NCAA faces potentially embarrassing scenario of under-investigation Kansas winning title
It is not fashionable to give Mark Emmert credit for anything these days, but let’s be clear about one thing: The man knows how to make an awkward moment look good on TV.
During Emmert’s tenure as NCAA president, he’s stood on the stage at the end of college basketball’s crown jewel event and handed a national championship trophy off to one coach his organization had penalized for cheating just a couple months earlier (Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun), another whose previous two schools had Final Four appearances wiped off the books (Kentucky’s John Calipari) and another whose program had benefited from a massive academic fraud scandal that kept athletes eligible through fake classes (North Carolina’s Roy Williams). No matter how ridiculous some of those men and their colleagues have made the NCAA look, Emmert is always there smiling and clapping for the cameras, offering absolutely no acknowledgement that everyone involved in that moment should be feeling at least a little bit of shame.
But as the current season of college basketball unfurls into March, it is becoming increasingly likely that the upper limit of Emmert’s ability to act oblivious on that stage will get tested like never before. Because amidst the chaos of a season where it once appeared that no team would separate itself as the clear No. 1, it just so happens that Kansas is now the program that can throw up a single digit in the air — even if it’s a middle finger.
In a year where the overall talent level is down and the quality of play is often inconsistent and horrid, Kansas is easily college basketball’s most bankable team. The eye test shows it. The analytics explain it. The schedule confirms it.
And at a moment in history when the NCAA’s credibility has rarely been more fragile, Kansas winning the title while both the program and coach Bill Self stand accused of massive rules violations would be nothing short of a nightmare for an organization that has never really followed through on its promise to get tough on cheaters.
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In a sense, the NCAA has been a little lucky since the FBI’s investigation into college basketball corruption became public on Sept. 27, 2017. Since that time, it has had national champions in Villanova and Virginia without a hint of scandal around either one.
