Bravo to the NYT for this timely story. Once again, the Nate Miles saga, which apparently is not over yet, not by the longest shot, is a function primarily of Jim Calhoun's ego. He didn't need this kid -- as his team's performance in this year's tournament more than proves -- any more than Jerry Tarkanian needed Lloyd Daniels back in the day. (That's probably the closest historical parallel to the Miles/UConn affair, especially in that neither Daniels nor Miles managed to stay out of trouble long enough to attend a single official practice at UNLV or UConn.) The whole UConn alibi in this case has been dubious. A telephone is initimately involved, and this isn't the first time that the UConn program got in trouble regarding a phone and a renegade street agent. The simple fact is UConn moved heaven and earth to bring in a troubled star it didn't need because its coach doesn't like to lose. At anything. Period.

It seems now that, every spring, just as the NCAA tournament gets rolling, we are going to be treated to a spasm of stories and television shows detailingthe operation of the college sports entertainment complex. This year, it's been HBO and Frontline, as well as a terrific documentary on the former regarding the Tarkanian teams at Vegas. These are all to the good. The fewer illusions we have, the better. However, the point that all of these shows miss is the fact that, with the tacit approval of a good deal of the country, what we have in these sports is the perfect example of a functioning underground economy. Looked at that way, players who are compensated beyond what the NCAA thinks is correct are simply finding a way to get paid for their work. This should surprise nobody. Time and again, the "amateur" concept - a foul vestige of the British class system -- has failed in this country because it is unsustainable in a nation that believes, even today, and even in Wisconsin, that hard work should return a fair wage. It was unsustainable in golf and in tennis. It was even unsustainable in the Olympics. It is unsustainable in college mega-sport as well. The only question is when the collapse will come, and how thorough the damage will be. 

If this country made sense, we would have organized our sub-pro level spectator sports along a club system, the way it's done all over the world.  Instead, we got them all tangled up in our system of higher education, which forced them to at least pretend to conform with an academic mission while at the same time producing spectacles of mass entertainment at a profit. Which is why every time the argument is raised about, perhaps, maybe, compensating the people who do the real work, we hear that they are compensated by their scholarships -- which, of course, they have to maintain while working a 60-hour a week job that requires business trips all over the country for eight months. This is, frankly, insane.