Like many other right-thinking Americans, I will fill out brackets and watch the March Madness action with great interest, Few things bring people together like the chance to win money based on the results of basketball teams they have never paid attention to before.
But I will watch with a little sadness in my heart this year because this amazing sports spectacle has done something terrible to a bunch of athletes in Nebraska. March Madness killed the University of Nebraska-Omaha wrestling program last weekend.
Well, not directly, but the decision by UNO administrators to drop wrestling and football had a great deal to do with the men’s basketball championships. You see, if UNO, which won its third straight NCAA Division II wrestling championship on Saturday, moved to Division I in basketball, they stand a chance to receive more money, which can better fund sports. Just not these ones, even though the teams plan to fight.
Football will be left behind because it’s just cost-prohibitive to push that up a level, even to Division I-AA. Wrestling doesn’t fit into the Summit Conference, which has asked UNO to come play at the Division I level.
Never mind that the program is dominant and could easily compete at Division I. Never mind that there are plenty of opportunities to schedule matches and tournaments without a conference that don’t require a ton of travel. Never mind that the Big 12 will only have four teams wrestling next year and UNO could have served as a catalyst for a truly creative solution to a new wrestling order in the Midwest.
None of that matters because athletic decisions now rank common sense as third in the decision-making process behind money and conference alignments. That’s how a national power in the middle of wrestling country decides to drop wrestling.
It’s really sad. I feel awful for those guys because I too have had wrestling pulled from me, kind of. My alma mater – Allegheny College – announced it was dropping our successful program at the end of my senior year. We fought and won a three-year reprieve, basically so he freshmen on the team had a chance to finish their careers.
As we battled with the administration, we heard the same kind of BS that the wrestlers from UNO will hear in the coming weeks. They will talk about how they really care and they thought long and hard about this and they wish there were a different way.
There is. They just don’t want to take that path because it’s harder and might mean less money. Which really sucks. It sucks when a school drops a sports, even more so when there was an alternative and when the team is damn good and when it was all done just so the school could hope to maybe hear it’s name on Selection Sunday in the future.
If that day comes, I will never pick UNO on my bracket. That won’t change much, but it will make me feel better.