COMMENTARY : NCAA Tones Down Final Four

The National Collegiate Athletic Association made another of its watershed decisions recently when it moved to take the sizzle and glitz out of its men’s basketball tournament.

It was one of the more curious business decisions imaginable when you stop to consider the source. The NCAA has decided, with respect to staging Final Four tournaments, there is such a thing as too much money.

That this conclusion would be reached by a de facto cartel that controls the flow of money into and out of collegiate sports is incredible in and of itself and stands, for the moment as the textbook case of the enlightened teacher who asks students to disregard what the instructor does and do only what the teacher says.

The NCAA, you’ll recall, is the organization that signed network TV contracts for rights to broadcast its basketball tournaments for sums in excess of a billion (that’s billion with a ‘B’) dollars.

Now the NCAA is telling cities that successfully bid for Final Four tournaments that they will no longer be allowed to generate local funding for the events, or to use game tickets in fund-raising activities.

The upshot is that with all its TV money, the NCAA is concerned that local Final Four organizing committees might be smudging the integrity of the hallowed student-athlete myth. With its new vision, the future of Final Fours is one that will be less festive and more generic than ever before.

“We’ve been looking into it for a long time,” Bill Hancock, the NCAA’s director of the Division I men’s basketball championship said Thursday, “ever since we started hearing from hosts about how much money they needed to raise to put on a Final Four. We’re concerned with it developing into more of a commercial look than what we wanted. We don’t want cities battling to see which one can outdo the other one for elaborate parties and all of that.

“We want the focus to be on the games.”

Sounds good. The focus should be on the games, where two of the past three champions (Kansas and Nevada-Las Vegas) have found themselves prohibited by the NCAA from defending their championships for various rules violations.

It makes sense that people get serious about what a business college basketball has become, because at the bottom of a Final Four championship is a very soft cushion filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars for the winning institution. Money, that evil unit of exchange, is the temptation that can eventually be blamed for most of the rules violations that occur in the NCAA.

Distributing increasingly larger payoffs to the winners doesn’t seem to be as big a concern to the NCAA as are the parties and associated high-cost hijinks that local host groups throw for themselves at the Final Four.

If less money will be thrown around and fewer fat-cat businesses will be involved in the procurement of tickets, so much the better, but how much intrusion into local sponsorship is too much?

“I can see some of it,” said Bob Walsh, the Seattle promoter who brought two Final Fours to Seattle in the 80s (1984 and ‘89), “but after a certain point, what you do is work against the spirit of civic pride that makes these events so great. You run the risk of ending up with a product that isn’t as good, doesn’t run as efficiently and leaves people asking a lot of questions.”

Walsh knows all about this stuff. To a degree, his entrepreneurial skills caused many of the problems, as viewed by the NCAA.

“You could say, in a way, the Seattle Final Four in 1984 was the one event that got it headed in a direction the NCAA has now decided to go away from,” said University of Washington’s lame duck athletic director Milo “Mike” Lude. “Back then, with Bob Walsh and everyone involved, we probably did it too well, if you want to look at it that way. That was the one they all talked about, I mean the staging, the local support and all the trappings that were around it.”

Since then, each city has tried in one way or another to outdo the one before it, standard operating procedure in Super Bowls, baseball and basketball all-star games and other events. Now, the NCAA has its own year-round employees who work on nothing but the men’s Final Four.

The new plans will be implemented in stages through the 1991 Final Four at Indianapolis, followed by those in ’92 at Minneapolis, ’93 at New Orleans and ’94 at Charlotte. Plans are for the full list of scaled-back local involvement to be in place for the 1995 Final Four in Seattle.

If they can close the deal.

“I think both sides are ready to put it on the front burner, to get it accomplished,” said Hancock. “We’ve discussed it, we’ve exchanged correspondence and now we need to get it done.”

Part of the difficulty is that the NCAA is asking for extremely reduced room rates at the two prime hotels. The standard complement of Final Four sponsors parties will be virtually nonexistent, there will be no tickets exchanged for sponsorships and virtually everything will be coordinated through the NCAA.

“The part I don’t like,” said Walsh, “is that leaving out the local people leaves out the people who care most about doing a good job. The NCAA doesn’t have any vested interest in making Seattle look good; it just wants to sell a lot of tickets and control the operation.”

Even that will be made more difficult by one of the new rules. No advertising will be allowed on tickets, which will eliminate Ticketmaster as a distribution source. Ticketmaster has a contract that sells the back side of its tickets.

“Apparently, all the tickets have to be sold either at the university or at the Kingdome,” said Walsh. “That doesn’t make it very convenient if you happen to live in Portland. I suppose they can try to sell 25,000 or 30,000 tickets back and forth through the mail, but I wouldn’t want to sort that out.”

That would be a lot of money floating through the U.S. Postal Service, but when it’s going to the NCAA, it can never be too much.