The argument is over. The secret is out. There will be no more denying, no more excusing and no more turning a blind eye to the truth:
College football is broken.
As one debate is laid to rest, another ascends to fill its place. Enthusiasts of a conversation-fueled sport will surely spend the next several months – maybe years – pandering solutions to the widespread epidemic.
But the old debate, at least, is no more.
To close out a summer characterized by major program scandal, former University of Miami booster and incarcerated Ponzi schemer Nevin Shapiro came forth with startling and supported revelations of providing improper benefits totaling millions of dollars to 72 current and former Hurricane football and basketball players. The scandal deepened when numerous coaches were indicted as having either knowledge or participation, including Missouri’s own basketball coach Frank Haith.
As those close to “The U” nervously await the dark days that are to come, college football fans nationwide endure a similar pain. The issue at hand goes far beyond a Ponzi schemer who threw outlandish parties on Miami Beach the same way it trumped a welcoming tattoo parlor in Columbus or an agent-signing spree in Chapel Hill.
Booster-ravaged schools may handle NCAA bylaw cases on their own, but college football is no longer a home to isolated incidents. The sport suffers from its own systematic chaos, as even the NCAA president has admitted in calling for industry-wide reform.
For far too long, the NCAA has hidden behind the title “student-athlete” to protect its monopoly over the industry. The NCAA claimed that since athletic participation was a substitute to education, “student-athletes” are prohibited from using their celebrity for personal gain of any kind.
This may have been an acceptable argument back when attending college was for the few and the market was directed primarily toward students. But what the NCAA chose to ignore is that the business that now generates millions of dollars annually would also be nothing without the recruits that attend these institutions solely for athletic purposes. The advent of full-ride athletic scholarships makes this much obvious even to the NCAA, though it have long refused to admit it.
As the barriers of the “student-athlete” definition crumbled, the NCAA needed a new excuse. Its new pawn would be the National Football League.
Sadly, the presence of another league is an even more preposterous reason not to pay employees. The NCAA is basically saying that if the NFL managed to put itself on a permanent lockout and folded, so would all levels of the game of football.
Gaps of logic like these have produced what I like to call, “College Football’s Great Façade.”
Nothing in college football is quite as it seems. Everyone knows that Texas Tech.’s newest gunslinger isn’t actually the most efficient quarterback in college football and that the tiny mid-major with the unblemished record isn’t really America’s best team.
Unfortunately, the mirages don’t end with NCAA statistics. They extend to every end of college football with a sinister reach.
Using examples from this summer alone, perception has completely defined the processes by which the administrations at Ohio State, North Carolina and Miami have handled their respective scandals.
As I wrote about in my first column, Ohio State allowed national opinions to destroy its support for former coach Jim Tressel. North Carolina same took the same steps to finally ridding itself of Butch Davis.
In our most recent example, Miami administrators and former athletes used a prison sentence as motivation to abandon their closest booster. The school was content with Shapiro picking fights with the compliance director as long as it received his donations, but removed his name from the school’s student lounge the moment he became a convicted felon.
It shows the sad state of the game when it takes a criminal to bring forth the truth those in power chose to ignore:
Nobody really cares about what the NCAA calls “rules.”
Coaches will act remorseful in the face of the NCAA hammer. Administrations will correspondingly fire them in a similar attempt to show the league that they care. The reality is that none of these people want program-wide babysitting to be their responsibility, and nor should it be.
For no amount of money should a head football coach be expected to police every action of 100 football players while simultaneously producing a winning product on the field. Whereas the NCAA asks the “student-athletes” to supply its industry for free, it requires coaches to register 48-hour days to meet conflicting responsibilities in order to keep their jobs.
I’m not purporting that Jim Tressel, Butch Davis or the Miami coaching staffs are flawless individuals. But what I will argue is that these men are football coaches, subservient to a brand name that demands of them the impossible.
That brand name is broken. College football is broken.
The healing process begins now.