March Madness About More Than Buzzer-Beaters … Just Ask Jeff Freedman

By Andy Hutchison

March Madness — which of course spills over into early April as the NCAA basketball tournaments unfold — is the most exciting time of year for college basketball fanatics.

For Newtown’s Jeff Freedman, while he does get caught up in the excitement of the tourney games (having grown up in the Philadelphia area, he’s a big Villanova fan), there is an entirely different Madness in the world of NCAA sports with which he is familiar — the kind that currently lingers like a cloud (slowly passing while casting a sometimes ignored shadow) over the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team.

As UConn prepares for its Final Four appearance in Detroit this weekend, the talk in the news (and at office water coolers, for that matter) seems to be as much, or almost as much, about possible violation of rules in recruiting practices as the team’s prospects for a championship.

Freedman, only a decade ago, might have been a person investigating a case much more substantial than this. He spent eight years working for the NCAA as an enforcement staff attorney and is familiar with the violations that he says run rampant throughout collegiate sports.

Freedman says he is surprised to hear the head honcho of the team, Coach Jim Calhoun himself, is being investigated for illegal recruiting practices in light of former Oklahoma University Coach Kelvin Sampson being barred from making any recruiting calls in 2006. Freedman, though, is not surprised to hear about any school, including UConn, being investigated.

“Coaches are willing to do anything to get a competitive advantage in recruiting prospective student athletes,” he said. “Their livelihood and the university’s reputation are at stake and dependent on what an [18- to 22-year-old] does on and off the football field or basketball court.”

Freedman worked with the NCAA enforcement staff from early 1992 through 2000 as one of a dozen investigators who looked into NCAA rules violations. While most fans are exposed only to the slam dunks, buzzer-beating 3-pointer excitement and Cinderella stories that unfold on their wide-screen televisions, there is so much more that happens behind the scenes in NCAA basketball — and in other sports for that matter.

Illegal recruiting practices, poor graduation rates — which Freedman says are “abysmal” — and SAT fraud are prevalent, he said.

“I saw the whole spectrum of everything wrong with NCAA athletics, and it’s a big business — unfortunately, it’s a big business as you can see with March Madness,” said Freedman, adding that CBS, which televises the NCAA men’s tourney every year, invests millions of dollars into NCAA sports.

“The question is, are student-athletes getting an education, and from what I saw at the NCAA when I was doing my ... eight years of investigation — the answer is [often] no,” Freedman added.

Freedman says he worked high-profile cases, investigating primarily Division I men’s basketball and football cases, including basketball at UNLV, Cincinnati and LSU, as well football at Michigan State and Georgia. He wore two hats, typically spending a year or 15 months investigating a school and interviewing principle parties and then shifting gears to become a prosecutor and present the NCAA’s case to the Committee on Infractions. Freedman went to law school at the University of Denver after playing collegiate sports during his undergraduate days at Macalester College in St Paul, Minn. A basketball and tennis player, he was an NCAA Academic-American and went on to play a year of tennis on the Professional Tennis Satellite Tour.

Upon taking the job with the NCAA (at the time based in Overland Park, Kan.), Freedman says he was on the road 75 percent of the time, interviewing principles, digging for facts.

Freedman said a lot of what he saw is somewhat similar to the movie Blue Chips, although he considers the movie to be a little bit overblown.

The purpose of the enforcement staff, Freedman says, is to create a level playing field for all universities so no one university is getting away with an unfair competitive advantage.

So how does word leak out about a possible violation, you might be wondering. Freedman said schools report rival schools or students who lose a scholarship might file a report. If someone breaks up with a student-athlete he or she reports their former boyfriend or girlfriend. Newspaper reporters break stories, Freedman added. High-profile transfer athletes are automatically interviewed and top-ranked athletes are also interviewed, he added.

“It’s mind-boggling what occurs at the major sports level,” Freedman said.

While it would seem to make sense that if the reputation of a program is at stake that proper procedure would be followed, the risk-reward factor leads coaches to take the risk for the glory and the money.

“Often they roll the dice because chances are you’re not going to get investigated by the NCAA,” Freedman said.

There are too many schools and athletes in relation to the number of investigators.

Freedman said he saw a lot of money being paid to student athletes, prospective student athletes and their families, as well as academic fraud and other extra-benefit legislation violations.

Enforcement staffers made cold visits to those they had to interview — oftentimes in bad neighborhoods. Freedman said he had his life threatened by coaches and boosters … and even had a gun pulled on him by a sheriff whom he needed to question. He used an unusual approach to defuse the situation, asking the sheriff if it was a bad time to talk.

Freedman’s outgoing upbeat personality carries over into his new line of work.

In 2000, Freedman left the NCAA and became director of Camp Winaukee, a sports camp in New Hampshire. He is still on the road for part of the year, but Freedman now works with children enjoying themselves in a less intense sports environment at summer camp rather than investigating big-time athletes and athletic programs for possible wrongdoings.

Freedman is married to Cindy, a former NCAA All-American diver (who Freedman jokes he never investigated). She is an occupational therapist who specializes in aquatic therapy and works with physically challenged children in the water. The Freedmans have three children — Zoë, Chloe and Beau — all of whom, not surprisingly, enjoy athletics.