Someday You Won’t Be an NFL Player in a Mercedes-Benz
5
ARE COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYERS EXPLOITED?
At age twenty, Akiem Hicks was, according to the NCAA, a very, very bad person. Hicks’s high school GPA was unimpressive, which initially held him back from Division I football, redirecting him to Sacramento City College, a juco—scouts’ slang for “junior college”—near his hometown of Elk Grove, California. But grades were not the reason for the NCAA’s wrath.
Hicks was a very, very bad person because he crossed the NCAA by failing to abide by every line of its 426 pages of petty-tyrant rules. In 2009, after Hicks spent two years at the juco, an assistant coach at Louisiana State University, a Division I power, made “impermissible phone calls” to him, using a cell phone that was not on the list of phones that LSU annually submits to the NCAA. Hicks was such a bad person that when his phone rang, he answered!
Speaking on the phone was appalling enough—Virginia Tech records all phone calls from coaches to possible recruits and keeps the tapes five years, to refute any accusation of impermissible phone calls. There was more to Hicks’s shocking transgressions. Offered a scholarship to LSU, Hicks explained that he had little money, having made the mistake of not being born to affluent parents. He accepted plane fare, then lived for a few months in a vacant Baton Rouge apartment owned by an LSU booster, not paying the full market rent. Prospective LSU students from well-to-do families don’t worry about paying their travel expenses to college. So why didn’t Hicks arrange to be born into a well-to-do family? That worked for other kids!
Finally, after accepting help whose sum reached several hundred dollars, Hicks let an LSU student buy him a meal. The horror! The NCAA’s bylaw 16.5.2.h reads, “An institution may provide fruit, nuts and bagels to a student-athlete at any time.” But other meals, even sandwiches and cookies, are subject to elaborate regulations.
In 2010, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan publicly ridiculed the bagel rule, saying the NCAA paid more attention to snacks than to academics. Was the NCAA embarrassed to be called out by the secretary of education? No, because the NCAA is beyond embarrassment. It has evolved an elaborate system to convert the free labor of young men into luxury living for NCAA and college-conference officials. Petroleum-cartel officials fantasize about the kind of market stranglehold enjoyed by the NCAA. Energy customers can buy from a broad range of suppliers; the customers who want to televise major-college athletics buy NCAA-branded products exclusively. The games must be of high quality. Whether education is of high quality is not the NCAA’s concern.
The Hicks case is not some isolated instance. In 2008, the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer reported that University of North Carolina football and men’s basketball players were enrolled in e-mail Swahili “courses” that had no instructors, never met and always led to A’s. Eventually, an investigation conducted by a former governor of North Carolina found the school had courses that required no work, which many football and basketball players enrolled in so as not to cut into athletic time, and found many altered grades with forged signatures. Some professors were fired or forced to retire, the football coach was fired, and the University of North Carolina was, as it should have been, profoundly embarrassed.
The NCAA sanctioned the University of North Carolina football program for a second scandal, involving sports agents, that was a factor in the firing of the coach. The NCAA took no action against the school for its extremely low athletic educational standards, though did elaborately investigate, then permanently ban from NCAA sports, a football player named Michael McAdoo. He couldn’t understand the “class,” so asked a former tutor to help him with an assignment: the tutor ended up doing the bibliography, which would be an honor-code violation at any university. Fitting punishment might have been a letter of reprimand. Hilariously, an attorney for the NCAA declared that McAdoo had to be banished because “the NCAA takes academic fraud very seriously”—yet was silent on the university’s systematic offerings of fake courses. McAdoo was a convenient fall guy, while the University of North Carolina is a moneyed institution whose cash flow had to be preserved.
There are no words strong enough to express how little the NCAA cares about whether the football or men’s basketball players who generate economic returns also receive an education. To the NCAA, the barometric pressure on the planet Neptune matters more than whether football and men’s basketball athletes receive educations.
* * *
LEARNING IN THE HICKS CASE OF THE DEEPLY SHOCKING phone calls and the free cheeseburger, the NCAA conducted an investigation that must have cost a hundred times as much as the benefits Hicks received. Acting without fear or favor, the supersleuths from NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis discovered the smoking Post-it note: several times Hicks called an LSU football office assistant who had been nice to him, to ask if she’d heard if his scholarship offer was going to go through. When she saw his messages, she returned the calls. The horror! NCAA rules say that potential enrollees may call colleges, but in most instances colleges can’t return the calls. This rule dates from the time when long-distance service was expensive—the logic was, make the kids’ families be the ones to pay for the call.
The NCAA got to the bottom of those returned phone calls and banished Hicks permanently from NCAA sports. Hicks spent a year working in a corporate call center, then enrolled at the University of Regina in Canada, beyond the reach of the NCAA. Completing school, Hicks was drafted, in 2012, by the New Orleans Saints. With luck, he will achieve the three-year average NFL career. The kicker: in 2013, the NCAA eliminated the phone-call restrictions it used to throw Hicks out of American collegiate football.
* * *
TRYING TO HUSTLE UP A scholarship is an extremely grave offense, according to the NCAA, if you are a penniless prospective college student. If you’re a wealthy head football coach who’s thinking of breaking his word, putting yourself first is fine. Around the time the NCAA investigated Hicks’s shocking attempt to enroll at LSU, Les Miles, the head football coach there, while under contract to LSU, talked to the president of the University of Michigan about that school’s vacant head-coaching position.
Miles was a hot commodity, as LSU was about to face Ohio State in football’s national title game. For making a few phone calls, a poor kid named Akiem Hicks was banished from the NCAA. For making his phone calls, the millionaire Miles was rewarded with a contract extension, raising his pay to $3.7 million annually; Michigan’s interest gave him leverage. Later his deal would be raised again, to $4.4 million annually, plus the promise of a stunning $19 million severance payment should he be fired. The big severance number essentially made Miles a tenured football coach.
When Hicks tried to shop for his best deal, the NCAA was outraged. When Miles shopped for his best deal, that behavior was totally fine with the NCAA—as was LSU’s 44 percent graduation rate for African-American football players for the year in which the Tigers defeated Ohio State, winning the national title.
While the NCAA took no action regarding low educational standards at big-money, football-factory universities whose games regularly air on national television, woe unto the Occidental College women’s volleyball team! In 2013, the NCAA dropped the hammer on Occidental women’s volleyball—a Division III program that does not award athletic scholarships. Occidental, the NCAA declared in full gravitas, “arranged for a booster to provide travel, lodging and meals to student-athletes.” Amusing enough is the notion that lurking in the shadows is a wealthy booster for Occidental women’s volleyball, which annually squares off against the likes of Claremont-Mudd-Scripps and Cal State San Marcos. The NCAA’s sanction announcement read like a Saturday Night Live sketch, pronouncing “public reprimand and censure” for Occidental, and declaring “the vacation of volleyball records,” which makes it sound as if the records are on their way to Los Cabos.
The NCAA comes down like a ton on bricks on Occidental College, which has a strong academic reputation and almost no sports revenue, while averting its eyes from low graduation rates at the big-money football factories. Auburn has fake classes for football players, Occidental has a booster who pays hotel bills: Occidental is the one punished. But then to the NCAA, the price of sorghum in Tajikistan matters more than education.
* * *
THE NETWORKS THAT BROADCAST COLLEGE sports feel the same way. ABC, CBS, ESPN, Fox and NBC almost never speak the words graduation rate while airing college football. Mentioning this is bad for business! Though, the networks do sometimes run little sidebar snippets about what a great student some member of a team is, in order to generate a pleasing impression that all is well.
Richard Southall, a professor at the University of North Carolina, found that at the sixty-four colleges that sent men’s teams to the 2012 March Madness tournament, black athletes were 33 percent less likely to graduate than black nonathletes attending the same schools. (This figure takes into account basketball players who leave college early for the NBA.) Southall has also found that in 2010, the average graduation rate for Division I football players was 55 percent, compared to an average male graduation rate of 68 percent at the same colleges. The television audience wants to be entertained, not reminded that players are being taken advantage of. For the NCAA and its broadcast-network partners, and partner is the term both sides use, mentioning graduation rates is bad for business.
* * *
LET’S NOT JUST BLAME THE NCAA. To many big universities and their boards of regents, whether revenue-sport athletes receive educations is less important than, say, tide tables for the Gulf of Bothnia. All that matters is whether the money flows.
When the football program causes public controversy that threatens the money flow, many schools just cut to the chase and fabricate. In 2011, the Ohio State program was enmeshed in a football scandal that led to a bowl-game ban. University president Gordon Gee, paid $2 million annually by a taxpayer-subsidized school, declared Buckeye athletics should be viewed sympathetically because Ohio State football “ranked first in academic performance among the nation’s top twenty-five teams.”
Don’t you feel better now? But the statement was a lie. Gee’s office told me he was citing a ranking of football programs by Academic Progress Rate. Ohio State had indeed just received an NCAA commendation for improving its APR. But the Academic Progress Rate does not measure “academic performance,” rather, measures change from a previous score. What happened was that the prior Ohio State APR was awful, while the new APR rose to okay. Gee was mischaracterizing the content of a source document, an offense that would cause any college student to fail a course. In a spin-cycle world, all that mattered was that Gee lied and got away with it.
Other colleges noticed! A few months later, a football scandal began at the University of Miami. Donna Shalala, president of the school, tried to squirm her way out by declaring, “Nationally, the academic achievements of our student-athletes are mentioned in the same breath and spirit as Notre Dame and Stanford.” Allie Grasgreen, a reporter for the invaluable newsletter Inside Higher Ed, showed Shalala’s claim simply was not true: that year, Notre Dame and Stanford graduated an impressive 91 percent of scholarship athletes, while the University of Miami graduated 67 percent. The only person who mentions University of Miami academic achievements “in the same breath” as Stanford and Notre Dame is Shalala herself.
Caught in football scandals, the presidents of Ohio State and the University of Miami, major national institutions, bluffed their way out by saying things that weren’t true. Major universities ought to feel ashamed when their presidents lie in public. But if football money is involved, university integrity goes out the window.
* * *
DON’T GET THE IMPRESSION THE NCAA penalizes only poor African-Americans. Beginning in 2009, the NCAA conducted what the organization described as a “twenty-two-month investigation” of University of Tennessee men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl, a well-off white man, who would be fired in 2011.
Pearl lied to the NCAA during the absurdly long investigation, and just as college presidents should never lie, neither should coaches. But what triggered the investigation and led to the fib? Aaron Craft, a talented high school basketball player, was visiting the University of Tennessee with his family. It was an “unofficial visit,” meaning at the family’s expense. Craft and some relatives were invited to Pearl’s house for a cookout. The barbecued chicken, coleslaw and corn bread consumed were, the NCAA ruled, an “improper benefit.” High schoolers on campus visits cannot receive any item of value not offered to all students already enrolled. The rule is sensible as regardless envelopes of cash or Vegas weekends. In this case, the NCAA used a literalist reading to conclude that Pearl neglected to welcome the entire 21,250 University of Tennessee student body to the barbecue. Since any student may eat on campus but not all students were invited to Pearl’s backyard, having the Craft family over for chicken was, the NCAA ruled, a major violation.
The lie Pearl told was that a blurry cell-phone photo of his shaking hands with Craft was taken on campus, not by his gas grill. The horror!
NCAA recruiting strictures don’t distinguish between expensive, inappropriate gestures and routine hospitality such as providing dinner. Had Pearl offered no hospitality, then signed Craft and used him to win games, keeping Pearl’s $3.1 million coaching salary flowing and sustaining the $7 million annual net profit the University of Tennessee enjoys from men’s basketball, everything would have been fine. That, after all, is what the NCAA expects coaches to do—use kids to generate money, then keep the money. Paying for the Craft family’s dinner violated the spirit of this enlightened arrangement.
Here’s the kicker. In the course of the twenty-two-month investigation, culminating in a press conference with the chancellor of the University of Tennessee, the NCAA said nothing about the fact that Tennessee was graduating only 54 percent of its football players and 33 percent of its African-American men’s basketball players.
* * *
THE NCAA IGNORES EDUCATION BUT comes down hard on violations of the exact wording of its petty rules because the petty rules are the NCAA’s control structure. In 2012, the NCAA sanctioned the University of Nebraska for supplying professor-recommended books to football players—huffing that unless on a required reading list, books are an “impermissible benefit.” In recent years, the NCAA has issued sanctions against Princeton and Cal Tech, colleges with excellent graduation rates and high academic standards, for trivial violations. Princeton’s crime was that an alumnus paid part of the tuition for a tennis player who was a family friend. Shouldn’t helping kids pay for college be lauded? To the NCAA, this was a “major violation.” Something the NCAA frowns upon—getting an education—was involved.
While Princeton and Cal Tech were being sanctioned, the NCAA said nothing about the University of Arizona, a sports powerhouse, graduating 41 percent of its African-American football players and 25 percent of its African-American men’s basketball players; said nothing about the University of Mississippi, school of Super Bowl MPV Eli Manning and of Michael Oher, hero of The Blind Side, graduating 52 percent of its African-American football players.
The NCAA was so mad at Bruce Pearl for not showing obeisance to its authority in petty matters that Pearl was effectively banned from college coaching. Yet the NCAA has never taken any action regarding University of Kentucky men’s basketball coach John Calipari, whose prior wins at the University of Massachusetts were “vacated” owing to cash payments to a player, and whose prior wins at the University of Memphis were “vacated” because a star player faked his SAT scores.
William Kirwan, head of the Knight Commission, is a University of Kentucky graduate. “I bleed blue [Kentucky’s color], but I could not make myself watch the 2012 March Madness championship game with Kentucky in it,” he says. “Calipari is disgusting, Everywhere he goes, he makes a mockery of the whole concept of academics in college sports. And he gets away with it because the NCAA does nothing, the networks say nothing.” Indeed, the CBS broadcast of the 2012 March Madness final game showed many adoring camera angles of Calipari pacing the courtside—great for his recruiting—but was nearly silent regarding his stained record. All that matters to the NCAA and to sports broadcasters is that Calipari assembles exciting teams that generate revenue.
In the rare cases when the NCAA takes substantive action, it first delays as long as possible. The NCAA sat for five years on information about serious violations at USC, before finally putting the school on probation and in effect revoking the Heisman Trophy awarded in 2005 to Reggie Bush. The NCAA took two years to act regarding medium-strength violations at Ohio State. The NCAA knows that the longer it drags its heels, the more money flows into the bank at big universities.
In 2012, the NCAA required just ten days to act after a report by former FBI director Louis Freeh detailed extensive corruption at the football program and administration of Penn State. Finally, rapid action by the NCAA! But it took the systematic rape of children, followed by a cover-up by Penn State’s highest officials, to push the NCAA to quick action. Even then the Penn State penalties were calculated to ensure Penn State football would not be jeopardized. Systematic rape of children was, the NCAA thought, not good; but not enough for the NCAA to feel a college sports program had gone too far.
* * *
FUNDAMENTALLY, THE NCAA IS A business. Its business is converting the popularity of college athletics, and the good standing of higher education in American society, into luxury living for college coaches, presidents, athletic directors and NCAA officialdom. NCAA president Mark Emmert makes $1.6 million per year, money that wouldn’t go into his pocket unless the NCAA power position were maintained. Libby Sander of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2010 that below Emmert some fourteen NCAA officials averaged $429,000 annually in pay. Emmert and the other top NCAA executives realize their personal wealth partly by treating sports excitement as more important than education, including educations for low-income African-Americans. In many businesses, the CEO wallows in money as average workers suffer. That is also the NCAA arrangement.
The members of the board of directors of the NCAA, who approve Emmert’s pay, all are presidents of universities or chancellors of state university systems: meaning it is in their interest for Emmert’s salary to be high because the number will be used in the compensation surveys upon which their own incomes are based.
You’ve surmised of course that the NCAA is tax-exempt, enriching its executives while masquerading as a philanthropy. That $10.8 billion CBS and Turner Broadcasting have agreed to pay the NCAA? Mostly tax free. “The primary purpose of the NCAA is to maintain intercollegiate athletics as an integral part of the educational program,” the organization’s mission statement declares—in garbled grammar that suggests “the educational program” did not do NCAA officials much good. The actual primary purpose of the NCAA is to divert money from unpaid athletes to overpaid NCAA executives, college coaches and administrators.
* * *
YET IS THE NCAA TO blame for all that ails collegiate sports? Some faint praise is due.
Gymnastics, fencing, soccer, tennis—in the many college sports that lose money, scandals are rare, graduation rates are strong. So the NCAA does regulate some sports well. Colleges don’t have to join the NCAA: they could opt for its lower-cost rival, the NAIA, or simply not offer intercollegiate sports. Big universities join the NCAA to have access to its structured competition, while even high-end academic colleges without football join the NCAA—Swarthmore is a member—because its blue-dot logo is prestigious.
Overall at public universities, athletes have a higher graduation rate than students as a whole. Most athletes are disciplined, possess good work habits and budget their time, qualities that lend themselves to classroom success.
But high graduation rates in the nonrevenue sports mask low rates in the sports where the money comes from. The NCAA never tires of noting, often in television advertising during high-profile college sports events, that athletes graduate at a higher rate than students generally; the NCAA just doesn’t add that “revenue sport” athletes, the football and men’s basketball players who make money for colleges, graduate at a lower rate than students generally.
Playing college football or basketball is a major commitment, but does not involve so much time that good graduation rates cannot be expected. Women’s basketball shows this. College women’s basketball has nearly identical practice and performance schedules to men’s basketball. At women’s basketball power Baylor University, 90 percent of African-American female basketball players graduate, versus 50 percent for the men’s team. At the University of Connecticut, another basketball power, the most recent year saw 83 percent of African-American women’s players graduate, versus 14 percent for the men’s team.
The NCAA has most control over basketball because the NCAA holds the rights to the annual March Madness tournament. A 2010 contract among the NCAA, CBS and Turner Broadcasting pays the NCAA an average of $770 million annually for the broadcast rights. The NCAA funds itself from this considerable treasure chest, then distributes the largest share to member conferences based on basketball victories. A small fraction is distributed for academic support, but there are no GPA or graduation requirements. A winning college with terrible educational statistics receives more than a losing college whose players graduate.
Take a wild guess what effect this incentive structure has on athletic directors. Secretary of Education Duncan said in 2011, “It is time the NCAA revenue distribution plan stopped handsomely rewarding success on the court with multimillion-dollar payouts to schools that fail to meet minimum academic standards.” The NCAA ignored the secretary of education.
Yet without the NCAA or something like it—and the present NCAA is so sullied, “something like it” is needed—the college sports landscape would devolve into a Wild West, where payola was the norm rather than the exception, where even more football and men’s basketball players laughed at the notion of going to class. The NCAA does fight a rearguard action against that outcome. For the 2012 football season, Central Florida, North Carolina, Ohio State and Penn State were banned from bowl appearances owing to scandals. Were it not for the NCAA, even such modest consequences would not loom, and scandals would be more frequent.
* * *
BUT IT’S ONLY SCANDALS, NOT lack of emphasis on education, that the NCAA opposes. Scandals cause bad publicity. Lack of emphasis on education is practically built into the NCAA system. For decades, the organization mandated that member schools offer only year-by-year athletic aid. That meant a football or men’s basketball player admitted as a freshman was not assured of an athletic scholarship as sophomore; a sophomore granted a scholarship was not assured of one as a junior; and so on. In the NCAA-standard year-to-year scholarship, a coach can yank an athlete’s financial support at any time, without so much as stating a reason.
As a practical matter, the year-by-year NCAA scholarship grants the football or men’s basketball coach control over a player’s life. The player must please the coach or lose his scholarship, which likely means leaving school. If a player needs to study for an exam but also is due in the weight room, he goes to the weight room. If a football or men’s basketball player is not motivated to get an education, the fault is his. But a player who really wants an education may accede to a coach’s insistence that sports come first, skipping class or taking a rocks-for-jocks course load. Washington Redskins star Alfred Morris majored in “exercise science” at Florida Atlantic. Even Stanford advises football players to enroll in “Social Dances of North America” and similar courses, according to the good-government organization California Watch.
For NCAA coaches, having players ignore the classroom helps them focus on football, generating victories that mean money for the coach, but nothing for the athlete. If football players fail to graduate, there are no ramifications for the college or the coach.
The year-by-year scholarship was required by the NCAA; member schools could not opt out. The arrangement was intended to keep football and men’s basketball players powerless, unable ever to say to a coach, “I don’t like the way you treat people,” or, heaven forbid, “I need more time to study.” A drama or history student on regular financial aid might lose that aid if he or she stopped turning in work. But if the student simply did not do as well in college as expected, the financial aid office would not toss him or her aside. NCAA football and men’s basketball players have been sent packing by colleges simply for not looking good in games.
When Barack Obama was elected president, he asked the Justice Department to open an investigation of the NCAA’s year-to-year rule, which seemed to constitute restraint of trade. The logic: Forbidding one school from offering a multiyear scholarship to an athlete restrains its ability to compete with other schools for the same student, which in turn harms the consumer, in this case the consumer of higher education. Faced with Justice Department action, in 2011 the NCAA announced it would allow members to offer multiyear scholarships.
This reform is hardly a panacea—colleges might offer a multiyear scholarship, then if a football player never starts, yank the scholarship by claiming violation of team rules. How would you know what rules were violated? You wouldn’t.
* * *
THE FAMILY EDUCATIONAL RIGHTS AND Privacy Act, passed by Congress in 1974, is a godsend to hypocrisy in collegiate athletics. The law was intended to block public access to the school records of minors. Since reading its fine print, colleges have used FERPA to deny release of information about the classroom performance or behavior of football and basketball players, though all college athletes are adults. As recently as 2003, many universities cited FERPA as grounds to refuse to disclose even aggregate (anonymous) graduation rates for football and basketball athletes.
Since a 2004 agreement with the federal Department of Education, colleges have reported aggregate graduation data to the NCAA, which publishes the numbers without names attached. Disclosure had the desired impact. Embarrassed by low graduation rates, many colleges are putting more effort into educating football players. Since first disclosure in 2004, overall NCAA graduation averages have slowly but steadily risen.
FERPA has been useful to NCAA programs not wanting bad press about football players. In 2008, Cam Newton, who would in 2011 be the number-one selection of the NFL draft, was dismissed from the University of Florida. The school refused to comment on why it was sending away one of the nation’s most sought-after football players. Florida said it could not explain without violating Newton’s FERPA rights, an extremely convenient thing for Florida to say, especially about an adult. Later, court documents showed that Newton had been arrested for theft; charges were dropped after he completed a court-ordered program. FERPA gave the University of Florida a pretext for saying nothing about the theft allegation, which it knew of. Probably bad-behavior issues by NCAA football players often are hushed up using FERPA—though since nothing is disclosed, who knows? And FERPA makes it nearly impossible to determine whether an athlete who claims to have a college degree actually does.
* * *
THE MULTIYEAR SCHOLARSHIP, JUST BECOMING common as this book is written, may shift some leverage toward the athlete who truly wants an education. A better solution would be a six-year scholarship. Any young man signing a football commitment to a Division I university would receive a contract promising six years of tuition, room and board—essentially an extra year, after the NCAA-maximum five years in athletics concludes. There could be a neutral-arbitration clause to prevent holders of six-year scholarships from just hanging around college without doing schoolwork, or to sanction them for violating reasonable team or college rules.
Many college football players give their all to the game and discover, as their eligibility expires, that the NFL has no interest. By then they are down to at most one remaining semester of tuition, room and board—too late to repair a bad transcript. With a six-year scholarship, when a football player’s on-field career ended and the NFL did not come calling, he would have three more semesters of tuition, room and board to be a full-time college student, not distracted by sports. That should be sufficient to finish his credits and graduate.
A six-year rule would not cause onerous costs to colleges—about $700,000 annually if all football players who completed their eligibility stayed for a sixth year. Not all football players would need or even want a sixth year, so the actual cost should be lower. Except perhaps at the lowest-tier programs—the University of Akron Zips, Division I’s perennial doormat, had just $6 million in football revenue in 2010–11—an extra $700,000 could be found, for the progressive purpose of allowing football players to complete their degrees after their strenuous physical efforts to make money for the school.
A college could protect itself against sixth-year costs by placing serious academic requirements on football players, so they graduate with the class they entered with and don’t require extra semesters after taping their ankles for the final time.
* * *
IN 2011 THE NCAA, CONCERNED about its reputation, put in force a dramatic new rule—that Division I football and men’s basketball teams must have a 50 percent graduation rate to appear in bowl games or the March Madness tournament. Take that, critics of the NCAA! Now there must be at least one player who achieves a diploma for each one who leaves college empty-handed.
Well, not “now.” The rule does not take effect until 2015. The Knight Commission had been urging the NCAA since 2001 to mandate at least 50 percent graduation for the rewards of postseason play. That it took the NCAA a full decade to agree to this extremely modest reform—and then implementation was delayed—is NCAA politics in a nutshell.
A quick check of the database shows that had the 50 percent graduation minimum gone into effect as soon as approved by the NCAA, it would have barred powerhouse universities Ohio State, Syracuse, USC and Connecticut from recent men’s basketball tournaments, the horn of the NCAA’s plenty. So the NCAA enacted the rule but postponed implementation, giving big-money programs years in which either to improve or find ways to finesse the new minimum.
* * *
FINDING THE LOOPHOLE TURNED OUT not to take five years but five minutes. What the NCAA announced to the press as a strict new 50 percent graduation rate actually was a requirement of an Academic Progress Rate of at least 930.
In 2003, knowing the dreaded day was near in which graduation statistics would become public information, the NCAA devised the Academic Progress Rate. The plan was to change the discussion from diplomas and GPA, which are easily understood, to the APR, a metric lacking any commonsense meaning. In 2012, the NCAA announced that overall APR for intercollegiate sports increased from 967 to 973. Do you have the slightest idea what 973 means in educational terms? Good, because you’re not supposed to.
Kirwan says the APR is “intended to be incomprehensible.” The NCAA says for the record that an APR system is needed because graduation rates do not reflect athletes leaving college for the pros. But each year only about 1.5 percent of men’s basketball players leave early for an NBA tryout, while far less than 1 percent of football players leave early hoping to reach the NFL. The claim about early-departure athletes is a smoke screen.
The APR scale is configured so that utter academic malfeasance registers about a 900, and perfection registers 1,000. It’s as if an SAT test, with a maximum of 800, had a minimum of 750. The result is that every university’s APR number is within shouting distance of the maximum, making it seem that every big-college sports program is closing in on educational perfection. “Hey, Mom, I got a 750 on my SAT!”
Maggie Severns is an educational analyst for the New America Foundation, who produces an annual Academic BCS showing which college football programs would make the top bowl games if graduation rates were a factor. She explains, “The APR is not rigorous. Half the score is awarded merely for having athletes enrolled in school, so everyone starts with 500 of the 1,000 points.” That means the NCAA’s claimed scale of 1,000 actually is a scale of 500—and the 2012 average, 973, is not 97 percent of ideal as the NCAA likes to say, but 95 percent, as the 973 equates to 473 on a scale on 500.
It’s a small difference, but careful use of numbers is the sort of thing you’re supposed to learn in college. The NCAA, which sets itself up as an arbiter of higher education, regularly issues studies or press releases containing grammatical errors, and often errs with numbers. A high school core-credit GPA of at least 2 is required to be approved by the NCAA’s athletic clearinghouse center, for example. But the NCAA doesn’t say a GPA of 2 or perhaps of 2.0—its documents say a GPA of “2.000” is required. NCAA officials themselves seem never to have passed a core course in numerical literacy.
Exaggerating the top end of the scale is the least of the APR’s problems. Severns continues, “The other 500 points are awarded not for graduation rates or classroom performance, but for keeping athletes eligible to play. Eligibility is usually defined as passing eight credit hours in a semester, and eight credit hours is a part-time student. The APR goals are so amazingly low that exceeding the minimum is rolling-off-a-log easy. Amazingly low goals tell nothing about education.”
According to the NCAA, an APR of 930 means a college is on track to graduate 50 percent of scholarship athletes. Why a proxy, rather than simply use graduation rates? Because everyone knows what “failing to graduate at least 50 percent of athletes” means. “Failing to achieve an APR of 930” is gibberish.
If colleges somehow are unable to roll off the APR log, little happens. When Auburn won the BCS title in 2011, it was ranked 85th of 120 Division I football programs for APR. There were no consequences. In 2012, the NCAA sanctioned fifteen colleges for low APR numbers—but none were football factory universities and only one was a big-money men’s basketball school. The NCAA lowered the boom on Hampton University and North Carolina A&T but took no action on the University of South Carolina, a mega-money sports mecca that finished 2012 ranked eighth but graduates fewer than half its African American football players. The most serious APR penalty ever assigned to a BCS-level football program came in 2011, when the NCAA temporarily reduced the University of Maryland from eighty-five to eighty-two football scholarships. Take that!
* * *
APOLOGISTS FOR NCAA INACTION MAINTAIN that big sports victories can’t happen along with strict academics. Yet the 2010 college football season ended with Stanford facing Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl and TCU facing Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl: all four schools have strong athletic-graduation rates. That year TCU finished second ranked in college football, Stanford finished fourth—above colleges that have powerhouse football teams but lax academic standards, such as Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi State.
Many colleges educate their athletes and also win big games. The 2010 March Madness tournament ended in a title contest of Duke versus Butler: both have strong athletic-graduation rates. In 2009 Villanova and William & Mary, both with outstanding academics, met in the Division 1AA football semifinals; Villanova went on to win the Division 1AA title. Four of the first forty-two players chosen in the 2012 NFL draft were from Stanford. At the end of the 2012 college football season, Stanford won the Rose Bowl, Northwestern won the Gator Bowl and Vanderbilt won the Music City Bowl. The latter two victories came over Mississippi State and North Carolina State, schools with low academic standards for athletes. Colleges where the football players go to class were also the ones that won high-pressure bowl games.
A happy milestone was reached in November 2012, when Notre Dame became the first college to be ranked number one in the football polls and number one in football graduation rates, proving a university can have high academic standards for athletes and still win. While one would have expected the NCAA to crow about Notre Dame’s accomplishment, instead it said little. Keep that bar low!
* * *
COACHES AND BOOSTERS NEVER DECLARE that low standards are needed to win, but that is what they would like spectators and lawmakers to believe. And in the end, coaches and boosters have more say in the matter than the NCAA.
No one huffs and puffs more about the NCAA than the head coaches, boosters and athletic directors of big-college programs, who want it to seem they live in terror of CIA-like compliance officers from Indianapolis. The coach and his recruiting coordinator may have a sleepless night waiting to hear whether a four-star commit had his transcript and SAT/ACT scores certified by the NCAA. Once that happens, the player belongs to the college, which makes almost all decisions regarding what he does and whether he remains eligible. In 2013, after Johnny Manziel of Texas A&M won the Heisman Trophy, Sports Illustrated reported that Manziel was “taking online courses [spring] semester to avoid the crush of autograph-seeking classmates.” It is Texas A&M, not the NCAA, that determined that clicking pages online in your dorm room constitutes being a college student. Manziel may not receive an education, but Texas A&M will keep all revenues he generates.
Three conferences—the Ivy League, the Patriot League (schools such as Georgetown University, Bucknell and Lehigh) and the New England Small College Athletic Conference (institutions such as Williams, Bowdoin and Amherst)—impose higher GPA and SAT/ACT admission standards on entering athletes than do the rest of collegiate sports. Even in these academics-first conferences, once a football player has been admitted, it’s up to the individual school whether he is eligible to play. Individual colleges are free to declare higher standards than the NCAA or conference minima, but few do.
When the money in college football began to skyrocket roughly around 1990, recruiting became a matter not just of pleasing the alumni with victories, but of attaining the premium athletes who would bring in the kind of big bucks now being bandied. The big bucks would ensure a cushy life for coaches, athletic directors and conference officials. By 2011, Larry Scott, commissioner of the Pac-12, would be paying himself $3.1 million annually, for administrating the logistics of college sports events. Other big-conference commissioners would enjoy similar paychecks, and as you have already guessed, big-college sports conferences are nonprofits, masquerading as public-service organizations while their executives roll in wealth.
When the money in college football began to rise, the conferences responded by lowering their internal standards for maintaining eligibility. A race-to-the-bottom developed. A recruiter from the SEC could say, “Don’t commit to Notre Dame; at Notre Dame they make you attend class. Come here and it will be nothing but football and parties.”
The three service academies, Boston College, BYU, Duke, Nebraska, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Stanford, Virginia Tech and a few others refused to lower their standards, and all save Stanford, with the lure of its dreamlike California campus environment, and Notre Dame, with its golden aura, have in recent years had trouble cracking football’s Top 10 as a result.
No college football program with higher internal academic standards than its conference requires has ever won a BCS championship. The BCS victors are Alabama (thrice), Florida (twice), LSU (twice), Auburn, Florida State, the University of Miami, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee and USC (its victory nullified by NCAA violations). As the modern game has developed, winning the BCS title has become the same as announcing to the world that your school’s standards are low. But the national television audience doesn’t care, the NCAA doesn’t care and its broadcast “partners” don’t care.
That Virginia Tech is among the holdouts against the trend toward lowering academic and personal-behavior standards is a reason Frank Beamer has never won a national championship. Each year a pool of star-rated prep athletes with poor grades, or who have been in trouble with the law, are welcomed on a red carpet at most big programs but not accepted by the admissions departments at BYU, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Stanford or Virginia Tech. The small number of football-factory universities that cling to high internal academic and behavior standards for athletes have become long shots to finish number one.
The Virginia Tech football exhibit hall, with a glass wall looking out onto Lane Stadium, has a pedestal at the center. Adorned by nothing, the pedestal awaits a national championship trophy. Most likely Beamer will never place one there. For Virginia Tech, and for a few other admirable big football programs, what’s needed to win the national championship is not to recruit the correct linebacker or tailback, not to switch to the hottest new offensive tactics—rather, to lower standards.
Nothing is a surer path to college football success than lowering standards. Virginia Tech won’t do that, which all but surely means Beamer won’t ever win the national title. This truly may not matter to him, as Beamer is the rare individual who would rather have self-respect than a trophy, and he draws others like him to Blacksburg.
But at many big-college football programs, placing self-respect and high standards ahead of wins and money is viewed as a leftover from the Howdy Doody era.
* * *
WHATEVER ITS FAULTS, THE NCAA in the end is a convenient cover story for what former Sports Center anchor Brian Kenny calls “the athletic industrial complex.” Here’s how things really work at many big-college football programs:
• The athletic department is in effect an independent business enterprise leasing the college’s logo and traditions.
• The head football and men’s basketball coaches do not work for the university, they work for the boosters. Many are paid their salary by a booster fund, not the school. At public universities, this is presented as a way to prevent taxpayers’ money from going directly to the football coach, which sounds good. But the boosters do not care about GPA, they want exciting games and big victory margins. Coaches strive to please their employers—the boosters—and so focus on wins and running up the score. In turn, players know they must please their coaches to retain their scholarships.
• College presidents don’t like the situation, and not just because many earn significantly less than the head football coach. Any conscientious college president winces at the knowledge that the football coach is better known than all the university’s professors combined.
The trouble is that a big-college president who tried to rein in the football program would not hold the job long. When football coach Jim Tressel got into trouble at Ohio State, president Gordon Gee was asked if he would fire Tressel. “No, but he might fire me,” the president of Ohio State replied. The joke fell flat because Gee had inadvertently spoken the truth.
A big-college president who is raising funds and meeting alumni invariably is asked about the fortunes of the football team. If the answer were that football was being cut to channel resources to some superfluous concern like the history department, the boosters would be in a fury. Even alumni who majored in history would be in a fury, since while the majority long ago stopped following research or theory in their field, all know when their beloved alma mater will be on ESPN. With the student bodies of American higher education now 56 percent female, and the women’s share continuing to rise, someday a big university’s alumni bloc may back a college president who wants to deemphasize football. But not today.
• The college president who thinks football is too big, but also does not wish to take the heat for changing that, has a ready fall guy—blame NCAA inaction. If the NCAA vanished tomorrow, big-university presidents, who lead remunerative, plush lives, suddenly would be responsible for the state of their football programs. That’s the last thing they want.
* * *
OF COURSE LOTS OF COLLEGE students cut classes and couldn’t name the capital of Sweden or the author of Great Expectations if their lives depended on it. At least those undereducated football players go on to the NFL, right?
Hardly any do. About five thousand NCAA scholarship football players leave college annually. About three hundred land jobs in the NFL, and few of those jobs are anything like careers.
Players says the initials NFL mean Not For Long. Philadelphia Eagles star Troy Vincent, later head of the NFL players’ union, noted in 2010 that the average NFL “career” is 3.7 years. Hardly any college football players ever receive an NFL paycheck, and of those who do, most are OOF—Out Of Football—by their midtwenties.
Not only is 3.7 years not enough time for the average player to make much money. In the fourth season an NFL player vests, qualifying for a long-term benefits package and a mandatory higher salary. The result is that large numbers of players are waived at the end of their third seasons and replaced with minimum-salary guys just out of college and desperate to please the coach.
Roll together the small number who reach the NFL, and the smaller number who stay more than a brief time, and find the odds of a scholarship NCAA football player having an NFL career are about one in fifty.
Those who reach big-college football discover that every player they encounter was the star of his high school team; those who reach the NFL discover that every player they encounter was the star of his college team. With the NFL having but 1,696 player jobs to begin with, and former college stars competing for each one, the situation is Darwinian. Frank Beamer and a few other ethical big-college coaches constantly remind players that their odds of performing in the NFL are not good, whereas those who leave college with a diploma are nearly certain to enjoy an above-median income throughout life.
But most Division I football coaches elaborately nourish a Grand Illusion that their players are headed to the NFL for money and celebrity. This makes players willing to go all out to win games for the coach—providing the coach job security and income, while not necessarily doing much for the player. The coach gets hefty bonuses for victories. Most players are used up and thrown away the moment their eligibility expires.
* * *
IN 2009, ALABAMA HEAD COACH Nick Saban jovially told reporters that he got his Crimson Tide fired up for a game against 48-point underdog Chattanooga by warning players, “You would someday be an NFL player in a Mercedes-Benz and roll down your window to talk to a pretty girl and she’d say, ‘You lost to Chattanooga when you played at Alabama.’”
Every football starter at Alabama is led by coaches to believe he will someday be a well-to-do NFL star who is swooned over by attractive women. Yet this is extremely unlikely, and Saban knows this. Encouraging the Grand Illusion improves Alabama football results, while distracting players from studying—which would mean more to the typical Crimson Tide player’s future than football. Many other college football programs lead many other players on with the same illusion of future NFL wealth and recognition.
Forget the long overall odds. Let’s look at the odds for players from the best college football teams—the ones that won BCS title games. Below are examples from relatively recent BCS winners, with enough time passed to determine what kind of NFL outcomes the teams produced.
The year 2000 football national champion, the University of Oklahoma, sent two players into the NFL for five or more years—a career in football terms—six players for two to four years, and one player for one year. Of the football scholarship holders at the University of Oklahoma in that championship season, 11 percent advanced to the NFL, while the rest went away empty-handed in football terms. Remember, this was the best team of 2000.
The year 2001 football champion, the University of Miami, was among the most talented collegiate squads ever, including future NFL stars Andre Johnson, Bryant McKinnie, Clinton Portis, Ed Reed, Jeremy Shockey, Sean Taylor, Jonathan Vilma and Vince Wilfork. That squad sent twenty players to the NFL for at least five years, twelve for two-to-four years, and four for one year. These numbers are good—but also mean that of one of the most talented college football teams ever assembled, 60 percent of the players never took a snap in the NFL.
Ohio State won the 2002 crown, and produced eleven players who were in the NFL for five years or more, sixteen who played two to four years and seven who played one season. Of the year’s best college football team, two-thirds never took an NFL snap.
From 2002 to 2004, USC fielded exceptionally strong football teams, going 36-3 and winning the 2004 BCS title. Those three seasons produced twelve players who were in the NFL five years or more, fifteen who were in two to four years and thirteen who had single-season stints. About 120 individuals held football scholarships at USC in that period—two-thirds never took an NFL snap.
During the same period, LSU had a run of talented teams that went 30-9 and won the 2003 BCS title. From those LSU years, eleven players reached at least five seasons in the NFL, ten played two to four years and three played one year. Eighty percent of LSU football players from the glory years never took an NFL snap.
Nick Saban was coach at LSU during that period, then jumped to the Miami Dolphins, where for the first time in his coaching life he did not produce winning teams: he was 15-17 in the NFL, compared to 159-55-1 in college. Professional football coaching success is about game planning, making wise draft selections and getting along with players who have big paychecks and bigger egos. College football coaching success is largely recruiting. At Miami in the NFL, Saban learned that he is not particularly good at game planning, drafting or human psychology. So he walked less than halfway through his contract. The Alabama head-coaching job came open in November 2006, the Dolphins’ season having many weeks remaining. Saban denied he would weasel out of his Miami commitment, saying, “I am not going to be the Alabama coach.” Then he boarded a private jet and left for Tuscaloosa: When you hire a coach who’s only in it for himself, you get a coach who’s only in it for himself.
Returning to the college ranks, Saban brought with him a new way of thinking for what he is quite good at, recruiting. And recruiting’s strongest tool is the Grand Illusion.
* * *
FOR DECADES, COLLEGE FOOTBALL RECRUITING has been oriented around selling the college: “Come here because we have tradition, a fine campus and a big stadium full of loyal fans.” Sometimes money changes hands—in 1987, Southern Methodist University was banned from NCAA football for two years for cutting out the middleman and handing cash directly to players. But in the main, the recruiting pitch has been “Choose our wonderful college.”
Saban realized that if landing rated players was the goal, a better recruiting pitch would be “My program will make you an NFL draft choice.” Whether or not that was true, it sure sounded good to high school boys dreaming of bonus checks.
Saban had this realization about the same time the “Rivals effect” arrived in college sports. Internet rankings of high school players by Rivals.com, MaxPreps.com and ESPNU.com made it practical for seventeen-year-olds to know where other seventeen-year-olds were headed. If two or three highly rated seniors committed to Alabama, within hours other highly rated seniors knew that and gravitated toward what looked to be a monster program in the making. Monster programs win big games and draw the attention of NFL scouts.
Since arriving at the University of Alabama in 2007, Saban has specialized in the Grand Illusion—it is no coincidence he is the one who speaks openly of his athletes becoming NFL players in expensive cars. Some college coaches are uncomfortable with NFL scouts at their practices; Saban encourages them because it lends the impression that Alabama is the Triple-A league of the NFL. In his years at Alabama, the Crimson Tide has produced fourteen number-one draft choices, more than any other school. The sense is that Saban sends large numbers of players on to “the league.”
The reality? Of the roughly 175 scholarship athletes Saban has had at Alabama, 23 have played at least one season in the NFL. Probably that total will rise: more years need to pass to enable the kind of evaluations made above with Oklahoma, Miami, Ohio State, USC and LSU. But so far, only 23 of 175—13 percent—of players in the nation’s most NFL-focused college program actually advanced to the NFL. Most of the starry-eyed young men listening to Saban in the locker room will never take a snap in the NFL, much less become a celebrity athlete being chased by women.
But Saban’s bonus money increases if his young men fall for that illusion. The harder Alabama players concentrate on football, believing they are headed to sports wealth, the more the Crimson Tide will win, and the more money Saban makes. But many of his players end up empty-handed—no NFL, no diploma. This happens across Division I football. Players give everything to football because they think it will take them to the NFL; victories enrich the coaches and the athletic department; by the time players snap out of the NFL dream and realize they should have studied in college, it’s too late. The scholarship is exhausted.
* * *
GIVEN THE MANIFOLD WAYS IN which the collegiate athletic establishment takes advantage of big-program football players, many commentators conclude the solution is for them to be paid. The first and not inconsiderable problem with this remedy is that paying college players would make the system even more inequitable than it is today. The second problem is that reform must focus on sports’ leading to graduation, because a college diploma is substantially more valuable than any pay a college athlete might receive.
Paying college athletes has an obvious appeal. But having read many articles, commentaries and books on what the historian Taylor Branch has called “the shame of college sports,” and having attended debates on this topic, your writer has encountered few proposals on how paying college athletes would work.
Would there be some kind of free-market competition? That quickly would lead to a winner-take-all outcome in which a few stars received huge sums while most college athletes realized little or nothing.
Suppose there had been free-market bidding for college football players in 2010, the year Cam Newton led Auburn to the college football title. Newton’s services might have gone for $5 million that season—booster clubs of a dozen big universities would have competed furiously to raise funds for an offer. But most players on the 2010 Auburn team would have been lucky to receive a few thousand dollars, if anything. In free-market bidding terms, most Division I college football players are worthless because they are easily replaced.
Philip Lutzenkirchen—what would he have been worth? Mike Berry? Byron Isom? Neil Caudle? All were starters with Newton on the 2010 Auburn title team, and in a free-market college situation, could easily have been replaced with someone willing to play for less or for nothing, simply to experience the glory of big-college football. Berry, a BCS-title-team starter in 2010, just two years later was OOF. Isom spent a few weeks on the practice squad of the Kansas City Chiefs, but was waived without ever drawing a game check. Caudle could stand at the center of Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium and no one would have a clue who he is.
In an open-bidding system, most starting college football players would have scant market value. Just imagine what would happen to backups and the scout-team performers.
Joe Nocera, a delightfully relentless critic of the NCAA, has proposed annual pay of $25,000 per Division I football player. That would cost a school $2.5 million per year, manageable for most of the universities that play football on television. Nocera also would allow colleges a maximum of $1 million annually in bonuses to attract star players, and would end all NCAA restrictions on college-to-college movement. So if, say, the University of Colorado needed a quarterback and knew UCLA had a good backup quarterback, the Buffaloes could call and offer a bonus for him to transfer immediately.
Paying Division I football and men’s basketball players $25,000 per year would improve the situation in some ways but might backfire by driving yet another wedge between NCAA revenue athlete and classroom. A nineteen-year-old football player with no living expenses and a $25,000 check might feel as though he’s already got it made—though college credits and a diploma mean more to his future than anything he could accomplish during a game.
In 2011, the NCAA voted to allow Division I schools to give scholarship athletes a $2,000 annual stipend, in addition to the per diem Division I players receive for away games. The stage crew at the college theater, staffers at the college newspaper—they get stipends because they perform work that contributes to the life of the college. Stipends for college football and men’s basketball players, those in the revenue sports, make sense by the same reasoning.
So far most big colleges are not offering the stipend, but should. Two thousand dollars would prevent football and men’s basketball players, who generate funds for their schools, from walking around without the cash to afford a cheesesteak and a milk shake. But players would continue to live the modest lifestyle that is the centuries-long norm for university students. The $2,000 stipend would grant Division I football and men’s basketball players a small cut of the money they produce, while keeping them amateurs. Then the focus can move to fixing other parts of the system.
* * *
COLLEGE FOOTBALL REFORM THAT SHIFTS emphasis toward the diploma is needed far more than payments to players. The reform program:
• Six-year scholarships, so when a football player exhausts his eligibility and the NFL does not call, he has two to three paid semesters remaining to fix his credits and graduate.
• Factor graduation rates into football rankings. The Associated Press, USA Today and BCS organization publish elaborate computer and poll-based rankings of college teams. The rankings avidly are followed by fans and determine bowl invitations; rankings will be central to the expected Division I football playoff system. Colleges and college coaches desperately want high rankings because these please the boosters and increase revenue. If graduation rates were a factor in the rankings—say, a quarter of the weight—coaches and athletic directors instantly would care whether players were at the library and in class.
Human beings respond to incentives, and right now, Division I coaches and athletic directors have incentives only for victories. Give them an education-based incentive, and they will respond.
At the NFL level, where football is pure entertainment, power rankings need only reflect quality of teams. Colleges are expected to teach and to play a role in guiding society. It is amazingly superficial of the Associated Press and USA Today to rank college teams on victory margins only, as if colleges existed solely to provide entertainment for sports fans. Add graduation rates to the rankings and college football will have an internal incentive to clean itself up. Internal incentives for reform are better than those imposed from without.
• In most cases, Division I athletes who transfer must wait one year before accepting an NCAA scholarship at the new college. So levy the same before their contracts are up. In 2012, Pitt head coach Todd Graham, who had been at the school just eleven months, was offered more money by Arizona State and instantly bolted. If Graham wanted to leave Pitt for Arizona State before his contract expired, he should have been required to sit out a year. Imposing a waiting period on coaches would reduce the mercenary atmosphere of big-college football and cause more coaches to set good examples.
• Make penalties follow the coach. The NCAA sanctions individual athletes, but almost never individual coaches. This means coaches know that if a scandal looms, they can simply jump to another school. The character education movement says actions have consequences; for college football coaches, actions rarely have consequences.
Suppose a college receives, say, a two-year probation. The head coach for the period when the violations occurred should be required to spend the same amount of time away from collegiate sports, regardless of switching employers. If college football coaches knew they would suffer consequences for taking shortcuts, fewer shortcuts would be taken.
• For any year in which a college football team’s graduation rate is below the rate of students as a whole at the same university (crediting for players who transfer and graduate elsewhere), the head coach is suspended for one year, and the penalty follows him to any NCAA member school. That would get coaches’ attention.
Human beings respond to incentives. The incentives described above would cause college football coaches to care about education.
* * *
IN THE END IT IS not the lack of pay but the lack of diplomas that is the fatal flaw of American college football.
Of course many highly accomplished people never walked in a robe and mortarboard to “Pomp and Circumstance.” Edward Elgar, who wrote the music that has become the commencement anthem, himself never graduated from college. But in contemporary American society, no step more closely links to achieving a materially secure life than earning a college degree.
College is “the gateway to the middle class,” President Barack Obama said in 2012. That year the unemployment rate for those with a high school diploma was 9 percent; for those with a college diploma, was 3.5 percent. Researchers Anthony Carnevale, Stephen Rose and Ben Cheah of Georgetown University have found that compared to a high school degree, a bachelor’s adds $1 million to the average person’s lifetime earnings. The bachelor’s is a perquisite for a master’s, which adds $1.4 million to lifetime earnings. For the 99 percent of college athletes who will never spend a day in the pros, the diploma is worth far more, financially and sociologically, than any cash payment they might receive for NCAA participation.
That the college football establishment actively lures a mainly African-American group of young men away from studying and graduating, by nurturing an illusion they will receive instant wealth in the NFL, is what is rotten about the NCAA apple. That the money-rich athletic conferences and big-university boards of directors go along makes their apples rotten too.
Education is the agency of economic and of political power not just for the person who receives the degree but for his or her family line. Studies show that the best predictor of a child’s educational success is not race, income, or school type, but the highest educational attainment of adults in the household. One person who graduates from college may found a line of others who do.
For those African-Americans who come into collegiate sports from disadvantaged backgrounds, a check for $25,000 would be nice, but will not change their family circumstances. A diploma could change their lives—and the lives of their children and children’s children, allowing them to achieve independent economic power that belongs to them, not to someone else.
Rightly or wrongly, in contemporary American society college sorts out who rises and who falls, who acquires economic power and who is cast adrift. The college football establishment gathers the fruits of the physical labor of African-Americans, without ensuring they receive the diplomas that represent economic power—often, actively distracting them from the classroom work that would give them power. The system may not have been designed to keep blacks down. But it functions that way.
The next chapter: the concussion crisis is all too real.