Monday, March 17, 2008

The story that never leaks

Cross posted on redshirtfootball.blogspot.com, where I'll be blogging most of March.

Ah, March Madness is back. The time of year when pens are once again relegated to second class material and good, old fashioned pencils (and most importantly, erasers) get brought out of the closet to help fill out those NCAA brackets.

One of the interesting things to me that just dawned on me this year, the selection committee has no leaks. It seems like almost everything these days gets leaked to the media before it actually happens. We've known the #1 draft pick the last 10 years or so, I almost always know which bowl game my Alma mater is playing in prior to the announcement, all trades get leaked and circle the Internet a dozen times, and so on and so forth. But no one ever knows those bubble teams. No one even posts the #1 seeds on the Internet at 2:30. It's all speculation right up until 6 pm.

It pretty amazing they've been able to keep everything that quiet for this many years. You'd think that surely someone is texting their best bud who's a alum that they are in or out. They won't let anyone near this selection committee and when questioned, they never mention any names of any schools about who the last team in or out was and why. You know what that means, Congress will launch a full scale investigation on that soon. Let's see, Virginia Tech was left out, so was Arizona State, Illinois State? What about that four bubble teams that got in all had a Wildcat as a mascot (Arizona, Kentucky, Villanova and Kansas State), sounds like conspiracy to me. That's several eligible senators right there to lead the charge against the NCAA. We have Congress investigating the MLB and NFL, the NCAA seems like a likely next target. I'm sure in a couple months, they'll be investigating the shady move of the Seattle Supersonics to Oklahoma City. It's not like our country has any real problems for them to solve, they might as well spend 100% of their time tearing down the establishment of American sport. It's obvious that it has done well on its own and needs governmental intervention to lead to its downfall, that may not occur if left to govern itself. They've done well at deconstructing the American government so that it operates nothing like it was designed to, we are stuck in a war we can not win nor get out of easily, we have a huge debt problem, immigration is a mess, obviously, these are not the people the commissioners of these leagues want investigating their sports. If they can't run a country, why stretch themselves further and try to investigate and poke into privately owned and operated sports leagues and screw those up too?

Anyway, I completely digressed there, all that to say, I think it makes it all the more special and unique that the seeds don't get leaked to the media beforehand. Maybe some of the other sports could get a clue and tighten down their security or the media could respect the information is does get and not publish it until due time. I don't see the media changing its evil ways though, better work on battening down the hatches at league headquarters.