There’s a guy in this business whom I really like. He’s a few years younger than me, I met him here in Austin when he was still in school, he does an awesome job, and if he’s reading this, I’m flattered. I do, though, want to use him as an example for something.
Earlier this week—maybe it was even last night—I saw a post from him nostalgizing those Oregon–Stanford matchups from the early 2010s. My impression was that they were included in his mourning as the Pac-12 fades into the sepia. To me, having started following the sport around 2004 or 2005, Stanford football was a flash in the pan. To him—again, a few years younger than me—it was a perennial power. This is the difference four or five years can make. Joe wrote it last week: When we start following a sport, we think of its organization and its power structure *at that moment* as the sport’s default, as the sport’s eternal history. To me, Stanford was always bad. To others, Stanford was always good. Joe used this to talk about how little this round of realignment will ultimately matter to the next generation of college football fan, how natural it will seem to them that Oregon is in a league with Maryland. I would like to use it to talk about how we can help the NIT.
The NIT suffers right now from one or two generations having come of age as college basketball fans at a time when the NIT was and is a punchline. It’s not a good situation, and it’s not necessarily getting better. Covid was a kick in the balls. The tournament no longer bears any presence in Madison Square Garden. No location is set yet for the 2025 NIT Final Four. Players are treating it like a bowl game, and that’s not a good thing for competition like it would have been twenty years ago. Fans are, in a lot of cases, not showing up.
There’s an opportunity in this.
To those who came of college basketball fanhood age in 1970 or before, the NIT once meant something, just as to those who came of college football fanhood age in 2011, Stanford–Oregon once meant something. The implication here is that if we can get the NIT to mean something more once again, it won’t stop meaning something more. There’s a lot of inertia in these things, and unlike the NIT did in 1970 or the Pac-12 does today, the NIT doesn’t actually have any competitors. It’s owned and run by its former competition, the NCAA, which means that the better the NIT does, the better things are for the organization which would be its rival.
How do we get it to mean something more?
The biggest thing with this is packing Hinkle Fieldhouse in March for the 2024 NIT Final Four. This is the pressure point. Every NIT demonstrates that by the time you get to its championship, you have two of the thirty or forty best college basketball teams in the country, and they’re playing hard. Especially if there is any sort of energy from the crowd. Some players might be sitting out. Some teams might have even opted out. But the guys on the court are playing basketball, and they’re playing it hard, having gotten to this stage in their careers—again, playing contributing roles for one of the thirty or forty best collegiate teams in the sport—by doing this very thing, loving the game and respecting it enough to play it with passion. The NIT’s issue is not the product on the court. If it were, nobody would be watching college basketball at all, and few would have watched a single Miami Heat game in this spring’s NBA Playoffs. The NIT’s primary issue right now is the crowd in the stands. People will turn on the NIT Final Four. They always do. It’s not a ratings bonanza, but people tune in. That’s what happens when you put college basketball on ESPN in primetime at the peak of college basketball interest. What we need those viewers to see is a crowd that cares very much about the action on the court.
This is part of why I’m so excited about the tournament concluding in Indianapolis this year. No state likes basketball more than Indiana, and no city likes hosting sporting events more than Indiana’s capital. What’s more, Indiana is still, West Coast additions and all, right around the center of Big Ten country, and it’s within driving distance for a lot of Big East and SEC schools. If Wisconsin were to make it again like they did this year, if Xavier were to make it again like they did in 2022, if Penn State made it like in 2018, if Valpo made it like in 2016…could we sell out Hinkle Fieldhouse? It’s only got a 9,100-person capacity.
Whether we sell out Hinkle or not, putting a large enough and interested enough crowd into those seats, so that a casual television viewer recognizes the energy of a big college basketball game, is exactly what the NIT needs. Doing that right before another expected round of bidding to host the Final Four and right before the NCAA takes bids on its own media rights package (which includes the NIT) only adds urgency. But the overall purpose of this, the means by which such a performance by us NIT fans could support our beloved tournament for years to come, is to show the newest college basketball fans that the NIT is not a punchline. The 2024 NIT means just as much as 1970’s did, and it means just as much as a certain game in Palo Alto in mid-November of 2011, when the Ducks and the Cardinal entered with a combined one loss.
It’s a little simplistic. It’s a little Leslie Knope-ian in its optimism. But Freddy Spaghetti ended up on that stage at the end of Season 2. We’ve got a little more than seven months to get nine thousand people in the doors of a basketball cathedral for two nights of college hoops. Meditate on that when you wake up each morning.
Northwestern Made Scandal T-Shirts
Family reunions, bachelor parties, occasion-less benders…we’ve all made t-shirts to commemorate a specific moment in our lives. Northwestern has evidently made some in honor of their coach getting fired a few weeks before the season started due to a hazing scandal.
The shirts say “Cats Against the World” on them and feature the number 51, Pat Fitzgerald’s number when he was a linebacker. They were worn by multiple members of the football staff yesterday at Northwestern’s first open-door practice of the preseason.
There are multiple explanations here. The first is that Northwestern’s academic standards are not as much to blame for the football team’s lack of recent success as previously thought. The second is that these guys really think they can get a buyout if they get themselves fired now rather than waiting for the new hire to do it in December. I can think of no third, but I didn’t know that Fitzgerald has a son who’s a freshman on the team?? Learned that in the Adam Rittenberg reporting on the shirts. Do you think his hazing was any different from the rest of the freshmen’s?
Joe Kelly Crushed It Last Night
Another great outing by our guy Joe Kelly, who pitched a scoreless eighth in the Dodgers’ 2–0 win over the Diamondbacks. Two strikeouts, one walk, 100 miles per hour, millions inspired to be better men and women than we were yesterday. It’s a service, really.
This Is Fun
Phil Mickelson Likes Gambling
Wait.
Phil Mickelson Liked* Gambling
There are Phil Mickelson gambling numbers going around right now, and they’re impressive, if that’s the right word. Whether that’s the right word or not probably depends on your feelings about sports gambling. My impression is that some people really, really like it; some find it fun on special occasions; some feel neutral; some felt neutral but have been turned off by the predatory nature of some of the industry’s promotions and/or the ubiquity of its advertising in the sporting world; and some find it a bane of society. Five camps, most people probably split time between a few of them. Each of the five have their points, but as usual, the poles are where it gets weird.
I would imagine that the first camp thinks it’s awesome that Mickelson reportedly bet more than one billion dollars and lost roughly one hundred million dollars over the last thirty years. I would imagine the fifth thinks it’s shameful. I would imagine the middle three probably find it simply eye-popping. That is a lot of money to spend on a hobby.
The more interesting part of this is where this report is coming from. Perhaps you’ve heard of Billy Walters.
Billy Walters, profiled here by ESPN in 2015, has been labeled by some as the greatest sports bettor in history. The story goes that Walters is so good at this that he eventually built a network of intermediaries to bet on his behalf, pulling lines a point or more in his preferred direction with large bets before capitalizing with even larger bets. The story goes that Walters is so good, and such a high roller, that even if these intermediaries weren’t sometimes intentional losers on Walters’s behalf, he’d still need them, the reason being that most sportsbooks won’t accept action from a guy who routinely wins. A rotating cast of runners, then, is reportedly how Walters did it.
Walters recently spent time in prison after being convicted of insider trading on Dean Foods stock. Carl Icahn was mentioned in the trial. So was Phil Mickelson. The allegations held, among other things, that Mickelson owed gambling debts to Walters, and that he used insider trading tips from Walters to earn some of the money which would go on to relieve that debt. If you remember talk five to ten years ago about Phil Mickelson and insider trading, this was that case. Mickelson eventually paid roughly one million dollars in fines and forfeited profits to the Securities & Exchange Commission for all of that, but he didn’t go to prison. Walters did go to prison. He’s not happy about it.
Since 2018, Walters has maintained that had Mickelson testified, rather than pleading the Fifth, Walters would have been saved from the conviction. In his upcoming book, he shares more details about the golfer. Those details are an allegation that he and Mickelson worked together in their gambling from 2008 until 2014, Mickelson having higher limits than Walters at offshore books (because he lost more than Walters) and Walters presumably helping Mickelson lose less? The return benefit in the partnership isn’t clear from reporting on the book’s excerpts, but that seems like a reasonable guess. Regardless, Walters alleges that Mickelson bet a lot of money and lost a lot of money, and that he knows because he worked with him while he did it.
Also.
Walters alleges that Mickelson tried to bet $400,000 on the U.S. team to win the 2012 Ryder Cup, the one where they choked on the final day like no Ryder Cup team has ever choked. It’s unclear if the bet was successfully placed.
After the shock and intrigue wear off, it feels sad. Here are these two super-rich guys, one rich through gambling and the other using his riches to feed his gambling. One of them, despite being among the best golfers in the world, was unable to get his addiction in check and ended up involved in at least two and possibly three or more legal cases. One of them ended up in prison for an insider trading conviction and is now using part of his book to snipe at his old buddy. It’s sad old rich man stuff. Fall of Rome vibes, but with individual human lives.
Mickelson has said a few times in recent years that he no longer gambles, which seems good. The fact that’s the last part of this story, though, an afterthought within it, is sad. It feels like we’re learning Bob Huggins’s drinking stats.
Fargo Defeats Iowa
A Little League named after our dog (and/or the city of Fargo, North Dakota—one can never be sure) is into the Midwest Region Championship, taking down Johnston, Iowa today to advance to a rematch with Sioux Falls for the right to go to the Little League World Series. We turned the last few innings on for the pup, and she fell right asleep. No concerns at all about all those runs the Fargo bullpen gave up in the sixth inning.
Oh, So They’re Blaming a Man.
U.S. Soccer is evidently expected to fire head women’s coach Vlatko Andonovski, the implication being that coaching has something to do with a team’s failures when said team falls flat on its face on the biggest stage. This is the first I’m hearing of this concept, and it makes me wonder the same thing you are wondering: If Vlatko Andonovski was a woman, would they fire her??
If men are accountable for our actions, we’re facing a much more treacherous landscape. What’s next? Is someone going to say Adam made his own choice to eat the apple when he too was warned very directly by his benevolent creator that eating it would lead to certain death?????
