Last March, Binghamton University was on top of the world. In just his second season, Binghamton coach Kevin Broadus had taken the Bearcats from a perpetual America East doormat to conference and tournament champions.
Binghamton earned the No. 15 seed in the NCAA Tournament and lost to Duke in the first round. It seemed that this young program and young coach were both going to enjoy many years of prosperity.
But everything was not as great as it seemed.
In February, New York Times writer Pete Thamel published an article questioning Broadus’s decision to recruit talented but troubled players, many of whom left more prestigious programs for not meeting team standards at larger programs.
Sure enough, troubles starting mounting up off the court and in the classroom. Guard Malik Alvin was arrested for stealing condoms from a Wal-Mart. One adjunct lecturer said she was pressured to take it easy on basketball players.
‘Even if they win an America East championship, what is it worth?’ asked former Vermont coach Tom Brennan in Thamel’s story.
They did win that conference championship. But at the end of the season, upset America East coaches chose not to vote the Bearcats’ best player, shooting guard D.J. Rivera, onto the all-conference team. The coaches questioned Rivera’s academic eligibility after he transferred from St. Joseph’s University.
Now, just over six months later, Binghamton’s house of cards has toppled. Broadus faced mounting pressure from the media, faculty and SUNY chancellor Nancy Zimpher, so he cleaned house.
He kicked point guard Emanuel ‘Tiki’ Mayben off the team on Thursday after police in Troy, NY arrested Mayben on charges of selling crack cocaine. The next day, Broadus dismissed five more players from the team, including Rivera.
Broadus gave no reason for the additional dismissals, but said in a statement, ‘If any of the young men in our program don’t respect the decisions that have been made or the rules we have in place, then they need to move on with their lives.’
The blame can’t all rest on Broadus’ shoulders. Giving troubled athletes a second chance is acceptable, but being unable to control your team off the court is not. If the players had stayed out of trouble, Broadus would have been looked at as a Coach Carter-type figure. Instead, the risk failed, and Broadus was forced to gut his team.
The Bearcats are now left with only three players from last year’s tournament team, none of whom were in the starting five. Broadus just signed an extension this summer, but he will have to completely start over.
So what lessons can the Binghamton debacle teach us at BU? We have a terrific athletic department through and through, from Athletic Director Mike Lynch to coaches like Jack Parker to our student-athletes themselves. We don’t have the big-time football and basketball programs that bring in enough money and publicity to make us compromise our morals, so why should we care?
Well, there are two reasons: First, the Binghamton scandal shows that sacrificing academics for athletics doesn’t just happen at big schools.
Sure, someone can give Reggie Bush an Escalade at USC or take Derrick Rose’s SATs at Memphis, but that’s only because bringing in those athletes will make their schools millions upon millions of dollars. Plus, those guys are all going to the pros eventually, so we can overlook it.
Maybe some titles are vacated or some coaches are fired, but everyone ends up rich and happy in the end. That could never happen to BU in the little old America East. Clearly, that idea does not hold true any more.
Second, the Binghamton debacle showed the consequences of a school placing so much emphasis on winning that it loses touch with everything else.
Binghamton president Lois Defleur and athletic director Joel Thirer knew Broadus’s history of taking chances on recruits with checkered pasts when they hired him. They knew what was going on when the arrests started to pile up. They knew and they chose to look the other way because, to them, a spot in the NCAA tournament berth was worth it.
To some extent, we’ve all been guilty of this. It’s not just Alabama football fans or Kentucky basketball fans that tend to put too much pressure on their athletes. We all get frustrated and disappointed with our teams at times. (Looking at you, Brett Bennett.)
But we have to remember that these are 18- to 22-year-old college kids who lead actual lives outside the confines of Nickerson Field or Agganis Arena. The amount of stress that college athletes deal with is already impossibly difficult. If you don’t believe me, try driving up to Orono, Maine and back a couple days before your midterm.
If we start forcing our student-athletes to focus strictly on the ‘athlete’ side of their lives, we get a situation like Binghamton’s. There will always be imperfections. That’s one of the things that separate college sports from the pros. Learning to live with these imperfections to emphasize academics is what separates great athletic programs from places like Binghamton.
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