The Sports Curmudgeon

It’s really pretty easy to look at a situation and know that all the people on all sides of the issue are worthy of your scorn. You don’t have to go through the analysis of who is right on what parts of the issues and then balance their ideas against some logical compromises. No it is really easy when everyone involved is fully worthy of a taunt that is purported to have originated with comedian Jack E. Leonard:

There’s nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won’t cure.

Such is the case of politicos and college sports. In the past year or two we have had the spectacle of the US Senate – an organization that loves to refer to itself as “the greatest deliberative body on Earth” instead of “a bunch of rich guys sitting around and soaking up all of this attention while taking three hours to tell you if it is raining” – hold hearings on the evils of gambling on college sports. I’ve ranted on those hearings and their hidden agendas before, but I always love to sit back and recall the outpouring of genuine angst – or at least the pretext of genuine angst – over this issue that obviously threatens the very fabric of our society. Hi- ho, as Kurt Vonnegut might say here. Now we have a bunch of politicians involved in yet another sporting issue; they have inserted themselves into the ACC/Big East membership dust-up.

That’s right folks. We have fought two skirmishes in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last two years; the economy is less than robust; the educational system of the US continues its decline as every subject is dumbed down to avoid bruising the fragile self-esteem of children whose only future seems to be as professional victims; corruption is rampant and we don’t even have the New York Times available to preach morality to us anymore because the folks who run that paper are showing themselves to be no better – and maybe even worse than – politicians on the take. In that environment, nine US Senators from 5 states have written letters to Boston College, Miami and Syracuse to try to stop them from jumping ship from the Big East to the ACC.

None of the Senators are from Massachusetts, Florida or NY – where these schools are; these Senators are from other states with Big East schools. The fact that not a single Senator from one of the states where the schools reside joined in this activity – it can’t take long just to sign a letter even if you’re a Senator, right? – tells me that the economics of jumping to the ACC are a whole lot more attractive than Big East spokesthings have been saying.

Here is a part of the letter from these Senators that shows you how far out of touch they are with the reality of college sports. If these three schools jump conferences, it would devastate the Big East and “send a troubling message to student-athletes across America”. Give me a break!! One of the huge and real problems that these gasbags don’t seem to recognize is that most of the nominal “student-athletes across America” can barely read at the 8th grade level and would not understand this troubling message that the Senators have alluded to in their letter. Even the intellectually challenged “student-athletes” understand the reality here better than do the Senators. This is not about education; this is not about progress in women’s athletics; this is not about competition; this is about money. And when it is about money, then principles and high-falutin’ ideals take a back seat. If any group of people traveling with us on Planet Earth should understand that concept at the spinal level, it has to be Senators who hit the campaign fund raising trails more than once in a while where they cater to the single-issue goofs who happen to have deep pockets. The schools are following the money just like Senators always – and I mean always! - follow the money and just like the student-athletes will follow the money if indeed there is any opportunity for them to follow it anywhere.

The Senators also regale the readers in their letter with the wondrous achievements of the Big East in producing Rhodes Scholars and for excelling in women’s sports. I’m certain that they had their staffs check to see that the letter is factually correct but the key word that they fail to understand here is IRRELEVANT. The Big East did not produce these Rhodes Scholars; the schools did. Villanova’s women indeed won the cross-country championship; they could have won with Villanova in the Big East or in the Big Lebowski.

Here is where it gets really good. The letter says, “The Big East has instilled core values of integrity, responsibility, loyalty and leadership in each and every student-athlete.” Anyone who actually believed that rhetorical tripe would be disqualified from being a Senator if I were making the rules.

Memo to the nine Senators: If you actually had a shred of those core values you attribute to each and every Big East student-athlete, you would resign your offices after this display of grandstanding and failure to focus on real problems facing this nation. Your continued presence in the Senate shows that you have not resigned and leads to the conclusion that…

On the other side of this contretemps are the conferences and the NCAA. As I said, it is not hard to find them less than worthy of your full emotional support. They keep trying to tell you this is about the students and about the integrity of college sports. It is about the money. Look at the student-athletes you admit to your colleges who can’t read beyond the 8th grade level and can’t do a long division problem without multiple tries on a calculator. They are admitted solely because they can dunk a basketball or run with a football like the Devil Incarnate was after them. They are taking the place of a student who might actually garner an education if he/she had a chance to matriculate at your institution of higher learning. Even these pampered and education-averse kids understand it is about the money. With your continued preposterous verbal legerdemain, you are instilling into them a core value of lying and dissembling. Why should I be surprised at that? Only US Senators and the IOC are in the same league with NCAA officials and conference administrators when it comes to shading the truth. I can’t wait for one of these people to stand before microphones in their academic robes and tell us that it all depends on the meaning of “is”.

College presidents have one primary task and that is to raise money from alums and from “partnering” with other organizations. The only limitation on these “partnering” arrangements is that the other organizations should not be directly guilty of war crimes or associated with any activities that are not politically correct. A college president who does not raise gobs of money for their school is a college president who will be looking for work soon.

Dr. Myles Brand continues to tell us that the college presidents will save the day for all of us by implementing “genuine academic reform”. He says the tide is building for such reform. I think the only tide that has any juice in college sports is the one that rolled Mike Price out of Alabama, but that’s just me. Let me pose some real questions to Dr. Brand here.

Why haven’t you been vociferously and publicly on the side of the Tennessee professor of English who says she was forced out of her faculty job because she blew the whistle on Tennessee’s academic fraud 4 years ago?

According to her, Tennessee athletes are forced to be classified as “learning disabled” thereby giving them the tutors who actually do work for the athletes. Is that part of your academic reform package?

Is that something that the school alone should investigate?

I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for Dr. Brand to answer these or any other tough questions about academic reform of college athletics. He has been in his job long enough now to understand that if he pushes that pawn too hard, he will be just like that college president who did not raise enough money for the school; he’ll be looking for work soon.

We can only hope.

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

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The questions that I can’t get out of my head are these. Do college sports have anything at all to do with college anymore? Are they merely organizations that share an external logo and periodically/accidentally occupy space on the same campuses with universities? Forty years ago, the answers would have easily been, “Yes” and “No”. Today the answers could well be “Of course not” and “I’ll have to get back to you on that one”.

Let’s review just the high points here. At the University of Georgia – fresh off the heels of the Jim Harrick Sr. and Jr. despoiling of the school’s reputation – we have a flurry of news. Five athletes were caught with marijuana in their dorm; coach Mark Richt suspended four other players for unspecified problems; an assistant football coach was caught in the process of DUI and was suspended for a month; then nine players sold their SEC championship rings on e-bay. The AD, Vince Dooley, is supposedly feuding with the president, Michael Adams.

Meanwhile, just down the road, Georgia Tech had to declare ten football players academically ineligible for all of the 2003 season. That can only mean that there has been a major breakdown in either the admission standards/processes or in the academic support programs offered to/foisted upon these athletes. Or maybe it was a failure in both areas? Makes no difference.

These events happened at the right time for me. I had begun to think that only coaches in college sports were capable of monumentally stupid behavior that would eventually come to light in the national press. Larry Eustachy and Mike Price must be thrilled that they are not the focus of all the collegiate sporting world attention anymore. Now, Larry Eustachy can try to put his life and career back together without any cans of “Natty Light” in his hands. Now, Mike Price can try to make his name something that does not evince a smirk; he was truly washed out by the rolling tide.

The ACC has decided to expand so that it can hold a conference football championship game like the SEC does and the way it plans to do that is to poach three teams out of the Big East. Three football defections from the Big East will leave that conference’s football “presence” virtually non-existent. The Big East will make counter-proposals to the three schools wooed by the ACC later this week.

The Governor of Virginia tried to throw some weight around to get VA Tech on the list of schools that the ACC would annex. Very firmly – but assuredly with utmost respect and propriety – he was told to go and take a dump in his hat. VA Tech is not one of the three “preferred schools” sought by the ACC because it does not bring a prestigious program to the ACC in basketball; it’s football program is OK but not renowned; Blacksburg VA is not a place that anyone would want to have to visit for any reason given any other alternative. The town motto for Blacksburg should be:

Why the hell did anyone stop here in the first place?

I can’t get past the thought in my head, however, that the ACC presidents missed out on a real opportunity to upgrade their football prestige. They should indeed invite VA Tech into the ACC; to make room, they should kick out GA Tech. With or without ten ineligible players and a program whose fan base is fickle and dwindling, GA Tech is not nearly the football power that VA Tech has become of late. The only answer I have for this is that the ACC presidents like to visit Atlanta and at least some of them have actually been to Blacksburg and have told the rest of their cohorts about it.

Amazingly, all of this is happening while the esteemed and courageous reformer, Myles Brand, is in charge of the NCAA. Think back to days before all of this recent nonsense and you can hear him saying that reform at all levels of collegiate athletics was on its way and it was going to be “genuine academic reform”. He has pontificated that the college presidents are going to stand up and be counted and that they will wrest back control of college athletics and put it all in the proper educational context of their institutions. Remember all that? Let’s get something clear right now. That is rhetorical poppycock and it is being mouthed by someone who deserves a reputation for credibility that is only marginally above that of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the former Iraqi Minister of Information. In fact, has anyone ever seen Dr Brand and Minister Saeed al-Sahhaf in the same room at the same time? Hmmm…

In case anyone failed to notice, it was the presidents of the ACC schools that met to vote to annex the three Big East schools. Take a moment to read that again; the presidents of the ACC universities voted to undertake this annexation. Now when is some important national journalist going to ask the NCAA reformer, Dr. Brand, just how these presidents are going to make all of this into “genuine academic reform”? Maybe you have not heard from Dr. Brand recently because no journalist can find him. Maybe he’s in a cave in the Himalayas trying out his new speeches on a group of yetis?

On 17 May 2003, Sally Jenkins nailed this issue on the head when she said that this was a hostile takeover by the ACC and that it was done for monetary reasons only and – most importantly – not a single dime of the money involved here or the added dollars that might accrue to ACC schools would go to improvement of college life at a single school. This is a business decision and nothing else and Sally Jenkins says that the way to rein it in is for the Congress to allow the IRS to tax these profits. Schools have dodged the tax bullet by claiming that sports are part of the fabric of the college experience and institution. That was true in the past; it is not true today. College athletes are often admitted only to play football or basketball or whatever; they have no interest in college courses; the colleges have no intention of soiling themselves by handing these self-centered ignoramuses a diploma. Major collegiate sports have become minor pro leagues – preparing a few athletes for lucrative careers as pro sports stars. That’s it; there is no more. I urge you to go to washingtonpost.com and read Sally Jenkins’ entire column; there is a lot of good stuff in there.

[Aside: If the IRS had been looking at the books, might they have found Ed Martin and his fountain of cash at Michigan a bit sooner? I’ll bet Tommy Ammaker wishes someone had.]

So maybe it is time to start a letter writing campaign to those people in Congress who want to assist college sports – usually by banning gambling on the games. Write to Senator John McCain and tell him to start the process to make athletic profits at colleges taxable by the IRS. Imagine how some of the schools with “active” boosters will love to have IRS auditors poring over the books to see where all the money actually comes from; imagine how the players will love to have whatever benefits – and maybe even minor league quality incomes – they get be subject to taxes instead of the current underground economy environment. Probably, just the threat will scare a couple of schools straight.

On March 18, 2003, I did a topical rant saying that university presidents as a category of people were no more virtuous and noble and altruistic than any other category of people. As events have unfolded, I will only say that some of these folks have made my case for me. In that prior rant, I said that Myles Brand was as useless as a bag of hair. I stand by that statement. I would like to add here that when the Good Lord gave out clues, Dr. Brand thought He said “shoes”. And Dr. Brand then decided to go barefoot through life.

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

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