Every week, PowerMizzou.com publisher Gabe DeArmond answers questions from Tiger fans in the mailbag. This format allows for a more expansive answer than a message board post. Keep your eye out each week to submit your question for the mailbag or send them to powermizzou@gmail.com. On to this week's inquiries.
mexicojoe asks: Which do you think is more prevalent:Â College coaches/programs cheating to achieve success?Or College coaches/programs cheating to sustain success?
GD: This is a good question. To me, I think it's more common to cheat to get to the top than it is to cheat once you're on top. I don't want to accuse any specific coach or program with no evidence, but if you take the top coaches in the game, I think they cheat less now than they used to (I'm not going to say they don't cheat at all because that seems awfully naive these days, especially when we're talking about basketball). If you're a guy who's been to multiple Final Fours and won multiple national titles and you're coaching at one of the handful of best programs in the history of the game, do you have to cheat? Or do you just go to the top five kids in the country and say "You want to play here?" And then if they say no you go to the next five.
I'd compare this to steroids in baseball. Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa got the headlines. And, yeah, they cheated. But you know who else cheated? The guy who was hitting .235 in AAA ball and needed something just to get to the majors to get a chance at a Major League payday. Or the pitcher who was 4-8 with a 5.92 ERA who was trying not to get cut. I'd argue it was probably more common for the borderline guy trying to make it to take steroids than it was for the established star. That's what never made sense to me about Bonds. He was an all-time great and a Hall of Famer before any of us knew about steroids. But that wasn't enough for him. He had to be the greatest ever and hit more home runs than McGwire and Sosa because he had an ego that couldn't be controlled. He didn't need them. But a guy who is a AAAA player needs them to get to that next level.
So I think the big-time coaches still cheat because at this point, I think everybody cheats. But I think they probably do it less than they did before they were big-time coaches.
Behind_You asks: What can MLB do to boost attendance?
GD: Get rid of TV. And Twitter. And the Internet.
Baseball became the biggest sport in the country in a time when we didn't have any of that. And then it got passed down through generations. I was a baseball fan because my dad was and he was because his dad and so forth.
Now? The truth is, younger people don't have the time or the patience to sit and watch a three hour game. And that's not just baseball. My 21-year-old is a big sports fan. But it's pretty rare he sits down and watches an entire game (It might be a little more common now that he's of legal drinking age and he and his friends can do it with a case of beer). He'll check on it. But even when he's watching it, he's scrolling on his phone and glancing back and forth. And that's not a generational bitch fest. I do the same thing a lot of times. Our attention spans are shorter.
Also, baseball's biggest problem is that the games aren't a big deal. Every team has 162 of them. Why am I going to go out of my way to watch the one on a Tuesday night in June? Football is a huge deal. Every game is a referendum on your season. The NBA and NHL playoffs are going on and every game is life or death. Only from mid-June to mid-August is baseball the biggest sport going on at the time. So a few more people will go to games then. But I read this week that attendance has dropped seven years in a row and last year it was 10 million below what it was in 2012. I'm not sure it's turning around. So maybe the owners will have to quit paying dudes $35 million a year at some point.
Jay0864 asks: Just wondering what EXACTLY does the NCAA do? It gets tons of money to do what?? I know this comes across somewhat as a joke but truly if someone asked me what the NCAA does I wouldn't have a clue what to tell them. Also, if Arizona gets away pretty much unscathed outside of Miller losing his job, will that be the last piece of evidence to completely nullify any power, relevance and reputation the NCAA actually has, if it even has any left?
GD: I want to say I know. But I don't. So I googled it. Here's the NCAA's mission statement:
"Our purpose is to govern competition in a fair, safe, equitable and sportsmanlike manner, and to integrate intercollegiate athletics into higher education so that the educational experience of the student-athlete is paramount."
So, does that answer your question? Because I don't really know what it means.
Basically, the NCAA is a governing body formed of all the schools. It's like a club. The NFL is the teams in the league. Same with the NCAA. It's just a group of schools. It's a larger version of the Big 12 or the SEC or the MAC. The point is to oversee everything and, I guess, enforce some set of rules and standards. It's a non-profit organization that seems to make a lot of money. But what does it do? Hell, I don't know. Depends on the day.
As far a Arizona goes, if Sean Miller continues to coach (and Will Wade for that matter), there are no rules and nobody should follow them and frankly I can't argue you should care about college basketball. At that point, it's just pro wrestling. Feel free to watch if you want, but I'd find it hard to get all that invested in the results. I have to believe that Miller and Wade are going to pay. I have to believe it because if I don't believe it I just have to give up all hope and quit paying attention. And I don't want to do that yet. So I'm going to believe there will be consequences until there are not.
