The Devil in Me Wants LSU to Win NCAA Title

The devil in me wants Louisiana State to win the NCAA Tournament.

My tiny shoulder Satan envisions the Tigers cutting down nets in Minneapolis with three FBI men holding the ladder.

My crypt keeper is also fine with each LSU player getting to possess the NCAA trophy for a day, like they do with the Stanley Cup, before giving it back to the engraver to finish the “E” and “D” on VACATED.

LSU winning would be a perfect ending to the most polluted college basketball season on record—and that’s saying a lot.

I want LSU just so basketball has to stick its nose once more into the dark stuff, in the hope it finally leads to some light stuff.

Yeah, I know, right?

Don’t get me wrong: my bright side is telling me the NCAA Tournament is the greatest three-week spurt in sports and also to make sure I have plenty of stick pretzels.

Mr. Sunshine is going to fill out a bracket, join an illegal office pool and watch talented amateurs risk their financial futures for the benefit of, well, me.

No matter how it ends one thing is for sure: we’ll all need a hot shower.

The dirty secret about college basketball is not really a secret. It remains a sport filled with shining moments—but also with termites.

There is corruption in college football, of course, but also far more moving parts—11 starters on offense and defense.

In basketball you only need to buy off two players to reach promised-land pay dirt, or get to two players to shave five points.

A single referee, maybe with a mortgage and child support to pay, can also turn on a dime.

This is not what Dick Vitale wants you to hear this week, but it’s the truth.

Corruption has always been baked into basketball’s cake.

The term “Cinderella” was coined in 1950 for the miracle run of City College of New York, the only school win the NCAA and NIT in the same season.

You know what happened next: CCNY was implicated soon after in the biggest point-shaving scandal in history.

You’d think a sport would learn from its mistakes, but it hasn’t. The money is too big, the stakes are too high and the fruit hangs too low. College basketball is, simply, too easy to influence.

The 2019 tournament culminates the dirtiest, low-down season in college basketball history. The entire sport, it seems, is tipping off in circuit court.

It is only fitting that LSU should win it all—and there’s a chance it can happen.

Baton Rouge is the poster program for an NCAA in crisis. Its coach, Will Wade, remains suspended and not acting like an innocent man after being allegedly caught on tape transcript describing the sport’s ugliest secrets.

The Tigers won the SEC regular season title before falling to Florida in the SEC Tournament.

LSU earned a No. 3 seeding in the East Regional and will face No. 14 Yale on Thursday in Jacksonville.

This is a dream pairing given Yale was one of the school’s implicated in last week’s college admissions scandal.

Tony Benford has taken over as LSU’s interim coach as the Tigers become my macabre choice to make a deep tournament run.

“We lost coach Wade, but we’re going to stay together,” LSU star Javonte Smart, a part of this investigatory mess, said after being cleared to play in the SEC Tournament. “Hopefully win the whole thing?”

Wouldn’t that be something?

Scandal in the NCAAs is not new, it’s just intensified with more shoe money to throw around.

The NCAA record book is filled with asterisks and abdications. Many of the greatest coaches in NCAA history have been tainted and shadowed; Adolph Rupp by the point-shaving scandal and John Wooden by Sam Gilbert.

Did you know Rick Pitino is the only coach to have officially taken three different teams to the Final Four—Providence, Kentucky and Louisville?

Pitino, of course, also took Louisville to the edge of a cliff and left his profession in disgrace.

He was also the coach of the only team forced to vacate a national title (Louisville, 2013).

John Calipari has also led three different schools to the Final Four, but two of those (Memphis and Massachusetts) were later forced to vacate.

The greatest championship game moment in history—North Carolina State’s upset of Houston in 1983—was undercut when Jim Valvano later got fired and NC State went on NCAA probation.

Somehow, though, every year, all that poisons the sport is put aside for three weeks as we suspend reality and enjoy the circus.

There should be something wrong about that but who has time for that now, what with the play-in games starting Tuesday in Dayton?