The difficult lessons of the Alford era

I don’t know if I could ever be a University of New Mexico basketball fan. I simply have coached too many games against them to truly warm up to the Lobos.

In December, I attended the Lobo victory over New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. By chance, I happened to sit right behind former Lobos coach Steve Alford. I’ll admit that I was deeply impressed.

Evidently, I was not the only one with high regard for Alford — he’s gone now to UCLA.

The Lobos, I understood by halftime of that game, did not have great players. Good ones, yes. But Alford had done a masterful job of putting together patchwork pieces, figuring out strengths, avoiding weaknesses.

Alford’s Lobos made small adjustments and slowly overtook a pretty good Aggie team.

I had no way of knowing how UNM higher-ups — along with Alford — would disrupt the Lobo’s NCAA chances.

Remember when Alford was given an unprecedented raise and contract extension? What perplexed me more than the money that UNM threw at Alford was the timing — just before the Harvard game — which indicates just how far the players are from the minds of the adults who make careers on the backs of these young men.

The Lobo basketball team was pumped up on pride like a bright red rooster after the NCAA’s Selection Sunday. But that hissing you heard the next day was very likely the air of momentum being let out of the tires on their team bus.

Sure, the Lobos were all savvy enough to pretend to support the guy who determined their playing time. But their response to his astronomical salary was the interviewee’s version of the clumsy head-fake.

All of the Lobos can do basic math, understand statistics and view the world on a “per game” basis: Coach Alford would soon be making $2 million a year. Or $60,000 per game. Or a little over $4,000 a day.

Could you blame the Lobo players for thinking, “Yeah, our coach gets a lifetime free of financial worries, but what do we get?”

I know: a year-to-year renewable scholarship.

But that feeble point gets weaker each time salaries and work forces increase in over-staffed athletic departments. And you don’t have to be a UNM professor who specializes in labor to comprehend this strange fact: It’s amateur sport for the athletes; pro sports for the coaches. Or, more precisely, it’s socialism for the players. And capitalism, Fortune 500-style, for the grown-ups.

If an NCAA school like UNM is going to give its coach a lifetime of riches, why can’t the players have a lifetime of educational opportunity — say, room, board, tuition, and books for life, even if that means a graduate degree?

An entire industry has sprung up on the success of Division I basketball. Go get a UNM media guide from 1963. I’d wager that today there are 10 times more employees making a living off UNM athletes.

The players haven’t gotten a raise, though, since the Naismith era.

And I’ll bet the Lobo players, maybe subconsciously, were affected more by the thoughtless timing Alford’s new contract than they were for the scouting report on Harvard. No wonder they lost.

And let’s face it: Your kid was never going to meet Steve Alford — or the new Lobos coach, Craig “Noodles” Neal, Alford’s assistant who was awarded a contract on Tuesday for five years with a base salary and compensation package of $750,000 per season — but she will be taught her first two years at UNM by underpaid and underappreciated adjuncts and instructors.

Here’s my NCAA Tournament prediction: The Lobos will learn from their loss to Harvard and do even better next season. But will anyone remember the real lesson from the Alford era?

Yet, like most professors in New Mexico, I’ll still hold hope — to see if college administrators will ever really consider the mind-set and welfare of their students — those who play basketball, and even students who do not.

Rus Bradburd is the author of “Make It, Take It,” a new novel set in the world of college basketball. He coached at NMSU and UTEP for 14 seasons and teaches at NMSU.