As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a college basketball junkie. As far as I’m concerned, the NBA is just a giant methadone program to easy me into the summer, when there aren’t any sports worth watching on tv. I’m a big fan of NCAA basketball, but I’m starting to think about how I can manage to watch it without funneling any money to the NCAA, who become more loathesome with every passing day.
The latest incident involves the ejection of a credentialed reporter for reporting on the game on his paper’s blog:
Should the National Collegiate Athletic Association be able to demand that someone leave an athletic event at a public university for blogging during a game?
The NCAA thinks it can — and that it can use universities as its enforcers. On Friday, the association did just that when the University of Louisville, acting on NCAA orders, evicted a credentialed reporter for The Louisville Courier-Journal from a baseball playoff game for doing his job. According to the NCAA, it would be fine for the reporter to write online about the atmosphere of a game, the mood of the fans, even the quality of the hot dogs in the stands. But mention that someone just hit a home run — information the NCAA wants to preserve for those that pay to broadcast games — and the reporter is outta there.
The logic here is that ESPN has paid big bucks for the exclusive broadcast rights to the game, so nobody else can be allowed to talk about it while the game is going on. This was explained by an NCAA spokesman wearing a suit made from the skins of cute, fuzzy puppies as he crushed the skulls of helpless baby kittens. Well, not really, but it’s about the only way they could make their position less appealing.
Yes, I know, the NCAA is a private organization, and thus not subject to the same level of scrutiny as the government when it comes to free speech. And this might conceivably fall into the same legal category as things like trademark protection, which is a sucking swamp of nonsensical and obnoxious decisions. But, really, this is ridiculous.