The Sports Curmudgeon®

In a previous topical rant, I suggested an NBA rule change that might make it less inviting for NBA teams to draft young high school players or even many college freshmen. I still think that would work. And I think that having more of the top players in college sports – particularly basketball – will help the games from a fan’s perspective and will help the colleges from a financial perspective. But since the NBA and the NBA Players Union don’t seem to be careening headlong to a way to make this work, maybe there are some other ideas that need to be considered.

Let me start with some of the things that form the basis for the upcoming out-of-the-box ideas.

I believe that college and NBA basketball will be improved if more players hone their games in college with competent coaching for more time.

I believe that college football and NFL football represent a self-selecting environment where the number of people physically able to contemplate the transition from high school directly to the NFL is miniscule.

I believe that too much money is involved in “winning” at the NCAA level and so there is far too much of an emphasis to “get an edge”. Rabid alumni will always get their adrenaline flowing when the big game between Whatsamatta U and Beaglebreath Tech is on the docket, but the big money makes the people within the school want to cheat – just a little bit.

The NCAA “investigators” are a mirage. There are less than twenty of them. Given how long it takes them to close out anything, you would have to believe that Inspector Clousseau runs their training program.

There are good apples and bad apples among the people who make up the body of university presidents, athletic directors, coaches, assistant coaches and scholar-athletes.

There is precisely no role whatsoever for the Congress of the United States in the reform of NCAA athletics.

Obviously, players have an incentive to get into the pro ranks and start earning money as soon as possible. This is not greed or shortsightedness; it is simple common sense. In fact, it may be one of the rare times when a player demonstrates simple common sense! So in order to shield many of them away from the lure of the big money will require a complicated system of rewards and balances. And please remember that the lure of the big money is fantastical for many of them. The scholar-athlete who has had sunshine pumped up his butt so that he believes he is a lottery pick in the NBA often winds up playing in Poland for so little money that his former posse members won’t even take his calls anymore!

Obviously, universities like the money they make off of the collegiate revenue sports of football and basketball. They need to have a strong set of sanctions in place to make cheating something more than scandalous; it needs to be economically painful.

Obviously, coaches get outrageous salaries at the college level for developing and maintaining winning programs that bring in money to the university. They too need to face sanctions when cheating occurs and it needs to have severe impact on size of the wallet in their hip pocket. I can’t remember who pointed this out recently, but when you hear a college basketball coach complain about his seeding in a tournament or something like that, remember that he is one of the world’s highest paid phys ed teachers.

So let me start by saying that there will exist players like LeBron James who are so much better than their peers that they might be taken directly from high school into the NBA. My playing-time minimum rules for NBA lottery picks would cut down that number drastically, but it would not be eliminated. However, there are so many people who “come out early” – particularly in basketball – who are not yet fully skilled in the game that I want to find a way to keep them at the collegiate level for a while without resorting to cheating.

The first reform step for college basketball should be that every school has a total of 20 scholarships to offer and that number can never go up. That sounds like a big increase until you hear the next part. Once Whatsamatta U. pins that scholarship on the back of a student, it cannot use it again until one of two things happens:

1. The scholar-athlete graduates from Whatsamatta U with a Bachelors’ Degree that conforms to the exact standards applied to every other undergraduate - - or

2. Twenty calendar years pass from the date you pinned that scholarship on his back.

Holy Academics, Batman!! All of the grief about eligibility criteria and SAT scores and progress towards a degree will be minimized. If Coach Grunt wants to bring in 5 studs in a season that do not collectively have the IQ of a peach cobbler, he may win now, but it will cost the team down the line. All you need is to have the Faculty Senate have enough of a spine to say that they are not going to risk losing the accreditation of the school just to get Coach Grunt’s morons graduated so he can go and find more just like them.

The school administrators will need to demand that the athletes take real courses taught by real instructors. It would not hurt to make it a rule that no person associated with the athletic department can teach a course in which an athlete is a student unless the scholar-athlete’s grade for that course is determined by some other faculty member. And it will require some vigilance on the part of the instructors to look for plagiarized term papers and “ringers taking exams”. Someone noted recently that in Professor Jim Harrick Jr.’s course at Georgia, all you needed to do to get an “A” was fog a mirror or pay someone to fog it for you.

A coach’s contract with a college should contain boilerplate clauses at the front end that acknowledge that he is an employee of that university but is also bound by NCAA rules and standards. Those clauses should say that when the NCAA and the University – not a court of law – find that he has broken university or NCAA rules that he will be fired from the university and banned from any other NCAA institution for a minimum of 5 years in any athletic department capacity. These clauses should also be in the contracts of all athletic directors, assistant coaches, trainers, sports information directors and athletic academic advisors.

Next, a scholarship from a university to a scholar-athlete has been treated as a grant in the past. The change that is needed is to turn this into a contract. Remember, Whatsamatta U cannot use this scholarship for twenty years if Dickie Dunkenstein does not graduate so there is no loss to the university by guaranteeing him a place in the student body. If a coach “runs him off” that hurts the program. But suppose Dickie Dunkenstein leaves to go to the pros? That would leave Whatsamatta U and Coach Grunt with a problem. Here’s the contract aspect of that. The scholarship is a contract between the university and the scholar-athlete. He can stay on for twenty years and take courses and pursue a degree if he wants to and it is free of charge. If he leaves prior to completing his eligibility (4 years) then the university gets a fraction his pro earnings off the top for a period of time. The sooner he leaves Whatsamatta U, the higher the percentage and the longer the period of time; if he stays 4 years, the percentage is ZERO. If Dunkenstein graduates, so much the better for Coach Grunt because then he can reuse that scholarship on the next prospect.

Notice please that these are strictures that would apply to every scholar-athlete and every school. There is no favoritism; no athlete would be forced to accept anything that was inimical to his real or perceived interests. The NBA has its developmental league for kids who think that these rules are too restrictive or who are so unable to cope with any college curriculum that no coach would want them because it would tie up one of his scholarship-contracts for twenty years. In a while, maybe this educational readiness component might trickle down to the high schools and convince a few aspiring scholar-athletes to pay attention in at least a few classes. Not likely, but possible…

There is another oversight role for university administrators and athletic department execs in my system. Nominally, the administrators are looking out for the university in the long run and particularly in the financial realm. So it might behoove them to be sure that Coach Grunt has not squandered the university’s 20 scholarship-contracts in such a way that the team 5 years from now could not beat the Alabama Asthma Asylum. That situation will reduce revenue to the school from basketball and it might make the alumni unhappy and when alumni get unhappy then tend to pull the purse strings just a bit tighter.

Under these circumstances, it would be very reasonable for a school to pay Coach Grunt an incentive for graduating his players. It isn’t that the NCAA will swoop in and reduce scholarship levels because scholarships are fixed. [Aside: With less than twenty investigators and over 300 schools to investigate, there is an incentive to cheat because the probability of getting caught is low.] Rather, this system makes it in Coach Grunt’s personal financial interest to recruit players who can play AND graduate. Now if the university president’s are really smart, they will make the bonuses for high graduation rates higher than the bonuses for winning. Yeah, that’s right; a pig just flew by the window here as I typed that sentence.

Some people have called for the reinstatement of freshman ineligibility – particularly in basketball. I think that is like putting a band-aid on malignant tumor. The problem is the rewards system for coaches and universities and scholar-athletes. Today it is skewed toward winning at all costs now and grabbing the big bucks as soon as you can. As I said at the top, that is clearly in the self-interest of the people grabbing for the big bucks. But college basketball and NBA basketball can be improved by altering the reward system a bit.

In my rant about fatuous university presidents and their lack of responsibility in creating and maintaining this morass, I said that it was time for them to stand in the light of accountability. One of the ways for them to be accountable is to stand up and to begin the implementation of real reforms in college athletics. Surely, it will not be as sweeping as what I have proposed here, but something more than window dressing and rhetorical flamboyance is needed now.

I know that the scholar-athletes are not capable of coming up with the needed reforms; they are barely capable of figuring out where those things called “classrooms” are located.

I doubt that there is sufficient appreciation of the “big-picture” among coaches to have this kind of movement begin at that level.

Athletic directors are either old coaches or paper-pushing bureaucrats and neither of those groups is likely to do anything bold and innovative.

The faculties at many schools either have no interest in athletics or – in some cases – are hostile toward the existence of athletics. And faculties love to debate things to death so looking for significant change to come from that sector is like “Waiting for Godot”. [In case you forgot, Godot never shows up.]

So, unfortunately I am fearful that this will need to begin with the university presidents. That is a frightening prospect. But there is hope. As I tried to say in my last rant on this topic, university presidents are – in reality – fund raisers with expensive suits and offices on the property of universities. So there are pressures that can be brought to bear on them; their success and their acceptability at good old Whatsamatta U is tied to dollar signs. Money is the key to getting these folks to act.

We’ve seen how low some of these university presidents will stoop to gather up some money. The question now is how tall will any of them stand to implement some meaningful reform of NCAA athletics.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Let’s get one thing straight from the beginning. Reforming college sports is necessary and it will not be easy. If it were easy, it would have been done by now; in fact, if it were easy to get it on the right path, it would be similarly easy to keep it there. So we never would have gotten where we are today. And where we are today is in such a mess that you could make this into a new “Reality TV show” and call it

Look What I Am About To Flush

The most important thing for everyone to consider when looking for ways to achieve real reform is to stop classifying people in terms of the jobs they hold and assigning putative behaviors to them on the basis of their position. At the moment, the most visible practitioner of this brand of stereotyping is NCAA honcho Myles Brand. Since he was a University president, he is convinced that the University presidents are virtuous and stalwarts in their pursuit of the ideal of scholar/athlete balance. The next time you hear him go off on that riff – or maybe when you hear him praise the tough positions taken by the presidents of Fresno State or Georgia – close your eyes and listen to the evasive wordings and the agile use of syntax. What pops into my mind when I hear that is the single most enduring phrase of recent American history that relates to truth telling and candor:

It depends on the meaning of “is”…

Myles Brand is as useful as a bag of hair. He sees a positive trend in collegiate sports today and he attributes it to the university presidents taking courageous voluntary actions to take their miscreant schools out of postseason play. He has said that he thinks the system is working; it isn’t and he is part of the reason it won’t. The NCAA is the collective of the colleges and universities that make it up and Brand’s “prime directive” is to make sure that none of the schools gets tarred too badly and the way he will do it is to assure that the scholar-athletes take the heat for transgressions and when that is not enough the coaches and the athletic directors. I said in a previous rant that Jim Harrick Sr. is a toad. Myles Brand has not evolved that far yet.

Before I go off on university presidents, let me stop and make sure that no one can accuse me of being simplistic and aiming at only one “category” of folks. There are lots of cases where head coaches and/or assistant coaches are weasels; there are athletic directors who might have to move up the evolutionary ladder three rungs to be classified as slug bait. And don’t even get me started on “boosters” such as the recently departed Ed Martin and/or the guy in Alabama who paid a high school coach to steer a defensive lineman to Alabama. These people are beneath contempt. In fact, in the “Alabama case”, I wonder why people have not called this precisely what it is and that is “pimping” and “prostitution”. He paid someone to deliver the physical presence, talents and performances of another human being to his preferred venue. That is what happens in prostitution and pimps are held in rather low regard in this society, no?

But it is the haughtiness of the University presidents that is intolerable at the moment. Looking narrowly at the 4 NCAA basketball disgraces of the past 3 months, what do we have?

Fresno State has found academic fraud during the Tarkanian regime. What the hell took them so long? The University president hired Tark to build up the basketball program so that he could raise money for an $80M gym on campus that is one of the university crown jewels. Tarkanian resigned from Fresno State after putting the program on the map and the local police blotter but he continues to pull down something in the order of $125K per year as a “consultant” to the university. So the players and the current coaches get punished; Tark continues to get paid and the guy who hired him and continues to pay him as a “consultant” gets off with saying that the situation “obviously raises questions”. The President of Fresno State is named John Welty. If he is part of the answer as to how to reform NCAA sports, then we are asking the wrong questions. Welty said that hiring Tarkainian “seemed like a good idea at the time.” I’ll bet that someone at Ford said the same thing about the Edsel.

At Georgia, Jim Harrick Sr. was not on the radar screen to be hired as the basketball coach until late in the process. If you are to believe reporting out of Atlanta, Mike Brey – now at Notre Dame and then at Delaware – was the guy who had made it to the end of the hiring process when University President Michael Adams inserted Harrick’s name into the process. They were “colleagues” from Pepperdine. Harrick had left a slime trail from UCLA to Rhode Island, but he got the job because he was President Adams’ guy. Then, with the support – or at least with the benign neglect – of President Adams, Harrick Sr. got a university policy waived so he could hire his son to help him slime down the program. Did President Adams keep an eye on things in the basketball program since he had his fingerprints on the hiring decision and the waiving of the nepotism rules? Adams better pray there is no evidence that he did because then he cannot beat his breast and say how hard he is working to defend the academic integrity and reputation of his fine institution. The nepotism-hire, Harrick Jr., was teaching a course that would not qualify for continuing education credits at a local senior center and giving out “A” grades to players who never showed up. Tell me how President Adams is part of the solution to our problems? You can surely do this in 25 words or less! Oh, for a more difficult essay question, why was Jim Harrick Sr. suspended with pay but Jim Harrick Jr. was fired outright?

At St. Bonaventure the basketball team was in need of some talent. A player was on the admissions scope but he did not have his associates’ degree from Coastal Georgia Community College that he had attended. But he did get a “piece of paper” from his time there in the form of a welding certificate. The athletic department realized he was not going to get into the school and then was shocked to find that President Robert Wickenheiser said that everything was fine with his record and this scholar-athlete should be part of the St. Bonaventure tradition of academic prowess. You know how this one ends. The kid is exposed; he is declared ineligible; the team votes to quit for the rest of the season; the university lets them quit; all hell breaks loose; Wickenheiser finds himself reading the want ads.

At Villanova, there is no evidence I’ve seen to date that says that anyone in the administration or the athletic department or the coaching staff did anything wrong. The players violated an NCAA rule regarding the amount of money they could constructively collect from the university by using the phone access cards provided by the university to all students. The players did something that is not morally wrong or academically heinous; they violated a rule and they were sanctioned for it. Of the four cases, Villanova comes out smelling like a rose here and the rest of these schools look and smell like road apples.

But notice that it was in the “head shed”, down on “mahogany row”, at the upper echelons of the administration where serious transgressions were perpetrated. So when you hear Myles Brand – or any of his other toadies – blather on about the inherent virtue of university presidents and how it is their noble duty to step in and clear the swamp of collegiate athletics, rids up in unison and emit the loudest Bronx cheer in the history of mankind.

Here is a flat fact; Myles Brand won’t like it, but it happens to be right. University presidents exhibit integrity and moral rectitude and altruism in the same proportions as other populations of educated and professional people. The difference between them and Enron execs at the moment is that no university president has yet to take “the perp walk”.

What are university presidents? Idyllically one believes they are noted scholars who lead the intellectual capital of the university in the search for knowledge and understanding that will benefit mankind. If you believe that, you aren’t worth the price of a one-way ticket to the Planet Zeembo. Here is what university president’s are:

They are fundraisers. They milk the alums and they make deals with wealthy folks who want to garner a bit of respectability by building a laboratory or a library - - or a field house. They strike strategic partnerships with any organization that has funds to give to the university in terms of grants and contracts. And they do all this with the rhetorical newspeak that makes them seem wise and beneficent.

University presidents are a step above the annoying folks who come onto your TV every three months or so and beg for money for your local PBS station. Those pretentious PBS folks pretend they are something “above” commercial TV except that I see a lot of “citations” for the same companies on PBS that I do on commercial TV. It is just that the PBS citations are shorter – and cheaper too because fewer people watch. It’s all in the ratings, folks. But don’t get too caught up in this because university presidents are only a small step above these “professional wailers and beggars” none of whom will be happy if I get to have any say in their lot in the afterlife…

Back to the beginning, this is a complex problem and relying on the university presidents to solve it is a fool’s errand. When Myles Brand waxes rhetorical on you, send letters of outrage and e-mails to the radio/TV folks who put him on and let him get away with only softball questions. If you want to reform college athletics and make it less of a cesspool than it is, then you have to be part of the crowd demanding answers. And the answers you get have to be logical and simple and in plain English. Remember, the problem is complex and the problem is not easy to solve but that does not mean that the perpetrators and the people who benefit by the status quo ante should be able to double talk you into believing that they are working to make things better. Keep asking the question about “accountability” and how that is going to be applied to university presidents just as it is applied to students who don’t make certain grades – and also don’t average 18 points a game and 9 rebounds a game! –or to coaches who happen to have a losing season or two in a row.

Until Michael Adams and John Welty are fired in disgrace for what they helped to get their universities into and until Myles Brand calls for these firings or praises them as necessary steps taken by the university trustees, then anything you hear from these folks is “spin-meistering”. And you want to know what spin-meistering is all about? The people who practice it won’t tell you this and don’t want you to know this but spin-meistering is done because the people doing the spinning believe that they are smarter than you and they can dazzle you with their BS and get you to focus your attention elsewhere. They are playing mind-games with you and you should not let them get away with it.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain…

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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