I would like to preface this article by saying that all of this is factually unsubstantiated. The following thoughts are merely my own musings.
So how does women’s basketball coach Nancy Fahey do it? How do you lose two All-Americans and First Team UAA players and only return 14 points to a starting line-up and still sit atop arguably the toughest conference in Division III women’s basketball? Here are a few possibilities:
1. Hustling: Hustling is normally a good thing in basketball, but not in the Paul Newman sense. Fahey and her Bears were holding back in the non-conference games so the UAA opponents wouldn’t see the real deal. The Bears hid plays along with talented bench players so that the loss of sophomore Shanna-Lei Dacanay looked to be the final nail in the season’s coffin. Dropping out of the national rankings for the first time in years (and then jumping to the 11th spot, the largest jump in poll history) was just all part of Fahey’s plan. Just call them “Fast Eddie” because the UAA just got played.
2. Bribery: In one of the largest scams to hit college basketball since the feces hit the fan in Michigan, Fahey and her staff paid the contending UAA schools to play poorly. How else can one explain the then second-ranked Yellow Jackets of Rochester shooting barely over 20 percent and NYU giving up 32 points to Sarah Schell? It could be that the Bears defense and Schell are just that good, but people still think there was only one shooter that day in Dallas, so why not a Division III basketball bribery scam? Could be fun.
3. Secret Scholarships: Perhaps Fahey and her staff have secretly been sliding money and other incentives in order to entice freshmen and transfers to choose the Danforth Campus over other schools. I suspect fake cushy “jobs,” free clothing and even payoffs from alumni. There are far too many new and expensive cars parked by the Athletic Complex. Now that I think about it, they could just be from the law school, but I’m still suspicious.
I’ve come up with some other potential reasons (some of which involve alien abduction, for which I had no conclusive evidence so I decided to withhold), but the above reasons should be enough to cause a reaction from the NCAA violations committee. It’s like Ohio State losing to Florida in the championship – it just doesn’t make any sense.
There has to be a reason other than Fahey’s 472 wins and four National Championships. It can’t be that the Bears have had six different top scorers this season and are holding opponents to only 56 points per game. I demand an investigation before Fahey’s previously unranked team runs away with the UAA championship and into the postseason.