National Collegiate Athletic Association
NCAA News Archive - 2000
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The NCAA News
Bill Benner, columnist
Indianapolis Star
"In the course of one year, about 1,000 cases where rules have been broken come before the (NCAA). The vast majority of those are reported by the institution involved, and not by NCAA snoops. Of those, more than 950 of the rulings are accepted without appeal and with minimal penalties. So now we're talking about 50 cases out of 335,000 student-athletes in which there is a dispute about the facts and the fairness of rulings.
"That's .0001492 percent. ...
"Now I'm not here to defend all the NCAA's rulings or even begin to explain all its rules. Some of them, quite frankly, don't make sense. But I do believe those numbers put the NCAA's mission into some kind of perspective. Which is that if it is in the continual process of conducting witchhunts, it's not bagging many witches."
Amateurism rules
Mike Jarvis, men's basketball coach
St. John's University (New York)
Portland Press Herald
"It's sinful and tragic. It shows an utter lack of concern for poor people. We are in danger of changing a very important part of America, which is the helping hand. The poor will be victimized again and will become poorer. There are a lot of very angry young men right now that are playing basketball in the NCAA."
Basketball issues
Mike Krzyzewski, men's basketball coach
Duke University
St. Petersburg Times
Discussing additional benefits for student-athletes:
"We should investigate any way where we can increase what is placed under the umbrella (of a scholarship). It's a different age. Isn't there some way we could give them something for (being an ambassador for their universities)? Is there any way we could protect them more in regard to insurance? We've never really looked at that as a group. They're much more than basketball players and we haven't been innovative enough to come up with ways under that umbrella to help them."
Jim Haney, executive director
National Association of Basketball Coaches
Washington Post
Discussing the need for the summer recruiting period in basketball:
"Where the top institutions in Division I basketball can use the high-school season to evaluate juniors, the mid- to lower-Division I institutions are evaluating seniors. Their first opportunity to evaluate prospects and see prospects in any kind of quantity is in the summer. When you talk about eliminating the summer, you're not really addressing the kids who are the focus of what 'the ills of summer' are. You're not addressing those institutions recruiting them. You're hurting the mid- to lower-Division I programs."
Dick Bennett, men's basketball coach
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Austin American-Statesman
Discussing the proliferation of lower seeds advancing to the Men's Final Four:
"The basketball world has shrunk. Kids from small towns are doing the things kids in big cities are doing. I remember when people used to say they didn't play basketball down in Texas or any other warm-weather states, but that's all changed. I think men's college basketball is the most competitive amateur sport in the world, and I don't know how that could be anything but wholesome."