TRANSITIONS

               The start of a new year usually is associated with new beginnings, but this year’s turn smacks more of endings. We’re in a time of transition in each of our three “major” professional sports—basketball, football and baseball.

               The turn in basketball came on New Year’s Day with the death at age 77 of David Stern, his game’s most consequential individual who didn’t dribble or shoot. By that time Stern had been retired as the National Basketball Association’s commissioner for five years, but the changes he wrought outlasted his 30-year term (1984-2014) and will continue to do so. They extend geographically as well as temporally, touching just about all parts of the globe.

               To measure how much the NBA changed businesswise during Stern’s tenure, a look at one team— the Chicago Bulls— should suffice. The team changed hands with little notice several times in the dozen years before 1985, when a group headed by the real estate man Jerry Reinsdorf bought controlling interest for a reported $16 million. Today, says Forbes magazine, it’s worth $2.9 billion, with Reinsdorf still in charge. The league’s overall revenues and TV-rights values have increased apace during that period.

               Stern had help in achieving those gains from the likes of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and, now, Lebron James, stars with both charisma and supernatural physical skills, but the New York lawyer secured for them the platform on which to display their talents and the mechanisms to spread their acclaim. During the 1980s he literally gave away NBA TV rights abroad to hook the rest of the world on the league and its personalities, an effort that culminated in the U.S. “Dream Team” at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, which captured the world’s attention like few other sporting entities ever. Now revenues flow from many lands and boys there—as well as girls tuned into the WNBA that Stern helped start and nurtured-- go to bed dreaming hoops dreams. Some of them—such as Giannis Antetokounmpo and Luka Doncic— live out those dreams nightly on their sport’s biggest stages, to the benefit of all.

The switch in football was made clear when the New England Patriots were bumped from the first round of the National Football League playoffs at home by the underdog Tennessee Titans.  The Pats’ season-ending 12-5 won-lost record was good by most measures, but the loss had an ominous ring because it might have marked the last game with the team of Tom Brady, the quarterback who has anchored its success.

The loss to the Titans smarted especially because that team’s coach, Mike Vrabel, used a wrinkle in the rules regarding intentional penalties to milk about two minutes off the clock in the late going while nursing a one-point lead. Steaming on the sidelines while the ploy unfolded was the Pats’ coach Bill Belichick, who’d first exploited it.  Vrabel is a one-time Belichick pupil, having played for eight seasons with the Pats. The league is catching up to wily Bill in many ways.

The Pats’ NFL domination has included six Super Bowl victories between 2001 and 2018, three other trips to pro football’s annual Big Game and 18 straight seasons of winning records. It’s astonishing because the league’s worst-goes-first draft system is designed to promoted parity and the Pats have been draft bottom feeders for just about all of their title run.  The team has thrived by making useful parts out of other team’s discards. That knack seems to have waned of late, leaving it with roster gaps that might not be filled easily.

Brady, a new free agent, says he has “more to prove” and probably will keep playing, but he doesn’t say where. In any case he’ll be 43 years old next season and ain’t the man he used to be (who is?).  Odds are it’ll be a while before a new “Titletown” emerges.

William Safire said it took three examples to support a column theme, and my third is my favorite team, the Chicago Cubs. They’re headed for transition after a five-year run that transformed them from chumps to champs with their 2016 World Series victory but petered out in a near-.500 (84-78) finish last year. Team boss Theo Epstein vowed to shuffle the deck after that one.  That came a season or two late, in my opinion; unused to success, the Cubs celebrated far too long after their trophy triumph.

The ’16 Cubs were a young team, full of players 25 years old or younger, and Chicago fans had visions of a dynasty. That they’ve been disappointed in this isn’t new for their city; the hockey Blackhawks won the 1961 Stanley cup when Bobby Hull was 22 years old and Stan Mikita was 20 but never repeated while those two greats played, and the 1985 football champion Bears were a young bunch that met a similar fate. The Cubs may rise again but it will be with a different cast.

What moves the team make will depend in large part on a soon-to-come arbitrator’s ruling on whether their biggest star and juiciest trade bait, Kris Bryant, will be eligible for free agency after this season or the next one. If the Cubs win they’ll control him for two more seasons and his trade value will be highest. He’s rumored to be on the block because his performance has slacked off since his ’16 MVP season and he might not be worth the enormous contract he’ll demand when he’s free to move. The Cubs will have many mouths to feed over the next few years and don’t figure to be able to satisfy all of them.

Trading Bryant would be just part of the Cubs’ new course. The team already has cast off its championship manager, Joe Maddon, and two of its ’16 cogs, shortstop Addison Russell and utility man Ben Zobrist. Other trade candidates include the young slugger Kyle Schwarber, a natural-born designated hitter, the agile catcher Willson Contreras (hope not), and the once-promising outfielder Albert Almora. We fans root for our teams no matter who wears their uniforms, but any changes to our cast of ’16 heroes will be tough to take. Whatever, none of them ever will have to buy themselves a drink in Chicago.

IMPUNITY

               We writers like to play with words and ones I’ve been playing with of late stem from “seam.” According to the dictionary “seamy” means sordid or disreputable, while a seam is the line along which two pieces of fabric are joined. Thus, “seamless” means an easy or invisible meld.

               Both apply to the season of college basketball that’s now playing out in the wake of the two-year FBI investigation and later trials that revealed under-the-table payments of up to six figures to recruits at a large handful of schools by the shoe company Adidas, funneled through various intermediaries. That’s seamy, huh?

               Alas, if ever an investigation promised much but yielded little it was this one. The Feebs went deep-sea fishing but landed minnows, the only people finally charged being college assistant coaches, would-be player agents and mid-level Adidas functionaries. This was consistent with past NCAA probes of misdeeds by the schools it oversees, which rarely touch the sports’ leaders. One coaching big-timer—Louisville’s Rick Pitino—lost his job as a result of the revelations, but his really was a sort of lifetime-achievement penalty, culminating a long trail of professional and personal slime.

               Two other top coaches-- Kansas’s Bill Self and Arizona’s Sean Miller—were implicated in the probe through intercepted texts and wiretapped telephone conversations, but neither was charged or, even, called as a witness. That’s a head-scratcher if there ever was one. Miller was suspended by his school but quickly reinstated, Self slipped through unscathed except, maybe, reputation-wise.  Both continue to float seamlessly to victory on the floor and in recruiting, Kansas ranking 3rd nationally in the latest Associated Press poll and Arizona 25th with a mostly freshman cast. The wicked flourish like green bay trees, especially ones with winning records, right?

               At this point one legitimately might ask just what those involved in the Adidas matter did wrong. Giving money to prospective college students is prohibited only to athletes governed by NCAA rules, so what laws were shown to have been violated? Moreover, crimes require victims and it was hard to discern any here, all the participants in the schemes seemingly benefitting.

 To answer those questions the cases’ prosecutors, with judicial approval, had to turn the law on its ear, first by giving criminal force to the NCAA rule book and then by declaring the colleges involved to have been victims of fraud, even though it was their coffers that would be filled by the young basketballers recruited with Adidas dollars. Never raised as an issue were the billions of dollars that directly flow from shoe companies, plural, to college athletics departments in return for their using (and, thus, advertising) their brands. For instance, the U. of Kansas is in the early years of a 14-year, $196 million contract calling for its teams to use Adidas gear exclusively.  It’s no wonder that it and the other schools involved in the cases were referred to as “Adidas schools.”

The biggest individual beneficiaries of shoe-company largess are the head coaches of big-time college basketball and football teams, many of whom individually clear seven-figure annual sums from the deals.  Those payments are part of what turns public employees such as Self and Miller into plutocrats, Self’s annual income reported at about $4 million and Miller’s at almost $3 million. According to CNNMoney, at most NCAA “power-conference” schools the salaries of head basketball and football coaches exceed the dollar value of all the athletics scholarship the institutions award. It’s such things that spread a smell of hypocrisy and exploitation over college sports generally.

But while it might be excessive to chant “lock him up” in the presence of Self or Miller, “kick him out” might be apt. Each violated the first rule of the sort of conspiracy in which they were involved, namely “don’t get caught.”  The NCAA rule on the subject is clear: a “head coach is presumed to be responsible for the actions of all staff members who report, directly or indirectly, to the head coach.”  That rule has been honored mostly in the breach because the people who occupy the job are careful to preserve deniability by placing others between themselves and any improper acts within their regimes. That was pretty much blown in the trials stemming from the investigation.

In Miller’s case, one of his assistants, Emmanuel “Book” Richardson, was sentenced to three months in prison and fined for accepting $20,000 for steering players toward an agent, an arm of the larger plot. Richardson said after sentencing that he had “no knowledge” of Miller paying players or attempting to do so, but wiretapped evidence was presented in which he and the agent Christian Dawkins discussed Miller having “bought” former Arizona star Deandre Ayton and “taking care of” Rawle Alkins, another UA player. Other testimony had Ayton’s family receiving $10,000 a month during his year in Tucson.

Self’s involvement came through most clearly in the testimony of T. J. Gassnola, an Adidas consultant who was sentenced to probation for his role in the schemes after admitting he made payments to several sought-after recruits for agreeing to attend Kansas, one totaling $90,000. Gassnola said Self not only acknowledged the efforts but also encouraged it.

One exchange put into evidence had Gassnola texting Self about a prospect he was paying, with Self asking “We good?” and Gassnola answering “Always. That’s light work.” Later, Gassnola texted Self bragging about keeping him and Kansas supplied with future NBA lottery picks. Self responded, “That’s how it works... at UNC and Duke.”

The trials are just about over but the NCAA has stepped in by announcing investigations of its own into the matter, with both Kansas and Arizona among the targets. Self and Miller have vehemently denied any wrongdoing and their schools are supporting them. In the past, about the most individual head coaches have paid when their schools were caught in major rules violations were a few games’ suspensions, on top of such institutional wrist-slaps as victory forfeits, scholarship reductions and post-season bans. To do more might be bad for business and that’s the last thing the NCAA wants.