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…