The Sports Curmudgeon®

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…