John Oliver Bashes NCAA in Latest Edition of "Last Week Tonight"
Have you heard of him? No? Well, this would be the best time to seek him out on YouTube (or in your TV guide, if you happen to be an HBO subscriber). John Oliver is an English political satirist, writer, producer, TV host, voice actor, critic and stand-up comedian, and he is the host of HBO's late night talk and news satire show Last Week Tonight. He usually covers sensitive topics that the mainstream media does not like to talk about - among his topics we can find the way the US handles its translators in war zones, the crumbling state of the infrastructure, the sometimes hilarious election campaigns of judges, and many other things that need to be said. What does this English guy have to do with college basketball, you might ask? Well, in the latest edition of his show he says a few nice words about the NCAA and its attitude towards its players.
The first shocking thing Oliver reveals in his piece about March Madness is the amount of ad revenue generated by the championship - over a billion dollars, which is bigger than the amount Super Bowl generates in a year. No wonder - he says that there is not much left to be sponsored in March Madness. Even the tradition of cutting the nets down has its own sponsor today - in the video Oliver presents Werner as the provider of the official ladder of the Final Four.
Oliver then proceeds to talking about the NCAA, a billion dollar sports enterprise where the athletes are not paid a penny - simply because they are amateurs, who can't be hired to play. He compares this situation with a sweatshop in the back, where children make the same t-shirt for months. He continues to wonder how can a championship which doesn't pay the athletes at all having so many rules, that are by the way so easy to break - a 440 page manual that they must follow to the letter. He mentions a case when one student athlete's parent has passed away, and Rick Majerus bought him lunch before putting him on a plane - for which he was suspended. Another athlete was kicked out because he got a discount on a ballroom he rented for his 21st birthday.
There is so much more in John Oliver's piece about the tricks and hacks of NCAA - things you won't believe, but they are true, as the show is always doing its homework and setting things straight. It's worth to be watched, even if you have to abandon playing your favorite euro palace online casino games in the process...
