The sound you probably didn’t hear last month was Tim Floyd waving goodbye to College Basketball. By accepting a job on the bench of the New Orleans Hornets, Floyd made it clear that he was done with college basketball, at least for now. Things unraveled very quickly for the coach of the Trojans basketball team that advance to the Sweet-16 in last year’s edition of March Madness. Just three months later, without saying a word beyond his terse one paragraph resignation letter to USC Athletic Director Mike Garrett, the embattled coach indirectly fired a shot across the bow of the late Myles Brand and his gang at the NCAA.  Hard on the heels of last year’s pathetic performance by Indiana’s Kelvin Sampson, who despite mounting evidence of his unwillingness to comply with NCAA rules, refused to release the death-grip he had on his job without first tossing loyal assistants, staffers and even players under the team bus, Floyd simply refused to fight. You could argue that Floyd saw the writing on the wall and turtled, realizing that he has very little support among his peers in College basketball and that no one at USC including his A.D. is going to stick their neck out for someone who might jeopardize Pete Carroll’s juggernaut. You could say that given the choice between quit now or get publicly tarred and feathered later, Floyd chose the easier route.  You could say that…but you’d be wrong.

When Floyd arrived on the scene of big-time college basketball in 1994 with a team at Iowa State that would go on to set a school record for victories and a #5 seed in the Tourney in his first year, he was described in the local Ames, Iowa paper as “combining school-boy good looks with a fierce determination to win”. Floyd’s erstwhile good looks are long gone, having been replaced in recent years with a perma-scowl of such psychopathic intensity that a ref once “T’d” Floyd for looking at him. But the determination to win remained and Floyd finally figured out something that everyone figures out who hangs around on the inside of college hoops long enough, you can play by the rules or you can win, but you can’t do both!

 “Whoaaa there big fella”, you say.  “Are you saying that Mike Cryzewski, Roy Williams and…and…and…” Go on, try to come up with another name that you would categorically state has not broken the rules to win. The point is that even if the Dukes and UNCs of the world don’t pay players to play for them they certainly are receiving “benefits” not available to players at South East Missouri State or Lafayette. Have you seen the way these teams travel, or the facilities the players train in and live in? And for the coaches of the other 300+ teams in Division 1 not in the class of the Top 10 programs, a more overt type of cheating is the only solution.  In 2003, SMU coach Dave Bliss, a coach who had worked in College basketball for over 20 years and was regarded as a sterling example of coaching integrity, publicly admitted that he paid players to play and to avoid detection had tried to implicate a player as a drug dealer to explain his lifestyle while in college.  Oh by the way, that player happened to have been recently murdered by a teammate. What could possibly explain this level of “scumbaggery” by a seemingly upstanding coach? The system created by the NCAA.

It is the highest form of hypocrisy for the NCAA to accuse any coach of unethical behavior. For the NCAA and its member institutions to benefit to the tune of 100s of millions of dollars in TV and licensed product revenue from the efforts of unpaid players and then impose a set of rules on these athletes so draconian and pervasive as to make them all but incomprehensible and ensure a poverty level existence for these players away from the comfort of their campuses, is immoral. That ethics and the NCAA sound as compatible as Jessica Simpson and a MENSA convention, is hard to argue. But everyone except the players has such a vested interest in the continuity of the situation that no one breathes a word about it. Not the media that generates sales and ratings, not the coaches and administrators that make a fine living of the avails of the game and certainly not the ticking heart of the goliath, the pencil-pushing evil geniuses at the NCAA.

So, Tim Floyd was left with no choice at all. He went home knowing that he would return down the road on the bench of some NBA team. As a throw-back, discipline oriented coach more at home in another age of college basketball, Floyd never looked comfortable stalking the sidelines of this modern game.  A newer mindset exists among these athletes who are now surrounded by handlers and acolytes from the time they lace up their shoes in high school. “I’m going to get mine” is the mantra of these players, but it is the NCAA that has created a world in which playing for school pride and for the love of the game is not only gone but are ideals more retro than the David Thompson shirts this unpaid workforce sport on the blacktop.