a ban on providing chocolate milk to athletes, but rules are rules, and I’ll pick that fight another day.)
As you’ll see, 43 out of the 68 teams that were in the tournament this year have committed major violations. That’s not a particularly surprising number given that it’s a relatively inbred group, with coaches jumping from school to school, often leaving a trail of NCAA violations in their wake. I was actually able to connect all 68 of the head coaches to either Rick Pitino (the prince of conduct unbecoming) or Jerry Tarkanian (the godfather of NCAA violations) in seven steps or fewer (and all but three in six steps or fewer). For example, Scott Nagy, the head coach at South Dakota State, was a graduate assistant with Lou Henson at Illinois; Tony Stubblefield was an assistant to Henson at New Mexico State; Stubblefield was an assistant coach with Mick Cronin at Cincinnati; and Cronin was an assistant with Pitino at Louisville. OK, to make it easier, here’s a fancy chart that diagrams all the connections.
Here's how the basketball programs stack up. Instead of ranking them by number, I've grouped schools by pop culture good guys and bad guys, starting with the innocent, then moving down to the very, very, very guilty.
It looks like David Stern picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue. After a lengthy and contentious lockout, a brief antitrust skirmish, and the cancellation of 16 regular season games, the owners and the NBPA finally agreed to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement. The months of bad publicity quickly washed away, and then Stern stepped right into the Chris Paul nightmare, vetoing a three-team trade that would have sent the inevitably-soon-to-be-ex-Hornet Paul to the Lakers, Pau Gasol to the Rockets, and a solid core of players — Luis Scola, Kevin Martin, Lamar Odom, and Goran Dragic — to the league-owned Hornets. Meanwhile, Stern and the Hornets continue to search for a trading partner for Paul.
Well, that was fun. After nearly 150 days of lawsuits, mediations, intramural flag football games with Kevin Durant, exhibition basketball games in Rucker Park with Kevin Durant, exhibition basketball games in Oklahoma City with Kevin Durant, and late-night settlement talks without Kevin Durant, we finally got a deal that will end the NBA lockout and get the season started on Christmas Day. Yes, the lockout cost us 240 regular season games, but we all knew it could have been much worse.
With the worst behind us, let’s talk a little bit about what happened, why it happened, and what it means.
We’re in yet another NBA-less week of November, and the labor talks between the players and owners took an ugly turn last week when the NBPA dissolved its union and players filed antitrust suits. With a lawsuit already pending in New York between the owners and the players, we have now officially moved from the sometimes-contentious collective bargaining phase to always-contentious litigation period.
And, instead of battling over BRI and salary-cap exceptions, the players and owners, represented by some of the best litigators and antitrust lawyers in the country, will now battle over labor exemptions and antitrust violations. In other words, as some have put it, basketball fans are about to enter a “nuclear winter,” the “doomsday scenario,” and “a foul, hilarious, and surprisingly heartwarming holiday experience that utilizes its eye-popping technology to take gross-out humor to a new level.” (That last one may refer to A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.)
I’m not here to talk about why things broke down. Instead, I want to talk about how we put them back together — how do we go from no union, no collective bargaining talks, and antitrust suits to an NBA season? It will be a bumpy road, and we might not get there in time to save the season, but here are some of the answers to the key questions that might arise over the next several weeks of this fight.
