This coming March the Orleans Casino in Las Vegas will host two men’s basketball post-season conference tournaments. Other casinos, including Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, have hosted men’s basketball games a stone’s throw from the slot machines and craps tables. All of that activity is OK if you are the NCAA. But if you are the undefeated Montclair State women’s hoops team, you need to hit the road, because the NCAA won’t let any postseason games be played in the State of New Jersey die to the pending lawsuit between the four major sports leagues and the NCAA against the State’s challenge for sports betting.
Collateral damage at its best, and the NCAA again at its petty worst. Who suffers? The undefeated Red Hawks, a school that helped rearrange the furniture for women’s athletics during their last great run in women’s hoops. Led by Carol Blazejowski, MSU helped put women’s sports on the map in the early days of Title IX, going to the first AIAW Final Four in 1978 and becoming the first women’s team ever to play in Madison Square Garden.
Let’s not forget that the law New Jersey is challenging is still the subject of what will be a long legal battle, and there is no legal gambling going on right now…or that like in Nevada, college games within state borders would be excluded. Also let’s not forget that there would not even be a way to bet on Montclair State women’s basketball if a profitable sports book existed in the States’ casinos and at their race tracks.
But when it comes to creating collateral damage, the NCAA is again at its best. Montclair goes 26-0, are No. 1 in their region and No. 5 in the country, but they will not get a chance, as student-athletes, to be rewarded for their success.
What makes the ban even more ridiculous is that if New Jersey wins its court battle and its gambling law stands, states will be lining up to follow them and start taking in the dollars that right now go to Nevada, or better yet, to illegal enterprises. Soon after rest assured, the major sports leagues will find ways to incorporate legal, regulated gambling into their marketing plans, and don’t be surprised to see the NCAA follow before too long. There are too many dollars at stake, once the federal ban is overturned, for sports leagues to go the other way. It works abroad, where professional sports wagering is OK, and it will be carefully brought in here after a while.
Now the professional leagues have not run from New Jersey despite their court challenge. The NFL will bring the Super Bowl to the State in 2014, the NBA and NHL will hold their drafts there as well in June. While arenas in Trenton and Newark and East Rutherford may be hit in the pocketbook by not hosting NCAA Regionals until the law changes, those places can fill their seats with other events. Montclair State? Rowan? Ramapo? Even Rutgers in sports like soccer and lacrosse? They might not lose revenue, but they lose a competitive edge that student-athletes worked, many times away from the limelight, to gain the right way. With hard work.
It is the worst kind of collateral damage, one that does not injure anyone who could ever be affected by the big dollars of gambling in any way…Just those who are innocent victims.
Now there is some great debate this week about the NCAA and whether it has outlived its usefulness as a governing body. That is not the issue here…the issue is whether the organization set up to govern intercollegiate sport is penalizing its most ardent followers for no reason other than geography. The answer is yes, and the cost is not dollars, it’s respect and hard work, two principles the governing body preaches to all who will listen.
Whose brand gets damaged? Montclair State? Certainly not. The NCAA? For sure. That’s a bet anyone could cash in on. Go Red Hawks.
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