Beware Used Car Salesmen bearing gifts

First appeared on March 31st, 2010
in The Lebanon Reporter

This week I thought we’d look at the impact Used Car salesmen have had on the NCAA Tournament. I chose this topic because I thought it would be interesting and also because my wife and I are currently car shopping and it’s the perfect opportunity to humiliate one salesman we dealt with who has really earned it.


His humiliation is the product of his trying to take advantage of me because he assumed I knew nothing about cars. Good judge of people? Maybe, considering the only thing I really know about cars is that red ones look much cooler. Bad decision? Definitely, considering not only will we not be buying a car from him, but he is also the impetus behind this diatribe against men of his ilk.

There are many NCAA coaches who remind me of used car salesmen. Forget their slicked back hair and $300 suits ($75 windbreaker if you’re Bob Huggins), the fact they have to sell their program to recruits makes them all salesmen to some extent. But that’s halfway intelligent and, unfortunately, not why I’m using the analogy.

I use the term “used car salesmen” to describe some college basketball coaches because many feel, myself included, that they can’t be trusted. Now before you go all “I can’t believe he just slammed used car salesmen!” on me, I’m only talking about the guy who tried to get the wife and I to trade our three year old car for a used set of golf clubs, a block of frozen cheese he claimed was once owned by Brett Favre and a sickly looking goat named Clooney he had staked to the pavement behind his dealership.

College coaches today face such intense pressure to win that many succumb to the near constant temptation to bend rules, or simply ignore them if you are a former Indiana University coach whose first name happens to rhyme with Melvin. Do I have specific rules violations to mention now? No, that would be the sign of a well researched column. I do however think there should be a rule in place that says coaches have to graduate a minimum percentage of their players to be eligible for NCAA Tournament play. The fact that I’m not sure if such a rule exists is likely what separates real sports columnists from those of us who pretend to be sports columnists once a week.

Now I would agree that Brad Stevens isn’t the pushy used car type. He’d be more like the guy running the government program that gives cars to underprivileged youth and the homeless (if such a program existed of course; perhaps this is the fate of Obama’s mountain of clunkers).

So whether it’s Bruce Pearl rolling an odometer back or John Calipari putting chewing gum over the hole in a radiator, the fact that we have graduated from the preacher-like John Wooden to the modern day used car salesmen coaching today’s game says more about the culture of college basketball than it does about the evolution of the game. College basketball is no longer about helping talented athletes get an education. Today everything, even the loveable Dick Vitale, is about money, so…what do I have to do to get you to watch college basketball today?

On an interesting side note, the Final Four is in our backyard this weekend and with Butler playing we as Hoosiers have the recipe for an unforgettable experience. So get out and brave the crowds, pay the inflated prices and do your best to be hospitable to the masses of drunk and overbearing Duke fans.