5. CCNY’s point-shaving costs the basketball program everything
When you think of the blue bloods of college basketball, some names rattle off the tip of your tongue very quickly, like Duke, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Back in the early days of the NCAA Tournament, another name belonged on that list: the City College of New York, or CCNY for short.
CCNY developed into a dominant basketball power in Division I, pulling off the unprecedented double of winning both the NCAA Tournament and the NIT in 1950. No school has accomplished this since due to restrictions over how many postseason bids a program can accept in one year, but there is no doubt that CCNY was supremely talented.
The Beavers were taken down by the point-shaving scandal we mentioned earlier with Kentucky’s 1951 team, which was forced to sit out a season, but things were far worse at CCNY. Several star players were implicated in the point-shaving fiasco, and the corruption was so widespread that CCNY suffered severe consequences.
The school was banned from playing games at Madison Square Garden, a death sentence for a prominent program in terms of recruiting. CCNY’s administration, also disturbed by the various allegations of corruption that emerged after the point-shaving scandal, eventually shut down the school’s athletic program.
The Beavers resumed playing basketball eventually, but they dropped down to what is now the Division III level, and it seems that CCNY has no aspirations of ever returning to the top-level of college basketball. The case of CCNY is a cautionary tale for all college basketball programs since they were at the top of the sport and lost everything.