So there we were. New Orleans, Louisiana, site of the first and second rounds of the 2010 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. It was sixty minutes before tip-off, so very few of the fans had made their way into the arena, but nonetheless the tension was palpable. The most devoted of the respective teams’ followers were making their way into their seats, carrying banners and posters, preparing for the impending game. But something was amiss.
Both teams were on the court, the players dressed in their traditional warm-up jerseys and various stretching equipment strewn along the court. A general passerby would make the correct assumption that each team was in the preparatory stage for the game, and yet one key ingredient was missing. All of the necessary equipment was available to all of the players, but there was not a basketball in sight. You can imagine what the scene portrayed, but needless to say the idle behavior of the players was less than appealing to watch, and significantly less than helpful for the players. The whole scene was reminiscent of outdoor time at a strictly run penitentiary.
This scene continued for a solid five minutes, until, at the precise stroke of fifty-five minutes before tip-off, the basketballs were released to the players. I stood, perplexed, on the sidelines, wondering why this turn of events had just occurred, until finally I realized the sad conclusion. It became obvious that somewhere, tucked within the voluminous encyclopedia-esque rulebook of the NCAA, there existed a policy that no basketballs were to be given to players until precisely that moment. My eyes immediately rolled back faster than that squirrelly Wal-Mart face guy in the commercials.
To the best of my knowledge, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, exists purely to promote the destruction of trees and the extended use of printing ink. No organization on the planet can match its ratio of guidelines to members. In a world where long newspaper articles are limited to blog posts, where phone calls are shortened to status messages, and where feature films have become digital shorts, the NCAA remains the only organization which still operates as if it is working toward some unreachable length minimum.
The greatest criticism of the NCAA is its propensity to over-regulate that which needs little or no regulation. I remember the story from a few years back when two teams were set to face each other in a football bowl game. Weeks before the game was to be played, the fans of one of the teams all got together to do something truly remarkable. As they found out earlier, a student-athlete from the opposing team had a father who was stationed overseas for military duty. This player had not seen his father in quite some time, and as such his father had yet to see the son play a football game for his collegiate team. As this was to be his final game at the university, the fans of the opposing team had raised money so that the boy’s father could fly in from the Middle East to see his son play in his final game. A touching story of patriotism and sportsmanship, right?
Wrong. The NCAA, in their enduring wisdom, nixed the whole plan, preventing the fans from allowing the gift to proceed. As the letter of their ridiculous law stated, the gift was deemed a payment in favor of the student-athlete, and thus was against the rules, as it would affect his amateur status. Upon reading that story, I knew it was a terrible decision. Upon telling it to my friends, they all knew that it was a terrible decision. Upon sitting next to me on my table, the water bottle to my right knows that this was a terrible decision. Of all the laws and regulations, of all the hundreds of thousands of pages written on NCAA procedure, one would think that there would exist a single line item in the rulebook for the use of common sense.
The longer I live, the more I struggle to understand how people can operate with such a deficiency in rationality. For the most part, I’ve kept my feelings hidden on the recent negotiations in Congress regarding health care legislation, yet I can’t help but fear that the medical industry is about to fall into the same trap that collegiate athletics has fallen prey to. Increased regulation and heightened monitoring rarely, if ever, lead to enhanced productivity. As we’ve seen many times over, it most often leads to robotic behavior and an environment void of common sense. Variability is good. Flexibility is good. A world where humans are given the freedom to make sound decisions is good. Let’s just hope a surgeon never has to wait around for five minutes to use his scalpel.
