Grantland: A visit to New Orleans to watch college basketball fall grandly apart

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At every interview session, there is an NCAA drone who keeps order. Before every interview session, said drone explains that the coach will talk first and then there will be questions for … wait for it … the student-athletes. The players are no longer players. They are student-athletes. (One informed estimate taken during the first weekend of the tournament counted 15 individual references to "student athletes" in a single interview session.) In his epochal takedown of the NCAA in the Atlantic earlier this season, historian Taylor Branch brilliantly parsed the history of the phrase. Branch found that it had nothing to do with education. It was a term of art that the NCAA cooked up to keep the members of its (largely) unpaid workforce from being reclassified as employees by the various public institutions on behalf of which they labor. Branch wrote:

But the origins of the "student-athlete" lie not in a disinterested ideal but in a sophistic formulation designed, as the sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has written, to help the NCAA in its "fight against workmen's compensation insurance claims for injured football players."

This cheap, hidebound euphemism is now what the NCAA insists upon in place of the word "player." I'm telling you, these people never have been funnier.

In other words, this whole event has become at best an incompetent mummery of what it is alleged to be. In that context, we now turn to John Calipari, the coach of the best college basketball team in the country, and the only man to have been rendered a non-person twice in the official NCAA history of the Final Four. (The NCAA has vacated both two of Calipari's previous Final Four appearances, with Massachusetts and Memphis.) This time around, Calipari has been criticized for his pattern of using "one-and-done" players.

Another silly rule now forces players to spend a year in college before moving on to the NBA. (There really are only two options: "one-and-done" and "none-and-done." Anything more stringent would fall to the first player whose bagman was sharp enough to find a good lawyer.)

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