I had to laugh when I saw that “Blue Chips” was available this month as one of the free-with-ads movies on YouTube.
The 1994 movie about corruption in college sports was well received when it first came out, yet seems obsolete these days.
The movie centers on fictional Western University, where legendary college basketball coach Pete Bell (played by Nick Nolte) is suffering through the first losing season of his career. Bell, a Bob Knight-like coach — Nolte actually shadowed Knight to prepare for the role — follows the rules of recruiting but is losing players to schools that aren’t.
Bell knows that to get back on top, he needs to find the nation’s best players. He finds Butch McRae (played by Penny Hardaway), a point guard from inner-city Chicago, and Ricky Roe (played by Matt Nover), a Larry Bird-type player from French Lick, Indiana. Bell also finds Neon Boudeaux (played by Shaquille O’Neal), a 7-foot-4 center in a small town in Louisiana.
It doesn’t take long for Bell to find out the cost of his recruiting. McRae’s mom wants a well-paying job and a house. Roe wants a bag of cash for himself and a tractor for his father. Boudeaux doesn’t want anything, he just needs help getting into college because his test scores are so bad.
Bell, against his better judgment, authorizes booster Happy Kuykendahl (J.T. Walsh) to give the players what they want — Boudeaux gets a Lexus that he didn’t ask for — and all three come to campus.
Troubles begin when McRae wants to quit to go back home, but Bell, after talking to Happy, makes sure that McRae knows his mom will lose everything if he does leave. Roe is given a new car by Happy that Bell didn’t authorize, and during an argument with Happy, Bell finds out that one of the players on his team shaved points in a game a couple of years earlier.
Western opens the season by defeating Knight and his top-ranked Hoosiers, but Bell, knowing that he had lost control of his program and feeling guilty over the breaking of the rules, confesses to everything in a press conference after the game and resigns.
What is funny about the movie is, today, almost everything is now acceptable.
McRae could buy his mom a new house with the money he makes from the new name-image-likeness (NIL) collectives that colleges are allowed to have today. Roe could get a bag of cash for doing some charity work, and could do a commercial for a John Deere dealership in exchange for a new tractor. Boudeaux wouldn’t have to turn down a new Lexus, or whatever car he wanted.
The success of college teams is now based on the resources they have to acquire players, and the numbers are climbing, something Fran McCaffery talked about last Thursday at the Big Ten Tournament, a day before he was let go as Iowa’s head coach.
“I think the numbers this year, you’d probably need $6 million, and we were nowhere near that,” McCaffery said. “I think you know that. Those numbers (next season) are going to go north of that.”
It’s what will impact Iowa’s ability to find McCaffery’s replacement — any coach interested in the job is going to ask what is the NIL commitment, and how much money will be coming to men’s basketball players with the new revenue-sharing agreement that is expected to be settled in court this spring as a result of a lawsuit against the NCAA.
The subplot, though, is still one of the NCAA’s biggest concerns. Federal and NCAA authorities are looking into several mid-major programs as part of an investigation into a gambling ring allegedly linked to point shaving in NBA and college basketball.
Players at mid-major programs don’t get nearly the money that power-conference players get, and thus are easy pickings for gamblers looking for an edge. The emergence of prop bets make it easy for players to shave points without costing their team the game — a player could control his or her scoring output in the first half, or their team’s scoring, and then play well in the second half. If it’s not a problem now, it will be.
It’s about the only plot a “Blue Chips” reboot could have these days, because everything else is now acceptable.
John Bohnenkamp is an award-winning sports reporter and a regular sports contributor for Pen City Current
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