Michael DeCourcy is an exceptional writer and even better man. As I mention below, he sent me an autographed copy of his book when I was still a high school varsity letterman. Today, he responds to a variety of my questions related to the game (Thanks again, Mike!). If you've been under a rock for the last 25 years, DeCourcy is "The most knowledgeable journalist on college basketball in the country, he is author of Inside Basketball: From The Playgrounds To The NBA and Legends Of College Basketball. He is also a sports contributor for MSNBC and CNN." - The Sporting News. Make sure you check out his archives and follow him on Twitter.About 12-13 years ago (which was also about 25 pounds and two steps ago for me), you sent me a signed copy of your book, Inside Basketball: From the Playgrounds to the NBA. In this book and in your work with The Sporting News, you've touched on many levels of the game (Playground, HS, College, and Pro). What's your favorite level of the game to watch and cover? And why?
I think it should be pretty obvious by now which level of the sport I prefer to watch and cover. I wrote about high school basketball for the first eight or nine years of my career and moved on. I've fiddled here and there with writing stories about NBA basketball but never sought an opportunity to do it more frequently. I'm exactly where I want to be: covering college basketball now for nearly a quarter-century, hoping I'm fortunate enough to continue for at least another decade or so.
The quality of basketball played at the collegiate level has always been most satisfying to me. I recognize that the best players in the world are in the NBA, and I have huge respect for what they can do, but I think the game is most entertaining in the colleges. The fans are more involved, the players are developing but highly skilled, and the Tournament wraps it up in a spectacular, memorable package.
March Madness: Expand the 65-team tournament or leave it alone?The only argument for expansion that I can even stomach is to 68 teams with four play-in games. I could live with that. I'm not in favor of it, but I would not argue vehemently against it. I don't think it's necessary and I don't think it would be helpful, but neither do I think it would ruin the tournament as we know it.
Anything beyond that would not just be wrong, it would be criminal. There's no logical argument to be made for expansion beyond 68.
We've heard about the supposed (and rampant) cheating going on in the college game in a variety of books: Raw Recruits, Sole Influence, Money Players, The Jump, etc. More recently, there have been allegations in the media pointed at UConn, USC, and Memphis, among others. In your opinion, what underlies or provokes cheating in college basketball recruiting? Will the NCAA's partnership with the NBA to provide structure and programs in youth basketball help clean things up?
What provokes cheating in college basketball is the same thing that promotes cheating on Wall Street or in an Ivy League classroom: risk vs. reward. There are tremendous rewards in all of those circumstances for those who are willing to bend the rules. There's also the risk of being caught and punished. College coaches who cheat believe they're unlikely to be caught, and they're probably right. Morality is not an issue for the people who would consider doing these things. They either justify their actions on the belief that they're doing some good for someone other than themselves -- perhaps their staffs, or their families -- or they flat don't care.
What role, if any, should blogging play in sports journalism? How have the various platforms of new media affected your profession?
Those are two profoundly different questions. The internet itself has completely changed my job, mostly for the better. It's made research so much easier I can't believe we got any work done before it came along. It's also made me much busier because of the various platforms to feed. Twitter has changed my job just in the past two months. I hadn't even started with Twitter until the regional round of the tournament, and now stories are being broken there routinely, so I have to have some awareness of it.
Blogging is still an animal I'm trying to wrap my head around. I can say that I'm most comfortable with written material produced by someone who has a working knowledge of the subject he or she is discussing.
That doesn't necessarily mean you've been in the locker room of the team you're writing about, but it helps to have been in someone's locker room and gained an understanding of how team sports work. I go back to a piece I wrote about Chad Johnson three years ago. I don't cover the Bengals or the NFL, but I've been around team sports long enough to recognize when an athlete is wrecking his team's chemistry. I wrote that and was blasted by a blogger who basically said I had no clue, just look at Johnson's numbers. Well, we've seen where Johnson and the Bengals have traveled since.
Who's the greatest college player that you've seen since you started covering the game? What separated him or her from the rest?
The greatest college player that I've covered was Duke's Christian Laettner. He wasn't the most talented. He wasn't as talented as Shaquille O'Neal or Penny Hardaway or Chris Webber or Allen Iverson. But Laettner was a dominating college player. He made more big plays than probably anyone who's ever played in college. I don't know that I've ever come across an athlete who was more confident than Laettner was wearing a Duke uniform. You could say Michael Jordan was more confident when he was with the Bulls, but he was Michael Jordan. He wasn't so much confident as he was invincible. Laettner elevated himself and his teammates through force of will. I was in Philadelphia the night he hit the shot to beat Kentucky. I don't know that I'll ever see anything quite like that again.
Are there any books or projects on the table or in the mind of Michael DeCourcy?
I'll continue to write my tail off for Sporting News Today, Sportingnews.com and Sporting News magazine and making periodic appearances on Sporting News Radio. That keeps me plenty busy.
Early prediction: Who will be crowned the 2009-2010 NCAA champ?
Right now, I think I'll go with Kansas. I might still reevaluate that before we do the Sporting News College Basketball yearbook, but I doubt it.
