Opinion: FBI Probe Shows College Hoops for What It Is

"I think the public has finally accepted it for what it is. The athletes have; everyone has except the people in Indianapolis (at NCAA headquarters). They're the only ones that have no idea. They have to protect their brand by being pure, and they're not, they haven't been and they never will be."

It will be a popular thing this week to say there's a cloud over the NCAA tournament.

The FBI investigation into college basketball's underworld continues, now more than five months old. Careers and reputations already have been ruined, with more damning information likely coming to light. College administrators and conference commissioners are wringing their hands, trying to figure out how to bring the sport out of scandal.

But for me, the FBI investigation doesn't cast a pall over this week. Instead, it's lifted one.

For the first time, this is an NCAA tournament with no use for sanctimony, no dividing programs and coaches into white hats and blacks hats, no more pretending that we know who "does it the right way."

That fairy tale is over.

And you know what? Instead of worrying about the façade being demolished, let the truth set you free.

"I think the public has finally accepted it for what it is," said Sonny Vaccaro, the former shoe company executive and now prominent NCAA critic. "The athletes have; everyone has except the people in Indianapolis (at NCAA headquarters). They're the only ones that have no idea. They have to protect their brand by being pure, and they're not, they haven't been and they never will be."

If you're one of those fans who used to kick and scream about how it was actually your coach's personality or the architecture on the campus quad that made the difference in landing those McDonald's All-Americans from eight states away, please stand down.

If you blindly had faith that the Dear Old Alma Mater's compliance department was on top of every phone call your coach made, every agent who hovered around your players, how every unofficial visit was paid for - while being convinced that your rival cheated its brains out - just stop now.

If you've been clutching your pearls about the moral outrage of one-and-dones, or believe there's more inherent purity in how Duke built its roster than Kentucky or think it's better to have a sport bathed in the virtue of amateurism while millionaire coaches navigate a black market economy to prop up their careers, let this NCAA tournament be the one that awakens you to the idea there are no good guys or bad guys in college basketball.

It's not just fair, but probably prudent to look at everyone the same way now. The only material difference is whose assistant coaches happened to get caught on an FBI wiretap.

But the real villain is amateurism, an idea that has been waved around by the NCAA as if it were some form of religion carved into stone tablets on Mount Sinai. Even the Pac 12, which released a set of recommended changes for college sports this week, wouldn't touch the A-word. The irony, of course, is the NCAA is the only organization that still espouses amateurism. It owns it lock, stock and barrel, which means they have the power to change it however they want and still call it the same thing.

"The NCAA has always put themselves above everybody else's thought process in trying to change you to their religion, and their religion is amateurism," Vaccaro said. "This is the boiling point, and it's the first time the public and the athletes have adjusted to the changing world. But they haven't. They're still under the same gospel. Their religion is amateurism, and it isn't accepted by anybody anymore."

It should be obvious by now that even if you don't accept that every coach or every program in this NCAA tournament has operated outside the rulebook or that every campus is teeming with agents offering benefits to players, what was revealed in the FBI indictments is only a slice of what's actually going on in the real world.

That information, and subsequent reporting from Yahoo! Sports revealing an expense report ledger from Christian Dawkins, who worked for basketball agent Andy Miller, shows us that a lot of the things people said for years about cheating in college basketball just weren't true. No, it's not just a handful of guys in college basketball only because the NBA forced them there who are worth six figures (Brian Bowen was nobody's idea of a one-and-done).

No, it's not just future first-round picks and their families who get targeted by agents and runners. No, it's not just college basketball's second-class citizens who have to work the gray area; it's the bluebloods, too.

And we know that just from one FBI sting over a period of a few months that ensnared one shoe company and one sports agency. Can you imagine what a wider scope would reveal?

But if you accept that as the context for the sport of college basketball is actually about, it makes everything else a whole lot easier to take.

The worst part of college basketball has never been the corruption, the buying of players, the middlemen brokering deals, the steering of recruits or the shady AAU wheeler dealers. Rather, it's been the fan bases, college administrators and even some coaches who pretend that they're above it all, that it doesn't exist at their school, that they alone epitomize the purity of the amateur model while everybody else is engaged in savagery because someone got paid.

"The barrier has always been two sides - the sanctimonious people and those defending the ones who were being crucified, and that would never go away," Vaccaro said. "But I think we're seeing a change."

Hopefully the change starts this NCAA tournament, where it's finally OK to sit back and enjoy the games for what they really are, not what some misguided college presidents and NCAA officials want them to be.

"I think the public has finally accepted it for what it is. The athletes have; everyone has except the people in Indianapolis (at NCAA headquarters). They're the only ones that have no idea. They have to protect their brand by being pure, and they're not, they haven't been and they never will be."

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