Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
It was a long time ago, two generations to be exact. On December 23, 1982, then NAIA Chaminade handed the Virginia Cavaliers a 77-72 loss in a tournament in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Cavaliers were the top-ranked team in NCAA Division I, with future NBA Hall of Fame center Ralph Sampson their focal point.
Chaminade didn’t care. They beat Virginia, who had earlier handled Georgetown with Patrick Ewing, and the fabled “Phi Slamma Jamma” of Houston.
News outlets didn’t believe it. The API and UPI switchboards were slammed with the same question, “Is this legitimate? Is the score correct?”
Yes, it was.
In the 1987 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, the University of Wyoming, led by 6-5 Fennis Dembo and 6-11 Eric Leckner, upset that same Virginia Cavaliers team in the opening round 64-60, then advanced to the Sweet 16 after upsetting UCLA 72-68 in the Round of 32.
Head coach Jim Brandenburg led the Pokes to a 24-10 overall record and an 11-5 mark in the Western Athletic Conference.
Wyoming finished fourth in the WAC that year behind Texas El Paso, BYU, and New Mexico. They were a 12 seed when they took the floor against fifth-seeded Virginia.
The 2014 tournament might have featured the biggest upsets in history with Stephen F. Austin handling Virginia Commonwealth 77-75 in overtime, North Dakota State upsetting mighty Oklahoma 80-75, also in overtime, and Ivy League Champion Harvard eliminating Cincinnati 61-57.
Don’t you just love an upset in the NCAA Men’s Tournament?
Schools you rarely hear of, like Florida Gulf Coast, Oral Roberts, Saint Peter’s, Cleveland State, and Chattanooga have all upset heavily favored opponents over the last four decades of the tournament.
Ball State, Butler, Cornell, UC Santa Barbara, and, of course, Loyola Marymount all had memorable tournament runs.
To be considered a true upset, the underdog has to have a tournament seed in double-digits. This year, the biggest upset was number 12 High Point over number 5 Wisconsin.
Tenth-ranked Texas A&M, 11th-ranked Virginia Commonwealth, and Texas also scored upset wins.
But a 10 versus 7 or an 11 versus 6 isn’t that wide a range. (All the opening round seedings add to 17 if you’re scoring at home.)
The South Regional in Houston had the most upsets with VCU taking North Carolina 82-78 in overtime and costing head coach Hubert Davis his job, and Texas A&M cruising by seventh-seeded Saint Mary’s 63-50.
Graham Ike, who played for the Cowboys from 2020 to 2022, was on the national stage last week at Gonzaga. The Zags lost 74-68 to Texas in the second round.
Gonzaga keeps their NIL payouts close to the vest, but insiders suspect that Ike is making between $2 and $5 million in endorsements, the biggest one coming from DoorDash.
To put that in perspective, his salary alone is at worst a half-million more than the entire University of Wyoming NIL budget for football and men’s basketball, and at best, three times what the Pokes have to pay their “amateur players.”
Let’s put it succinctly, the system sucks; it is rotten to the core, and the pay-for-play insanity has ruined athletics wall-to-wall.
Cowboy sophomore guard, Damarion Dennis, isn’t even close to the level of Dembo, Leckner, Tub Bradley, Larry Nance, Bill Garnett, or arguably the greatest Poke player of all time, Theo Ratliff.
Dennis averaged just 6.7 points per game, with less than two rebounds and just over one assist as a 6-1 point guard.
He entered the portal this week. Looking for greener pastures. In this case, the green is “Federal Reserve Note” green, as in the color surrounding Ben Franklin on the 100-dollar bill.
Dennis came from San Antonio, Texas, stayed for at least three semesters, and is now headed somewhere else.
Will he be a star somewhere else? Not likely, 6-1 guards are a dime a dozen in college basketball. Will he make more money than he could have in Laramie? No doubt.
The University of Oregon currently has 98 players on its football roster. The NCAA limit is 105.
Nike co-founder Phil Knight is obsessed with bringing an NCAA football championship to Eugene. He’s publicly stated that he will invest one billion (yes, billion with a “B”) into NIL contracts for the Fighting Ducks football team.
The math is simple. Divide a billion by 105, and you get about 9.5 million dollars per player. These kids, if they make the NFL, will be taking pay cuts to play at the professional level.
The Ducks had almost that much money earlier this year and were embarrassed by eventual National Champion Indiana in the semi-finals, 56-22 at the Peach Bowl.
Phil Knight was not happy; he doubled down in effect, promising more money so the Ducks could win a title.
Is it really winning a title at the “amateur” level when you pay outrageous sums of money to 18-19-year-old kids to come to your school? It’s not just the incoming freshmen. They snipe talent at every level from schools across the nation, and with the portal wide open for bargaining, they’ll always have four and mostly five-star recruits in Eugene.
If you haven’t been able to tell, I’m not a fan.
Wyoming will never be able to compete at the NCAA Division I level. You can argue, but we don’t have the sponsorships to purchase the talent to win an “amateur” title.
The pendulum needed to move a bit, there is no doubt. Coaches were making outrageous salaries with even more in endorsements, while players didn’t have enough money to go to McDonald’s with their dorm room buddies.
Now, it’s the wild, wild west. There are no checks and balances. When you hear the NCAA might be investigating a university for recruiting violations, you can only laugh. What recruiting violations, there aren’t any rules, how can there be violations.
When a football recruit makes a visit in Austin to the University of Texas campus, the recruiters take them through the players’ parking lot in the first few minutes. There, lined up in neat rows with personalized parking signs, are Maseratis, Porches, Corvettes, and Lamborghinis. Players’ cars, 19- to 22-year-old college kids driving “cheap” Corvettes to foreign sports cars valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It used to be a few “friendly” co-eds, maybe a $500 handshake from a booster or a new car for mom and dad. It’s well beyond that today.
Don’t expect many upsets in the NCAA tournament anytime soon. Any talent capable of pulling off a win by a small school, or mid-major, over a power conference opponent is long gone.
Gone with the whiff of something green in a player’s hand.