Welcome to the NCAA Final Four, where 'cheating' isn't cheating and everything's swell

HOUSTON – The fact that on Selection Sunday, the NCAA mistakenly sent a text to South Carolina inviting the Gamecocks to the men's basketball tournament, only to quickly reverse course – Steve Harvey style – and say the invitation was meant for someone else instead is, well, pretty comical.

At least it is unless you're a member of the South Carolina basketball program, which instead got stuck in the NIT.

"Regrettably, a text meant for another institution went to South Carolina instead," Dan Gavitt, NCAA vice president of men's basketball championships acknowledged here on Thursday. At least, the NCAA didn't Snapchat a middle finger to Valpo.

Welcome to the 2016 Final Four, which ought to just toss out its old marketing slogan ("The Road Ends Here") and go with a new one ("Hey, Nobody's Perfect").

Clerical snafus, a leaked bracket that (thankfully) undermined a dreadful two-hour selection show and a semifinal game featuring North Carolina and Syracuse, who were both involved in recent NCAA scandals, has made the road here a little bumpy.

"I understand why optically people have a lot of questions around all that," NCAA president Mark Emmert said on Thursday.

Sure, but only if they take this stuff too seriously, right?

"When they say 'cheating,' that's not true," said Syracuse's Jim Boeheim who's program was banned from last year's tournament and personally served a nine-game suspension this season for a case that included, among other items, having athletic staffers complete a player's paper, log into his email and submit it to a professor on his behalf.

"Rules being broken is a lot different," Boeheim explained. "Cheating to me is intentionally doing something, like you wanted to get this recruit, you arranged a job for him, or you went to see him when you shouldn't. You called him when you shouldn't to gain an edge in recruiting, to get a really good player.

"That's cheating."

Glad we got that cleared up. Boeheim has a point, by the way. He probably isn't the best to make it.

"I'll let Coach Boeheim define that how he wants to," Emmert said. "But the committee determined these are clear violations of the rules and that, therefore, it warranted some pretty significant sanctions, and they were imposed."

See, that's not really in the spirit of being magnanimous.

Also not considered cheating, at least not yet, is having your program involved in a two-decade system of academic fraud using no-show or no-work classes through the African and Afro-American Studies Department. Carolina's case has been rolling around for years, but the NCAA, which at first deemed the case out of its purview but has since reversed course, still hasn't gotten around to making any real charges.

It's infuriated fans around the country who figure actually educating the players should carry a little more urgency than, say, whether an agent bought a future pro an impermissible slice of pizza.

Every Final Four has a brush with uncomfortable reality. It's tougher to hide this year. CBS has made Carolina vs. Syracuse the prime game Saturday Night. (Referees: Bond, Schoeneck and King.)

This is still a topic because when Williams won his first NCAA title in 2005, it was one tear-filled feel-good moment. Man, CBS could hardly contain itself over that one. Ol' Roy finally won the big one, dadgumit. Of course, that UNC team featured seven players who earned degrees from the African and Afro-American Studies Department and thee others who didn't graduate at all.

At the time, the NCAA referred to all of them as "student-athletes."

One of the guys who didn't graduate was junior star Rashad McCants, who in the fall semester of that championship season failed two classes: algebra and psychology. (Don't ask why a college junior was taking algebra, let's just assume it was very challenging version of algebra.) With his eligibility on the line, McCants enrolled in four of the now discredited classes in the spring and, while winning the championship and declaring for the NBA, managed straight A's in every one of them – a 4.0 GPA to go with his 16.0 ppg.

McCants says the classwork was all a joke. In an interview with ESPN he described his academic career as "almost a tragedy."

On Monday, the NCAA still referred to all the players as "student-athletes."

You just have to trust it's true this time. Or maybe just ignore it and talk about the games and the pageantry and "One Shining Moment."

"We have talked about it so much, it's been such a big story that I'm tired of it," Williams said on Friday. "We have, in my opinion, the greatest sporting event there is, the Final Four, going on. It's about four schools, four teams, four coaching staffs who have worked their tails off to get here.

"All that other stuff that sometimes I call 'junk' has been talked about too much."

Even if some are arguing that Syracuse and Carolina show that cheating – er, "junk," er, "rules being broken" – pays.

"I would disagree with those observations that people have," Emmert said.

So let's just move on. Everything is good. Everything is fine. Sometimes things go a little haywire.

Like South Carolina's NCAA invite that wasn't, there's nothing to see here, not now, not ever.

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