Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, is the ultimate soft power player. He does not produce concise sentences. He rarely raises his voice. Instead, he speaks opaquely, often requiring something like a university sports Kremlinologist to interpret his intentions.
He’s also been at it long enough to be accustomed to throwing his weight around: launching a realignment wave by poaching Oklahoma and Texas, co-writing a rewrite of the NCAA constitution, and scoffing at the possibility that the SEC was excluded from the football playoffs last season.
Recently, he teamed up with Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti to strike a deal that will give their conferences about 60 percent of television revenue from the 12-team College Football Playoff that begins next year, leaving crumbs to everyone.
So when Sankey told ESPN this month that it was time to rethink NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournamentthe analysis has started.
“We offer very competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers” from little leagues, Sankey said. “I think the pressure will increase as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top due to expansion.”
The takeaway: Goodbye Cinderella. Give me a 17-14 Mississippi State.
Expansion of the tournament — from 68 teams to 80, 96 or even 128, as some reports have suggested – has been a popular topic as the tournament got underway this week. The change would increase television rights fees and could potentially exclude small schools from the action.
The most powerful counterpoint to the expansion plan came Thursday evening. It was delivered by Oakland Universitya suburban school north of Detroit, which knocked Kentucky out of the tournament thanks to a hail of 3-pointers from Jack Gohlke, a 24-year-old graduate student with a widow’s peak and the same respect for shot selection as ‘a gunslinger who passes through the doors of the saloon.
If there was an avatar for the soul of March Madness, consider the Oakland Golden Grizzlies, whose coach, Greg Kampe, is in his 40th season. And consider Gohlke, who spent the last five seasons at Division II Hillsdale College.
No one has shot more 3-pointers in Division I basketball than Gohlke, and no one has made more this season after bombing in 10 3s for his 32 points Thursday night.
Kentucky initially considered him a curiosity. Then an embarrassment. Then a five-alarm fire, treating him like Steph Curry, using bumps, jersey clutches, switches and double teams. After Gohlke stepped away for an off-balance rainmaker, Kentucky coach John Calipari raised his arms in exasperation.
Stories like the Golden Grizzlies, who joined Division I in 1997, “1,000 percent, they are the essence of the tournament,” Gohlke said. “Historically, you always have these top seeds that win the tournament. But you see the runs to the Final Four, the Elite Eight, the Sweet 16 – those are the runs that people remember, like Saint Peter’s finish in the Elite Eight. I don’t think we should lose that.
Teams like this provided some juice on an otherwise lackluster first full day of the tournament: Duquesne, for its first appearance in 47 yearsoverthrew Brigham Young, and little Samford scared Kansas.
To understand the gulf between programs like those in Oakland and Kentucky, consider the most recent measure that separates the haves from the have-nots: name, image and likeness funds.
Oakland just launched a collective which Kampe said raised about $28,000 for his entire team. He expects to need about 10 times that amount to keep his best player, Trey Townsend. On the other side of the field, Kentucky team leaders announced a sponsorship deal this week that’s likely worth just as much. (Freshman guard DJ Wagner has deals with Nike, Drake and an exotic car club.)
Football is responsible for conference realignment and many other decisions in college sports because of the billions of dollars it generates. But in football, there’s no room for small schools like Oakland, even with an expansion of the playoffs to 12 teams. Appalachian State doesn’t beat Georgia in a sport where size, strength and depth make it an unfair fight.
Some believe that restricting access for small schools that could — George Mason, Davidson and Saint Peter’s — would rob March Madness of its magic.
“You know, we’re what makes this tournament, the little guy,” Kampe said Wednesday, noting that it was the 70th anniversary of Jimmy Chitwood’s game-winning shot memorialized in the movie “Hoosiers,” about an underdog high school basketball player . team.
He mentioned Townsend, Blake Lampman and Gohlke.
“They could be Jimmy Chitwood tomorrow night,” he said. “Don’t take that away from us.”
Kampe, 68, grew up in Defiance, Ohio, which seems fitting. He was tough enough that Lampman, a fourth-year junior, recalled one of his teammates being punished for wearing different colored socks in practice. This season, DQ Cole, a junior college transfer, is practicing in Jolly Rancher socks.
No one paid much attention to Cole’s socks when, with Oakland clinging to a 75-74 lead, he made a corner 3-pointer with 29 seconds left, tripping again on the Oakland bench.
On the other side of the field, among the Oakland fans, Lisa Gohlke burst into tears. Earlier in the day, she had shown her son a good luck video from her students at Greenland Elementary School, near their home in Pewaukee, Wisconsin.
The night before, she and her husband, Dave, a leadership advisor for a technology consultant, explained to Jack what parents say to their children when they don’t want to impose their own anxieties on them: Have fun!
“I’m not here to have fun,” Jack tells them. “I have work to do.”
At halftime, as he made seven 3-pointers, they marveled at the way he was thriving on social media. “They say he looks like he’s 28,” his father said. “Forty,” her sister Jennifer corrected.
They were among the few who understood how he got there. Hillsdale was the only scholarship offer he received out of high school, but he was so skinny that he redshirted his freshman season. He played three minutes per game the following year. And eight minutes the next.
“You also have to do a little introspection at this point,” Gohlke said. “I knew what I could be. But I also knew I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t mad at my coaches; I didn’t blame anyone for not playing me. I knew I had to improve.
And so he became stronger. He got faster. And he delivered blow after blow. He graduated last year with a degree in accounting and wanted to use his final year of eligibility to earn a master’s degree in business administration, which Hillsdale did not offer.
Oakland was the only offer he had – and it got a green light.
In the final seconds of the game, Gohlke stood at the top of the sideline next to Kentucky’s silky freshman guard Rob Dillingham during a timeout. They shared a smile.
That didn’t go unnoticed this week when Gohlke felt Oakland had better shooters than Kentucky, which led the nation in 3-point shooting percentage. Dillingham reminded him of that before the game, telling Gohlke he’d better prove it.
“That’s fair enough,” he said. “I was talking a little.”
In the end, Dillingham gave props to Gohlke.
“He would say, ‘Respect, you’re the one who made it,’” Gohlke said. “I said I wish I was in your shoes before the NBA draft.”
The shoes he stood in, provided only for this tournament, weren’t bad. Glass slippers that fit perfectly.
