WITH EPIC STORIES AND $3B IN BETS, MARCH CAN’T AFFORD BAD CALLS

A rocking NCAA tournament is a gambler’s paradise, and with rich narratives such as Saint Peter’s and Coach K, we need to talk about spectacular games and not about poor officiating

    I don’t bet on sports. Never have, never will, even if California slides into the ocean and tempts me to recoup financial losses as another sportsbook app degenerate. A gambler never leaves this world in the black, as Charles Barkley realizes, and I’ve had to reject the asks of too many loan-seeking acquaintances posing as friends.

     Any minute now, one will call cursing Saint Peter’s. Didn’t he read what I wrote about the strut of the Peacocks, from a don’t-blink campus in Jersey City, who, of course, beat Purdue on National Peacock Day? Didn’t he know the original Saint Peter held the keys to heaven and performed miracles? Didn’t he realize the blueblood-defiant powers of Shaheen Holloway?

     “What they gonna say now?’’ preached the bullishly lovable coach, presiding over the first 15th-seeded team to reach the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament. “Everybody got something to say: ‘We can’t do that. Cinderella. Underdogs. This, that.’ Listen, I’ve got a bunch of guys that just play basketball and have fun. That’s all we do. What they gonna say now?

     “See you later.’’

     North Carolina is next. Anyone who put down $1,000 on the Peacocks to win it all at 1,000-to-1 — the highest odds of any team ever to reach the Elite Eight — is three wins from a million bucks. “We're making history and we look forward to making more history," said guard Doug Edert, who jumped on a table during the celebration in Philadelphia.

     This edition of March Madness has reintroduced America to college basketball’s charms and adrenaline rushes. It has eliminated three No. 1 seeds, ushered a brazen upstart to the cusp of the Final Four and given rise to an all-time story line: Mike Krzyzewski winning the succession game, outcoaching elite names 20 and 30 and 40 years younger, and winning a sixth national championship in his final game at Duke.

     “This has been a SPECTACULAR tournament,’’ raved CBS studio host Greg Gumbel, not normally given to superlatives.

     For that very reason, I’ve come today to protect the 45 million Americans who will wager $3.1 billion on this event. Some are harmless thrill-seekers who keep steering into the perennial bracket dead-end — do not pick that cute recurring name, Gonzaga, until the Zags join a big-boy conference and stop stockpiling cheap, soul-softening victories over Pepperdine and Pacific. But too many are problem gamblers whose jobs, marriages and college funds depend on the results of excruciatingly close games that act as cocaine bumps for addicts, with every win/loss leading to another toot.

     The NCAA does not care about these poor souls or, for that matter, those of us just enjoying the action. Otherwise, a governing body bulging with resources — banking more than $1 billion alone from this year’s post-peak-pandemic revival — would spend more money, time and energy on building a better, less disruptive pool of officials. What a shame the referees are stealing the show and the conversation.

     If not the money, too.

     Hey, all suspicions are fair game when the NCAA no longer concerns itself with the ills of betting. Once the industry leader in emphasizing its anti-gambling stance, with no shortage of messages and threatened bans directed toward athletes, president Mark Emmert has been emasculated. When he finally lost an age-old legal fight last summer and was forced to let athletes profit from names, images and likenesses, who knew the NCAA would allow a star player to film a TV commercial for … a casino?

     Consider it one redeeming benefit of Gonzaga’s loss to Arkansas. We won’t have to watch smart-ass Drew Timme, he of the horseshoe mustache, dribble a ball while wearing his Zags uniform in the slot machine section of the Northern Quest Resort & Casino. In another ad, as referenced scoldingly by the Wall Street Journal, Timme is in a Gonzaga sweatshirt as he stands at a roulette table and tells the gambler beside him, “I like No. 2.’’

     “Your jersey number,’’ the man says. “Isn’t that a little on the nose?’’

     Actually, isn’t it a complete sellout and surrender by the NCAA? Why would Emmert allow states and universities to decide what constitutes a permissible NIL deal? Why wouldn’t he at least try to shield a sport, soiled by its share of gambling scandals through time, from casino commercials featuring a well-known player from a prominent program?

     Now that all bets are off — or on, I mean — we should be asking all the dirty questions about gambling. Will it be easier for athletes, as record sums are wagered with frightening fury, to consort with game-fixers? And what about officials? Aren’t they more vulnerable to corruption than ever? The perception battle already is lost, as every bad call is connected to cries that games are rigged. So what exactly is the NCAA accomplishing here, other than its usual money grab, in hosting an event clouded by distrust?

     The national narrative changed for a few days, from a fun tournament to another sham, when officials allowed the second half of North Carolina’s victory over top seed Baylor to devolve into demolition derby. Most of the roughhousing was initiated by Baylor, which employed a raging full-court press to reduce a 25-point deficit. Was this the crew’s make-up call after ejecting North Carolina’s Brady Manek — and rightfully so — for swinging an elbow and connecting with Jeremy Sochan’s chops? The Tar Heels still managed to win, but post-game chatter was about the officials. And two of the three went on to work in the Sweet 16. As Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde pointed out, this was a curious way of rewarding them for poor work.

     Would Notre Dame have beaten Texas Tech, which nearly sent Coach K to his retirement chair, if official John Higgins had called Tech’s Kevin McCuller for hanging on the rim with his left hand before a dunk? The officials missed two calls on one play late in Arizona’s tight victory over TCU — a bulldozing of TCU’s Mike Miles, who also committed an over-and-back violation without a whistle.

     Even when we can’t excuse the erratic play of Gonzaga’s Chet Holmgren, whose monster hype is attached to his freaky physique as a 7-footer with NBA-impact arms, at least one of his five fouls was wrong. “A big aspect,’’ said coach Mark Few, again falling short of a national title after Holmgren’s DQ. “Chet, I thought, was playing good, and he was getting to his shots, and we were trying to call his number and get him some more actions when we could, but, yeah, that was hard. We needed Chet to be able to stay in there a little longer. ... We're so different on defense when he is in there with his rim protection."

     Of the 17,357,209 brackets entered on ESPN.com, almost 23 percent had Gonzaga winning it all. So it matters to a ton of people that all five fouls on Holmgren are legitimate. I speak for the masses in saying we need less Gene Steratore, who does a fine job as the CBS rules analyst, and more talk about two emerging paths to history.

     One is Coach K, who continues to claim, “It’s not about the coaching’’ when it clearly still is at age 75. To reach the Final Four in New Orleans, he first must survive the whirlwind that is Arkansas coach Eric Musselman, the antithesis of Krzyzewski’s authoritarian rule. He insists his players do more than play, think and eat basketball at tournament stops, having them ride a cable car and hang with Steph Curry in San Francisco, where Musselman refused to let his NBA coaching heartbreak of 20 years ago — fired by the Warriors at 38 — stop the Hogs from jollies that included, oh, a trip to the West Regional final.

     “The day I was fired, to think that I would be coaching in a Sweet 16 in the Bay Area — I would have said there was zero chance,’’ he said. “I guess the world has a funny way of working itself out.’’

     But even the idea of Duke advancing to a national semifinal against North Carolina — their first-ever meeting in a Final Four, just weeks after the Heels stormed into Cameron Indoor Stadium and ruined Krzyzewski’s farewell night — isn’t as jarring as the strut of the Peacocks. They left yet another marquee name in tatters.

     "I'm honestly still in shock," Purdue center Trevion Williams said. "It just doesn't feel real."

     “It eats at you, man,” coach Matt Painter said. “These guys won 29 games and then you feel awful."

     What are we gonna say now about Saint Peter’s? Like the original patron saint, Holloway and his crew are saving us from evil. Namely, the officiating.

     We only can pray that the Peacocks aren’t screwed next.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.