This comes our way from Virginia colleague Elaine Mittleman, who sends along a link to a story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “NCAA Tournament: Why Won’t College-Basketball Coaches Stay Off the Court?”
The story is about how some college basketball coaches are “regular offenders” and routinely ignore the rule that they should not step foot on the court:
Michigan State’s Tom Izzo regularly roams the playing floor. In the final seconds of a loss to Oklahoma last season, Baylor’s Scott Drew leapt onto the court, then fell backward as the Bears missed their last-gasp shot. In a game against Louisiana State this season, Kentucky’s John Calipari—a prolific wanderer—lunged onto the court and shoved one of his players into position.
The rules require every coach to stay within a 28-foot roaming area behind the sideline and on his end of the court. Stepping outside the box can bring a warning followed by a technical foul.
But instead of incurring penalties, coaches are pulling off the sporting equivalent of eminent domain. Unchecked by referees, coaches are simply annexing new swaths of territory in which to work. If the NCAA tournament—which begins in earnest Thursday—is anything like this regular season has been, prepare to see millionaire coaches stomping wherever they please throughout March Madness.
How do you know when your area of practice has hit the big time? When it’s finally okay to admit at cocktail parties that you do eminent domain law. When other partygoers don’t flee when they hear you say so. When they’re making movies about it starring Brooke Shields. For sure.
But you know you’ve really arrived when sportswriters use eminent domain as an analogy to entitled basketball coaches “taking” property belonging to others and getting away with it, because referees do not “check” the offenders (sound familiar, Justice Stevens?), and no one even blinks. When not much is needed for the guy reading the piece to understand that the coaches remind the writer of governments that believe they deserve someone’s property simply because they want to do something else with it.
That’s when you know that you’ve really made it.