This is the scariest Romeo Langford story you'll ever read.

Don't worry, amateur (?) hoops obsessives -- the author delivers "good news" in the sense that he believes Romeo will be attending Indiana University. I'm the only crackpot insisting on knowing what his major will be.

Why Romeo Langford Appears to be Going to Indiana + Senior Year Mix Tape, by Mike Schumann (The Daily Hoosier)

But back to that April visit to Bloomington. It is really one of three things: (1) part of the decision process, (2) a confirmatory visit, or (3) they are making the trip to tell the staff that they are going elsewhere. Which of these, after all this time, seems the most likely to you?

Rather, this passage is the terrifying part.

Tim Langford also stated that the family would like to make the announcement “out in the community“, perhaps with the mayor of New Albany (an IU graduate) involved.

If you'll excuse me, it's time for a shower.

I'd hate to see Langford sully his stellar reputation by indulging the mayor in what would amount to being co-opted as a re-election campaign prop.

Don't do, Romeo.

As an aside, I'd pick Vandy. As Bluegill dreamed the other day, Romeo could go to Vanderbilt, get an education and then play his way through the top-tier Europe leagues.

R.I.P. Connie Hawkins -- and a look at Roger's labor theory of basketball value.

I'm annoyed at having missed the news of Cornelius (Connie) Hawkins' death earlier in October.

The story of this Hall of Famer's life recalls an earlier time of college basketball corruption, one that had nothing to do with Hawkins, but nonetheless resulted in his blackballing. Then it was gambling, now it's pretend amateurism. The two eras cannot be compared in terms of money.

First a remembrance, followed by the repeat of an old column explaining why an inherent hypocrisy prevents me from enjoying college basketball, though in truth I seldom watch any games of any sort these days, pro or otherwise.

Connie Hawkins, New York City playground legend and Hoops Hall of Famer, dead at 75, by Frank Isola (New York Daily News)

Connie Hawkins, the Brooklyn playground legend who rose from the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant to become a four-time NBA All-Star and gain induction into the basketball Hall of Fame, died on Friday the Phoenix Suns announced.

Hawkins was 75.

Nicknamed “The Hawk”, Hawkins was an athletic, offensive force who made a name for himself with his graceful and acrobatic moves long before anyone had ever heard of Julius “Dr. J” Erving and Michael Jordan.

"Someone said if I didn't break them (the laws of gravity), I was slow to obey them," Hawkins once told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In this household, Rick Pitino's fall from grace was greeted with yawns. In 2011, this column appeared in the chain newspaper, and in 2014 I liberated it from behind the Hanson-Fried Pay Wall.

In our fast-moving world of ephemeral meaninglessness, some of the topical references have aged better than others, but the gist remains precisely the same: When it comes to the artful fiction of student athlete amateurism amid rampant, monopolistic and profiteering hypocrisy, college basketball is tops.

---

A labor theory of basketball value.

Numerous sources agree that on average, Americans spend at least four hours a day watching television, and although three decades of competitive beer drinking have atrophied my basic math skills, I’m fully capable of calculating this amount to a weekly total of 28 hours and a yearly tally of 1,456, give or take a TV evangelist’s sermon or three.

In truth, it’s probably a lot more than that, and speaking personally, I can’t fathom it. Wasting one’s life watching television makes less sense than squandering valuable agitation time asleep. Both are better done when dead.

Reading and writing, or staring passively at someone else’s creative output, assuming “reality” TV can be “creative”?

Walking and biking, or another numbing episode of Two and a Half Men?

I’d rather mow grass or even put up hay bales than subject myself to Glee, American Idol or any show about comic book criminal forensics, and if refraining from these vapid intrusions, and avoiding the even more disgusting commercials accompanying them, means I’m missing out on a shared “cultural” experience, that’s fine by me. I’ll listen to Duke Ellington instead.

However, exceptions prove the rule. While spending nowhere close to 28 hours a week staring at the tube, I enjoy selected sporting events – a few baseball games in summer, and National Basketball Association (NBA) contests.

‘Round here, the merest mention of my preference for the NBA usually is enough to incite anguished howls from those with rooting interests in universities that many rabid fans have never visited, and couldn’t locate on a map even if map reading were a widely shared skill in Christina Aguilera’s America.

In my admittedly obtuse and distended world, colleges and universities are places where students go for an education, the overall contempt for which severely punishes our American battered work force in a time of increased global competitiveness.

Conversely, America’s (and recently, the world’s) finest basketball players are paid to play in the NBA, which functions vaguely as a market economy, with laborers remunerated in a manner somewhat commensurate with the wealth they assist in creating.

In the NBA, it’s all about the money – and refreshingly, not a single person involved ever bothers denying it.

In American college basketball, it’s also all about the money – and alarmingly, almost every person involved constantly denies it.

---

As products competing for the entertainment dollar, sporting voyeurism in both the NBA and college hoops is a paying proposition. Fans pay to watch athletes play, and make no mistake: At both levels, without the presence of athletes out there actually playing basketball, no one would ever pay to attend. Remember this whenever college or pro basketball’s “cult of the coach” rears its pompous, idiotic head, because there have been no recorded instances of fans tithing for the privilege of watching Bob Knight or Phil Jackson bark instructions to an empty court.

Given that basketball players are the means of generating profit from nothing, a significant proportion of the money generated by NBA players comes back to them in the form or salaries and endorsements, and that’s as it should be, even if it took until recent times to rightly end the sort of artificially maintained monopoly/cartel at the professional level that merrily and deleteriously persists in college basketball to this precise moment.

In short, while the NBA is far from perfect, at least it’s free of hypocrisy.

---

Meanwhile, in college basketball, a strikingly small percentage of the money generated by the players comes back to the players, not as pay, but in the form of scholarships and grants. Before Cards or Cats fans begin waving this bogus “free ride” statistic in my face, recall that NCAA Division One basketball players generate billions of dollars of revenue.

Yes, the players are lightly “paid” with wholesale-priced scholarships, representing what amounts to sweatshop wages in proportionate terms, as well as being “rewarded” with the opportunity to work more often than study. All of it is hypocritical and exploitative, and the system as currently constituted is to the detriment of higher education, as Murray Sperber concludes in his classic study, “Beer and Circus."

In the book, Sperber (who the iconic Knight understandably detests) charges that Big Time Universities knowingly entice students not with bang-for-the-buck learning, but with the siren’s lure of party culture and upper echelon NCAA athletics, hence the term “Beer and Circus,” which consciously echoes ancient Rome. Distracted by parties and ballgames, students hopefully fail to notice that their educational institutions fail to provide them a quality undergraduate education … and tuition never decreases.

In a nutshell, that’s why I can no longer watch college basketball. The sham is too much for this hardened cynic, even if every once in a while a school like Butler comes along to encourage us to giddily swallow the bait and get all touchy-feely about the alleged triumphs of amateurism, but wishing doesn’t make it so.

To maintain the populace’s preference for the fiction of student athlete amateurism amid the rampant, monopolistic and profiteering hypocrisy, why not institute a program of delayed gratification?

Take a percentage of the revenue generated annually by NCAA basketball (just think of the advertising monies generated by March Madness alone) and use it to pay the players according to an agreed upon wage scale -- but deferred, not until they graduate, or failing graduation, when they reach a certain age.

Until then, how ‘bout them Heat?

The coaches could pay H-O-R-S-E instead: "NCAA Players Should Strike at the Final Four."

Photo credit: Forbes.

They're schools first, and sports programs second. Perhaps the single point uniting Democrats and Republicans is a shared tendency to ignore this fact.

That's why I'm obliged to continue reminding you.

NCAA Players Should Strike at the Final Four, by Dave Zirin and Etan Thomas (The Nation)

They have the power to force a change, but only if they refuse to be pawns in someone else’s game.

 ... One common argument against paying these athletes is that the cost of their tuition and room and board is already covered. But NCAA is a billion (with a b) dollar annual industry. The idea that players should just be grateful for what they get is in line with the contention that workers in a multi-national corporation’s sweatshop should be grateful to earn pennies for their labor. Free market proponents argue that those workers are better off because they have been given the “opportunity” to make those pennies, but that doesn’t change the reality of exploitation. That’s what’s going on in the NCAA. The NCAA sits on a cash cow, a Scrooge McDuck-type gold mine, and they are very happy with the system working the exact way they designed it to work ...

 ... Whenever the topic of paying college athletes is brought up today, forecasts of the death of college sports flood the airwaves. Yet the only thing that will destroy intercollegiate athletics is continuation of the current system, a system without a moral center that careens from one scandal to the next and is rooted in rank exploitation. This system will either be wrecked by its current minders or remade by the players themselves.

The NCAA is not going to change anything if they are not compelled, just as the NBA and MLB weren’t going to change anything back in the day without the push of people like Oscar Robertson and Curt Flood. The players have the power to force a change, but only if they refuse to be pawns in someone else’s game.

"A billion dollar sports enterprise where the athletes aren't paid a penny."

The video is from 2015, but since the story is repeated each year, the relevance has no shelf life. Last year 'round this time, I was stunned to learn that ...

John Calipari is far more refreshingly transparent than Jeff Gahan.

In 2016, there's a new book for papa to read: Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, by Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss.

Does the NCAA exploit student-athletes? by Nick Romeo (Boston Globe)

... Nocera and Strauss quote a wide range of economists and attorneys who agree that the NCAA functions as an economic cartel by colluding to artificially suppress wages for workers. The phrase “student-athlete” was a legal fiction concocted in the 1950s to avoid paying worker’s compensation to the widow of a football player who died on the field. In 2014, football players at Northwestern went on strike, noting that they regularly worked more than 50 hours per week on sports. One economic analysis suggests that a free-market competition between schools to recruit men’s football and basketball players would result in natural wages between $100,000 and $300,000 per year.

Nocera is a heroic figure -- and there'll be lots of reading time these next few weeks.

From John Oliver's 2015 video.

R.I.P. Malone and Dawkins, the "two original prophets of justice about the sham amateurism of NCAA basketball."

There was a time when I regularly won bar bets with this question: "Who are the only three NBA players to turn pro out of high school?"

Yes, it was a very long time ago.

Usually they'd get two of three; Moses Malone and Darryl Dawkins, eulogized below. The name of the third is contained therein, and you'll have to read Zirin's thoughtful article to learn it.

Two passage: First the lead, then an excellent point.

The Prophets: On the Conjoined Legacies of Moses Malone and ‘Chocolate Thunder’, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

Following both the first week of the NFL regular season and a historic US Open tennis finals, it’s understandable why one would not want to read a column about death. But it is difficult to think of little else after the sudden passing of NBA legend Moses Malone, whose end at the age of 60 comes just two weeks after fellow center and Philadelphia 76ers alumnus Darryl Dawkins died at 58. One of Dawkins’s most famous maxims–and the man known as “Chocolate Thunder” had many–was, “When everything is said and done, there is nothing left to do or say.” With all due respect, I disagree. When it comes to the linked legacy of Dawkins and Malone, there is still a great deal to say.

Here's the backboard-shattering slam dunk.

But Malone and Dawkins of course share something else besides their uncommon abilities to connect with others. They are also the two original prophets of justice about the sham amateurism of NCAA basketball. Long before the rest of us had figured it out, long before it was of a fashion to point aghast at college sports, long before coaches made multimillion-dollar salaries, long before the NCAA signed multibillion-dollar contracts with cable networks—hell, long before there was such a thing as cable—these two men saw the worth and value of their own labor and they refused to be exploited.

John Calipari is far more refreshingly transparent than Jeff Gahan.

Meme from John Oliver's video. Follow the SB Nation link to watch it.

Great opening from the New York Post's Phil Mushnick.

The refreshing transparency of education-shunning Kentucky

Finally, after all these years, we have an NCAA Tournament favorite we can root for without moral compromise, a team so steeped in unconditional, conspicuous integrity that right-headed folks can cheer as one. Go tell it on the mountain!

Ladies and gentlemen, sports fans of all demographic ages, Nike jersey and sneaker sizes, your University of Kentucky Wildcats!

Finally, a team without false collegiate pretense, a team that plays on courts stripped of scholastic varnish. Finally, a team fronted by a major university that knows we know that this team now annually has the same relationship to college as pigeons do to stone soldiers standing in town squares.

"This whole system seems fundamentally flawed," says John Oliver, and of course he's right. It is, and that's why Mushnick's snark is gospel. In turn, that's why for the first time in 25 years, I'm rooting for a team in this year's tournament: UK.

Who better than Calipari to achieve immortality by recording an undefeated championship season for the first time since IU's sainted Bob Knight did it during the Ford administration? By leveraging a dishonest system, Calipari is rendered scrupulously honest. It's the system you crave, so how can anyone among you begrudge him working it to the maximum degree?

Go Wildcats. Not that I'll waste any time watching games.

John Oliver went all in on NCAA for shameful March Madness commercialism, by Michael Katz (SB Nation)

On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver set his premium cable warpath on March Madness. Oliver ~destroys~ the NCAA for insisting college players are not employees while the tournament rakes in so much cash.

"All this makes it even harder to swallow when some coaches like Clemson's Dabo Swinney, a man who makes over $3 million a year, insists that his players not get paid."

Previously at NAC:

Finally tackling "the hypocrisy at the root of the big-time college sports system."

REWIND: A labor theory of basketball value.

Down with the NCAA? Sounds wonderful to me.

Weekend reading update: College sports reform, J. Edgar Hoover and hypocrisy.

REWIND: A labor theory of basketball value.

In 2011, this column appeared in the newspaper, and today, I'm liberating it from behind the Hanson Pay Wall. In our fast-moving world of ephemeral meaninglessness, some of the topical references have aged better than others, but the gist remains precisely the same: When it comes to the artful fiction of student athlete amateurism amid rampant, monopolistic and profiteering hypocrisy, college basketball is tops.

---

A labor theory of basketball value.

Numerous sources agree that on average, Americans spend at least four hours a day watching television, and although three decades of competitive beer drinking have atrophied my basic math skills, I’m fully capable of calculating this amount to a weekly total of 28 hours and a yearly tally of 1,456, give or take a TV evangelist’s sermon or three.

In truth, it’s probably a lot more than that, and speaking personally, I can’t fathom it. Wasting one’s life watching television makes less sense than squandering valuable agitation time asleep. Both are better done when dead.

Reading and writing, or staring passively at someone else’s creative output, assuming “reality” TV can be “creative”?

Walking and biking, or another numbing episode of Two and a Half Men?

I’d rather mow grass or even put up hay bales than subject myself to Glee, American Idol or any show about comic book criminal forensics, and if refraining from these vapid intrusions, and avoiding the even more disgusting commercials accompanying them, means I’m missing out on a shared “cultural” experience, that’s fine by me. I’ll listen to Duke Ellington instead.

However, exceptions prove the rule. While spending nowhere close to 28 hours a week staring at the tube, I enjoy selected sporting events – a few baseball games in summer, and National Basketball Association (NBA) contests.

‘Round here, the merest mention of my preference for the NBA usually is enough to incite anguished howls from those with rooting interests in universities that many rabid fans have never visited, and couldn’t locate on a map even if map reading were a widely shared skill in Christina Aguilera’s America.

In my admittedly obtuse and distended world, colleges and universities are places where students go for an education, the overall contempt for which severely punishes our American battered work force in a time of increased global competitiveness.

Conversely, America’s (and recently, the world’s) finest basketball players are paid to play in the NBA, which functions vaguely as a market economy, with laborers remunerated in a manner somewhat commensurate with the wealth they assist in creating.

In the NBA, it’s all about the money – and refreshingly, not a single person involved ever bothers denying it.

In American college basketball, it’s also all about the money – and alarmingly, almost every person involved constantly denies it.

---

As products competing for the entertainment dollar, sporting voyeurism in both the NBA and college hoops is a paying proposition. Fans pay to watch athletes play, and make no mistake: At both levels, without the presence of athletes out there actually playing basketball, no one would ever pay to attend. Remember this whenever college or pro basketball’s “cult of the coach” rears its pompous, idiotic head, because there have been no recorded instances of fans tithing for the privilege of watching Bob Knight or Phil Jackson bark instructions to an empty court.

Given that basketball players are the means of generating profit from nothing, a significant proportion of the money generated by NBA players comes back to them in the form or salaries and endorsements, and that’s as it should be, even if it took until recent times to rightly end the sort of artificially maintained monopoly/cartel at the professional level that merrily and deleteriously persists in college basketball to this precise moment.

In short, while the NBA is far from perfect, at least it’s free of hypocrisy.

---

Meanwhile, in college basketball, a strikingly small percentage of the money generated by the players comes back to the players, not as pay, but in the form of scholarships and grants. Before Cards or Cats fans begin waving this bogus “free ride” statistic in my face, recall that NCAA Division One basketball players generate billions of dollars of revenue.

Yes, the players are lightly “paid” with wholesale-priced scholarships, representing what amounts to sweatshop wages in proportionate terms, as well as being “rewarded” with the opportunity to work more often than study. All of it is hypocritical and exploitative, and the system as currently constituted is to the detriment of higher education, as Murray Sperber concludes in his classic study, “Beer and Circus."

In the book, Sperber (who the iconic Knight understandably detests) charges that Big Time Universities knowingly entice students not with bang-for-the-buck learning, but with the siren’s lure of party culture and upper echelon NCAA athletics, hence the term “Beer and Circus,” which consciously echoes ancient Rome. Distracted by parties and ballgames, students hopefully fail to notice that their educational institutions fail to provide them a quality undergraduate education … and tuition never decreases.

In a nutshell, that’s why I can no longer watch college basketball. The sham is too much for this hardened cynic, even if every once in a while a school like Butler comes along to encourage us to giddily swallow the bait and get all touchy-feely about the alleged triumphs of amateurism, but wishing doesn’t make it so.

To maintain the populace’s preference for the fiction of student athlete amateurism amid the rampant, monopolistic and profiteering hypocrisy, why not institute a program of delayed gratification?

Take a percentage of the revenue generated annually by NCAA basketball (just think of the advertising monies generated by March Madness alone) and use it to pay the players according to an agreed upon wage scale -- but deferred, not until they graduate, or failing graduation, when they reach a certain age.

Until then, how ‘bout them Heat?

ON THE AVENUES: 27 is just a number.

ON THE AVENUES: 27 is just a number.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Earlier this week, the University of Louisville men’s basketball team won the 2013 NCAA tournament title. It is the school’s first championship since 1986, and the third one overall.

I began pondering: How long has it been since 1986?

In 1986, the city of Louisville still was several years away from its first craft brewery, and there wasn’t a Sportstime Pizza yet. Scoreboard Liquors still operated on West Spring, and Doug England hadn’t been mayor, not even once. Back then, it truly was a different world.

I still followed the college game in 1986, although the ties previously binding me to childhood tribal loyalties gradually were being loosened as the rampant hypocrisies of amateur sports became increasingly evident to me, amid mounting daily cynicism pertaining to most things American.

Ronald Reagan was president, for chrissakes, and Ray-Gun ruined the eighties hereabouts, just as Margaret Thatcher did in the United Kingdom. In more ways than one, dementia is our collective legacy.

---

To be perfectly candid, I remember almost nothing of the triumphant 1986 U of L tournament run except that the title game against Duke was quite close, “Never Nervous” Pervis Ellison was a freshman, and I was extremely drunk at my Sam’s Tavern stomping ground during the final -- but of course, this may have been any night between 1979 and, say, last week -- give or take a venue or two, and an evolving selection of adult beverages in between. The difference was a local team winning.

Somehow the following college basketball season (1986-87) remains a more memorable period for me, probably because Indiana University won the championship in 1987. Moreover, defending champion Louisville suffered through one of the worst campaigns ever waged following a title, finishing only 18-14 and failing to qualify for the so-called Big Dance.

(It pains me highly to market-speak a cliché in this context; I’m sorry, Mr. Mencken).

As the 1987 regular season wound down, I was only weeks away from embarking on my second grand journey to Europe, and my friend TR unexpectedly scored gratis tickets to the Metro Conference tournament at Freedom Hall in Louisville. U of L was matched against its then arch-rival Memphis State, and given the poor record recorded by the Cardinals during the regular season, the home team would have to win the Metro Tournament outright to qualify for the NCAA bracket.

A digression: Memories can be funny things, indeed. I recall that day at Freedom Hall as warm and spring-like, although it seems unlikely so early in March. Conversely, IU’s victory in the final game, three or more weeks later, strikes me as having occurred on a cold and icy night with bad roads, with only a handful of us at Lanesville’s K & H, watching on television and drinking beer I’d rather not mention aloud.

Louisville began badly against Memphis State in the Metro Conference final, and the game never got any better. In the second half, with the Cardinals consistently trailing by more than twenty points, the building rapidly began hemorrhaging people. In the closing moments, with both benches long since emptied and a pall as wide as the Ohio River settling over the steadily diminishing faithful, I glanced around our end zone seats and noticed we were among the last attendees remaining anywhere near our vicinity.

Mercifully, the humiliation on the court was about to end when suddenly I became aware of a disturbance behind me. Violent sounds were echoing off the concrete wall, far up the vastness. It sounded almost like a banshee.

Turning to look, an earthier tableau abruptly was revealed. Seated on the very last row, a man apparently afflicted with sudden onset swill poisoning was projectile vomiting in a disgusting scene fully reminiscent of a certain Monty Python film.

Who could forget such a scene?

Mr. Creosote’s visceral reaction to a three-touchdown loss (in basketball) was perhaps the very best summary of a lousy, wasted year for the returning champs. We promptly returned home, where I consumed a six-pack of Heineken Dark in short order, alone in my room, reading a travel book about Italy, and dreaming about better days to come.

In the aftermath of Louisville’s win on Monday, I’m wondering: Did those days ever arrive?

---

Don’t worry, because I’m not about to embark on one of my frequent screeds denouncing the corruption of major college sports, or ramble about how we’re the only country in the world to befoul education with athletics (and vice versa), or dismiss the whole “sports fan” phenomenon as the pervasive waste of precious time it undoubtedly is.

Rather, it’s about those elusive better days.

I’m guessing they actually did arrive, and to once again quote Bob Dylan, “I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now,” but along with better days in selected contexts have come inevitable changes in others, among the latter my steady, perhaps inexorable drift away from youthful pursuits, like actually caring about what happens in college basketball.

Many of my friends still do, and that’s fine. To me, it’s a topic for ruminating about personal consciousness, and how it changes and (sometimes) evolves. Interests and even obsessions come and go, and at some point, one is spotted scratching his head and asking: Why is it this way, and not some other way?

That’s the point when you reach for a beer. After all, some constants never change at all.

Ware's place as a cog in the NCAA money machine.

I understand not many hoops junkie readers will want to think about this, but it doesn't mean you should ignore it.

Will Ware be stuck with the bill?, by David Sirota (Salon)

Louisville sophomore Kevin Ware’s injury today in the Midwest Regional finals of the NCAA tournament will likely be remembered alongside Joe Theismann’s career-ender as one of the most tragically gruesome in sports history. But that’s not the only tragic and gruesome part of this episode, because unlike Theismann, who was working under a guaranteed contract, Ware was an NCAA athlete helping to generate millions of dollars for the NCAA, but not automatically guaranteed a four-year education scholarship. As in so many other similar cases, that means his injury in service to the NCAA’s multimillion-dollar machine could spell the end of his financial aid and massive healthcare bills to boot.

Zirin nails it: NCAA as "Poster Boy for Corruption and Exploitation."

Couldn't have said it better myself, although heaven knows, I've tried. Call me a Marxist if you wish, but when players generate billions in revenue for others while receiving farthings in return value, it's simply a farce.

Go get 'em, Dave.

The NCAA: Poster Boy for Corruption and Exploitation, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

It’s time for that period of breathless college-hoops hysteria known as March Madness. It’s time for bracketology, Final Four predictions, office pools and the gambling of billions of dollars, legal and illegal. What will go largely unnoted is the fact that kids, ranging in age from 18 to 22 and branded with corporate logos, are producing this tidal wave of revenue—and they’re not receiving a dime of it.

Welcome to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the twenty-first century, about as corrupt and mangled an institution as exists in the United States.

Okay, I can write about NCAA basketball just like all the rest.

Meet my hero, now a lion in winter, and the man who saw the college basketball world the way it actually is, as opposed to the way we idealize it ... and acted accordingly.

Ladies and gentleman, Jerry Tarkanian, and he should be in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

A Rebel’s Methods Go Mainstream, by Sam Borden (New York Times)

... During his time at U.N.L.V., he was considered by many to be an outsider. He was not (John) Wooden, certainly, and his approach to operating his program — from recruiting to his playing style to how he handled the N.C.A.A. — was markedly different from those of contemporaries like Knight and North Carolina’s Dean Smith. Compared with those icons, Tarkanian was a renegade.

Hoosier Daddy and Vessel, Friday night at NABC's Bank Street Brewhouse.

Friday's always a big day at Bank Street Brewhouse. This Friday (March 23), we have two added attractions, later in the evening.

"JUST ANOTHER BASKETBALL GAME"

Right. Indiana plays Kentucky in the NCAA tournament at 9:45 p.m. Bank Street Brewhouse will stay open for the game; NABC's official Cream and Crimson Ale, Hoosier Daddy, will be flowing; there'll be very limited food menu after the usual kitchen closing time; and what's more ...

A SPECIAL MUSICAL PERFORMANCE

On the north (side) patio, Vessel. Members from the band played during the recent Saturday afternoon "Welcome Back Sherman Minton" celebration in downtown New Albany.

About Vessel: The Vessel has been around for 5 years, playing a swath of major festivals and clubs, delivering a unique sound that blends blues, bluegrass, funk, rock, electronic, and jazz. Our goal is to get in the zone, and make everyone around us happy and inspired. We love playing, thinking, and encouraging positive vibes in all those around us.

The music will begin after the normal dinner hours, but before the game, and last until 11:00 p.m. - midnight. The band will be charging a cover for this performance, probably $5. It's something we haven't tried in the past, but there's a first time for everything, so please be patient as we work out the kinks.

Today's Tribune column: "A labor theory of basketball value."

I fully expect that after weeks of writing scintillating truths about local political shenanigans with nary a comment in return, I'll now be pelted with brickbats for challenging the very last sacred doctrine: College basketball. Why does Baylor, that pain in the arse, hate America? Read the column and find out!

BAYLOR: A labor theory of basketball value

In the NBA, it’s all about the money – and refreshingly, not a single person involved ever bothers denying it.

In American college basketball, it’s also all about the money – and alarmingly, almost every person involved constantly denies it.