In a week in which an ugly sex-abuse scandal at Colorado has put yet another blight on intercollegiate athletics, Stanford's undefeated men's basketball team is the good news college athletics needs.
On Thursday night, the top-ranked Cardinals extended their winning streak to 22 games with a 76-67 victory over Southern California. Today at UCLA, Stanford will go for its 23rd straight. The NCAA needs Stanford to be No. 1; the NCAA needs Stanford to win the national championship, undefeated.
At a time when highly publicized scandals have raised more questions about the value of the intercollegiate athletic enterprise, the NCAA needs great news to counter a year of bad news: at Baylor, at Ohio State, at St. Bonaventure, at St. John's, at Colorado.
What the NCAA needs is evidence that intercollegiate athletics is more than a breeding ground for entitlement based on athletic prowess.
Stanford hardly has all the answers. But it could be a model for achieving a balance between highly competitive athletics and uncompromising academics.
Ted Leland, the Stanford athletic director since 1991, said he hesitated to call Stanford a model. "We have to be cautious about saying who does things right and who doesn't because opportunity wears a lot of faces," he said in an interview Thursday. "I don't expect anybody to use the Stanford model. We do it our way; we like it. This isn't a test of values when we play basketball, it's just a basketball game."
The significance of this season for Stanford is that the program has forged a high-level basketball reputation among blue-chip recruits. Previously, Stanford could not consistently establish the kind of reputation for basketball that it enjoys in tennis, golf, swimming and baseball.
Andy Geiger, who served as Stanford's athletic director from 1979 to 1990 and is now at Ohio State, remembers the uphill haul.
"We had to rely on the academic power of the university to recruit players," he said yesterday by telephone. "Other coaches would tell recruits, `You'll never develop as a player,' or `You'll stick out like a sore thumb in that environment."'
Although Geiger hired Mike Montgomery as the basketball coach in 1986, things did not really begin to change for several years. Then Montgomery led Stanford to the Round of 16 in 1997, to the Final Four in 1998 and to the Round of 8 in 2001.
Stanford does not apologize for wanting to win championships or to cultivate athletes. A player like Josh Childress, who scored 36 points on Thursday, can feel good about being a Stanford student as well as an NBA-caliber athlete because there is a large community of Olympic-caliber swimmers and track athletes and major league-caliber baseball players on campus. Stanford's Tony Azevedo, is regarded as one of the world's best water polo players.
What Stanford has to guard against, Geiger said, is the feeling of being above the fray. "No one is immune," said Geiger, who has spent the past season embroiled in a football-related scandal involving Maurice Clarett.
In fact, Stanford struggles with the tensions of commercialism that have become a part of revenue-generating sports.
"A lot of people look at us nationally and say, `You're a model for balancing,"' Leland said. "But we struggle with it on our campus every day. We made a decision years ago to play in the Pac-10. That means we've got to practice a lot. We recruit athletes who are very ambitious, so they're going to spend 30, 40 hours a week on their sport. In these kids' lives, sometimes the priority is athletics - they're young and they love to play the game. Our faculty get concerned about that."
In deference to faculty concerns, Stanford made the wise, and long overdue, decision not to pay outrageous salaries for football and basketball coaches a couple of years ago, Leland said. The university will not pay market value even if means losing quality coaches like Tyrone Willingham.
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