Reforms Needed in College Sports

The frenzy associated with college football has again invaded the holiday season. On New Year’s Day alone, there will be six bowl games to choose from – 12 solid hours of college football.

As someone who played football in college, I love the game. It combines power and grace, speed and strength, individual talent and team effort. Football games also nurture school spirit and alumni pride.

But what began as a school sport 130 years ago has become a national obsession and multibillion dollar industry. Like all good things, college football risks ruin by being overvalued and under-regulated. Once a Saturday afternoon event, regular season college football games are now played on Thursdays and Fridays too. Television contracts dictate the schedules. This fall, for example, Florida State University canceled classes for a whole day to accommodate a Thursday night game.

Star players and coaches have become major celebrities, and the salaries of top coaches are astronomical. As the stakes have risen, the intense pressure to win becomes all-consuming. Bryce Jordan, president emeritus of Penn State, admits that at some universities with elite football programs, people seek to “win at any cost.”

The win-at-all-cost attitude too often leads to exorbitant spending, confused priorities, academic shortcuts and recruiting scandals. One university president recently expressed his frustration at the unending “arms race” among the elite programs. The greatest “threat hanging over football,” he declared, “is the multimillion dollar stadium, locker rooms and the $2 million paid for a football coach. Only a handful of schools in this country can afford this madness.”

Money issues, however, are by no means the only problem. Academic concerns abound. Division I-A football players graduate from college at much lower rates than the regular student body. The Knight Commission concludes its report on college sports by noting that “big-time athletics departments seem to operate with little interest in scholastic matters beyond the narrow issue of individual eligibility.” Efforts to enroll and keep players in school often result in academic scandals and recruiting violations.

During the past decade, more than half of all Division I-A schools have received sanctions for violating NCAA regulations.

To be sure, several college presidents recognize that things have gotten out of hand, and they are eager to restore the legitimacy of the term “student-athlete” and to make intercollegiate football a more positive experience for all involved – students, coaches and fans. Myles Brand, the former president of Indiana University who is the incoming president of the NCAA, has recently called for an “Academics First” movement, led by college presidents, to address the negative effects of college athletics on academic life. “While we don’t want to turn off the game,” Brand stresses, “we can lower the volume.”

Cries for reform are not new to college athletics. Alarmed by the rising violence of college football, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 called upon university leaders to protect the amateur status of players (some boosters were paying athletes) and promote safer play. Furman responded by eliminating football for 11 years! The National College Athletics Association, founded in March 1906, grew out of this reform effort.

In 1929, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching called for sweeping athletic reforms, noting that college sports had become a “highly organized commercial enterprise” with a “demoralizing and corrupt” recruiting process. The report added: “The paid coach, the gate receipts ... extensive journeys in special Pullman (railroad) cars, the demoralizing publicity showered on the players, the devotion of an undue proportion of time to training, the devices for putting a desirable athlete, but a weak scholar, across the hurdles of [classroom requirements] -- these ought to stop. The compromises that have to be made to keep such students in the college and to pass them through to a degree give an air of insincerity to the whole university-college regime.”

That the problems cited in 1929 are virtually the same as those facing college football today suggests how unsuccessful such reform efforts have been. Campaigns to restore the integrity and appropriate role of college football must confront very powerful forces working against any change. Money plays the dominant role. Not far behind is the single-minded devotion of well-intentioned alumni and fans who love their teams and game-day rituals so much they willingly tolerate the excesses and abuses of big-time sports. Dick Schultz, the former executive director of the NCAA, acknowledges that “You’ll never convince the real die-hard fans that reforms are needed.”

I wish President Brand luck in his efforts to reform big-time college football, but it will not be easy. Money has corrupted college football just as it has corrupted political campaigns, and neither arena seems eager to reverse course. The college teams participating in this year’s Bowl Championship Series will each take home more than $12 million.

Such a payday is not likely to put them at the front of the line among those promoting the restoration of sanity to college football.

Yet just as football games produce upsets, perhaps the latest effort to reform the sport will have surprising success. I hope so.