The Sports Curmudgeon

Yes, I know that I have never had anything nice to say about this man and my most common descriptor for him is that he is an animatronic suit-dummy. And I don’t plan to do a “180” here and try to convince you that he’s not nearly as bad a guy as that convicted child molester out on parole who was arrested for dropping his trousers in the elementary school playground last week. But just as the blind squirrel will sometimes find a nut, so too will Dr. Myles Brand stumble onto the right side of an issue. Now appears to be such a time; and so I’m prepared to offer some help.

At the event of the 99th NCAA Convention in Texas Dr. Myles Brand warned that many NCAA institutions have gone on a spending spree on athletics ever since the rights fees from television starting their exponential expansion and that such spending sprees cannot be sustained into the indefinite future. He’s got that right.

Of course, then he had to go off into scholar-speak and say that “value-based budgeting” was one means to keep this bubble from bursting and spreading goo all over a lot of the NCAA member-institutions. Somehow, I suspect that “value-based budgeting” will have all the impact and all the lasting import as did “zero-based budgeting” in the Carter Administration.

But he is correct in saying that the spiraling rights fees cannot continue to grow at the same rate as they have in the recent past and he is correct to note that many athletic departments run significantly in the red. And the response on campuses where money is being lost is to try to increase spending in order to generate a winning team that can cash in more heavily on those spiraling revenues – which are far more readily available to winners as opposed to losers. Duh!!

Since I am about to try to be constructive here, I do want to get one curmudgeonly thing out of the way so that it does not interfere with what follows. The NCAA was holding its 99th convention; it has been around for a long time and the current set of arcane and jejune rules is the best that it could come up with after 99 years worth of trying? And this is an institution made up of colleges and universities that purport to take smart people and prepare them to make the world a better place?

With that observation out of the way, let me cut through any of the politically correct management speak and try to lay out a couple of things that the member institutions can do in order to keep this system from really getting out of whack. I know that Dr. Myles Brand is not omnipotent in this area – although he certainly does like to leave us with the impression that he is omniscient – but through his bully pulpit and using any rudimentary back-room political skills he might have, here are some specific goals he might seek to achieve.

One way to begin to put a cap on costs would be to put an end to the runaway salaries paid to successful football and basketball coaches. In institutions that even try to make a pretense of having an academic mission that transcends their athletic conquests, it is absurd to pay a coach and his coaching staff as much as the school might pay to all of the professors in the philosophy department. This cost containment could come in the form of a “coaching salary cap” or possibly by paying head coaches at the top end of the academic salary scale and leaving it at that. But it is clear that some schools are spending far too much money on coaches and that fosters an atmosphere of “win at all costs”.

Coupled with the cap on coaching costs, institutions and athletic departments need to be a lot less trigger-happy when it comes to firing coaches with less than fully successful records. This year, two football coaches were fired after winning 60% of their games at the school where they had been plying their trade. Firing them cost the school some money and hiring the successor did not come cheaply either. It would take the pendulum too far to the other side to say that a coach should be immune from firing for the first 3 or 4 seasons at a school because situations could get way out of hand in that environment. But if NCAA schools were a bit more “patient”, cost escalation might be easier to contain.

I’d suggest that the NCAA adopt a certification process for coaches and that part of attaining that certification and more importantly maintaining that certification would be that there be no rules violations involved in programs under the direct supervision of that coach. When problems come to light, far too many head coaches do the “Sgt Schultz routine” from the old Hogan’s Heroes program. They keep shouting, “I know nothing…!” Well, if coaches needed NCAA certification to be a coach and if keeping that certification meant he/she had to be responsible for the things that their underlings and their charges did, I suspect that coaches would be far more attentive than they are now. Under the current situation, coaches are rewarded for being “unaware”. Imagine if that translated to academics. Bevis could be the next valedictorian…

I know that Dr. Myles Brand likes to cite statistics to say that athletes graduate at a higher rate than the student body at large. But we know that is a crock and the books are cooked. Look at major football and basketball programs and look at the majors listed for scholar athletes in their 3rd and 4th years at the school. Now tell me that these are people making real progress toward a baccalaureate degree. So when schools make a sham of graduation rates, I suggest that the NCAA hit them where it hurts most and ban them from post-season play – and their share of post-season conference revenue sharing – for a period of X years. If things do not improve in reality – and not in some window dressing mode – then extend the ban of getting any post-season money AND start chopping scholarships. At that point, the school will be forced to do something constructive or be relegated to the status of “perpetual doormat”.

I’d suggest that freshmen be ineligible to play any and all varsity sports at any NCAA institution. Yes, I know that means that schools will be shelling out money in the form of tuition and room and board to scholar-athletes who cannot “repay” that investment for a year. So what? If you want to send a message to students that they are in college for something in addition to playing some sport, here is a way to deliver that message loud and clear from the day they enroll. Yes, more high school basketball players will skip college and go directly to the NBA. So what? That’s the NBA’s problem not the NCAA’s problem.

Finally, I suggest that Dr. Myles Brand remind the university presidents of the NCAA’s member institutions that he was once a university president just as they are. And he needs to tell them that he knows the pressures that they face from alums who relive their jovial collegiate days through the prowess of good old Alma Mammy’s sports teams. Nonetheless, he needs to remind them they are educators first and fund raisers second. That means they need to do something to take a positive stand in all of this messy business.

OK, there are a half-dozen or so basic ideas for Dr. Myles Brand and the NCAA to spend their energy on. I didn’t say they were easy and I didn’t say they were painless and I didn’t say they would fix things overnight. They aren’t and they won’t. But they will move the situation in a positive direction. It would be really good for the national media to begin to push Dr. Myles Brand to start doing things of this kind of positive nature and to stop giving him positive press for doing next to nothing at all. Next time he calls a news conference to pat himself on the back, it would be a positive thing to have a corps of reporters ready to call him out on these ideas and other constructive ideas. And most importantly, they must not tolerate him telling everyone that “they can’t be done”.

Here is a translation for you. “Can’t” means that whatever is being proposed either violates the laws of physics or some Federal statute. Most times when a politician or someone in a position such as Dr. Myles Brand tells you that something can’t be done, what he really means is that he – or the interests he represents – would prefer not do it. So don’t let him get away with that kind of verbal legerdemain.

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