The 2018 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Bracket Busters Might Be The NCAA
March Madness isn’t supposed to start until, well, March, but the revelation that a sports agency has been loaning tens of thousands of dollars to players and Arizona Coach Sean Miller was caught talking about offering a one-and-doner $100,000 means it’s started in February.
Dozens of players and teams are involved, including a lot of people’s favorites to win it all, Michigan State. How might this affect the Selection Committee come NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament bracket time? Are brackets already bused weeks before the tournament tosses up the ball for the first game?
According to this story on Yahoo! Sports, an agency called ASM Sports loaned several players tens of thousands of dollars (or sometimes paid family members) while they were in school in hopes those players would sign with that agency when turning pro. The agency even created a spreadsheet of the players detailing how much they were loaned at the time with notes on repayments.
Some players signed with the agency and some did not; one signed and then dumped them for another agency. (Shrewd move, if you ask me.)
This is sheer madness in February.
How the NCAA views this as infractions is anybody’s guess, and the big and urgent question is will it ban affected schools – which also include Duke and Kentucky – from the upcoming NCAA Tournament? Has their bubble burst bigger than a borderline team losing a critical game?
March Madness begins March 13 (appropriately enough, on the 13th) with the feed-in games. The Final Four is March 31-April 2 in San Antonio, Texas.
As as for Miller, well, giving $100,000 to a player who will only be at the school for one year – on a team that’s unlikely to advance past the Sweet 16 anyway – well that’s just madness.
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