Athletics

College football frenzy is peaking, soon to give way to a crescendo of basketball mania culminating in March Madness. For about 108 of the 128 Football Bowl Subdivision schools, this is a distinctly mixed blessing, as intercollegiate athletics pose a drain on school finances – one that is growing steadily over time.

Schools are in an athletic arms race, feeling the necessity to spend ever more funds on high coaches’ salaries and fancy facilities lest they suffer athletic humiliation and the wrath of irate alumni and fans. According to USA Today data, more than 100 schools currently subsidize intercollegiate athletics by more than $10 million a year. The fact that the University of Florida is spending some $7 million to lure a football coach away from Colorado State shows the financial dimensions of this are huge. It is no wonder that at the recent White House college summit, Vice President Biden blasted schools for elaborate spending on stadium sky boxes.

But as President Ray Watts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham recently showed, it does not have to be that way. He is eliminating the school’s football program.

UAB has been a football power wannabe, playing in the shadows of its superpower state rivals, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and Auburn University, which have won a majority of national championships in the past five years.

Its stadium, Legion Field, which seats almost 72,000 people, has limped along with an average attendance recently of under 15,000 fans per game. UAB takes in about $9 million in revenues from its athletics programs but spends $27 million. That $18 million loss amounts to nearly $1,000 annually for each of UAB’s 19,000 students – the equivalent of about 13 percent of the school’s in-state tuition price. Getting rid of football will eliminate some of that loss, though the school will maintain several other sports. More importantly, perhaps, the school will not have to spend tens of millions on new facilities viewed critical to remaining competitive.

Contrast the UAB experience to Ohio University, where we have some experience. Like UAB, it has a so-so football team (6-6 record) and considers a game with 15,000 attending to be pretty typical, despite its stadium capacity of 24,000. Like UAB, it plays in the shadow of a football powerhouse that regularly draws over 100,000 to its games, currently fourth-ranked Ohio State, playing UAB’s sister school Alabama in the Sugar Bowl.

Like UAB, OU is forced to subsidize intercollegiate sports to the tune of about $18 million a year – again, nearly $1,000 for each of its roughly 20,000 students on the Athens campus (partially disguised as part of a “student activity fee”). Both universities have medical schools. The institutional similarities are striking.

While UAB President Watts is saying “enough is enough,” Ohio President Roderick McDavis is following a more conventional path: let’s spend more to try to break into the ranks of the athletically anointed. Facing similar facility problems as UAB, OU has built a $12.5 million indoor practice facility, primarily for the football team.

It has also announced plans for an “academic center” costing more than $5 million, which will serve as a gated community of sorts where athletes but not ordinary students can study. Ostensibly, an existing study facility and the university’s library are insufficient for the athletes. Similarly, a decade ago the basketball coach made much less than McDavis, but now the coach is paid significantly more than he is.

When former Vanderbilt University President Gordon Gee made the athletic department a unit within the normal university bureaucracy, subject to all of its rules regarding budgeting and staffing, he said that if he tried to do that at Ohio State (where he also was president), he would quickly be pumping gas for a living. University presidents who try to unilaterally disarm athletics face fierce threats to job security that prevent any constructive reform to rein in college costs.

Instead, resources are misappropriated toward sports. Presidents like McDavis spend hours trying to cajole rich donors to help fund new athletic facilities when that money could finance the construction of, say, a much-needed performing arts center or more scholarships for excellent students. The crowding out of academic needs to support sports has come at a high reputational cost – OU has fallen 13 spots in the U.S. News national university listing over the past five years.

Boise State has emerged in recent years as a football power, but compares poorly with the less football-oriented University of Idaho. Despite spending more than twice as much as Idaho on athletics ($43 million versus $19 million), it loses more, and in both the Forbes and U.S. News rankings of colleges, Idaho clearly surpasses Boise. Many university presidents fail to recognize the Iron Law of Sports: when someone wins a game, someone else loses. It is impossible for a large portion of schools to achieve primacy in any given sport.

Economic pressures, however, suggest that other presidents may start biting the bullet and take the UAB route. Total college enrollments are lower today than three years ago, and high costs paired with widespread underemployment of recent college graduates are making students more price-sensitive than in the past. Passing on athletic subsidies to students in the form of higher fees is increasingly unrealistic.

The top 60 or so schools that are genuine athletic powers, about half losing $5 million or less annually on sports, are gaining control of the lucrative commercial aspects of sports through the NCAA athletic cartel. So while Watts might be catching some backlash for his decision to shut down the football program, do not be surprised if this turns out to be a recurring strategy for presidents to control costs in the future.

Additionally, the continued tales of corruption and abuse in sports that stain the reputation of higher education, such as phantom courses at the University of North Carolina, sex abuse at Penn State, and widespread cheating at other schools, should make presidents and trustees more willing to fight to withdraw from the arms race.

There is another model, where sports can be part of college life on an amateur basis without expensive coaches, ESPN television contracts, or athletic scholarships. In fact, this has been a glorious season for a New England town, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard College had an undefeated football team, and M.I.T. went 10-1, losing only in a national playoff game -- despite spending relatively modest amounts on sports. While neither school makes any list of the top 100 football powers, they are at or near the top of nearly every academic ranking.

A colleague of mine once asked me a rhetorical question. “What kind of magic does it take for college athletes, especially those from very disadvantaged educational backgrounds, to remain eligible when they must spend most of their waking hours training for or playing sports?”

“The magic,” he suggested, “is academic fraud.”

In his view, which I share, responsibility rests with institutional leaders whose jobs depend on currying favor with powerful alumni and other constituencies whose priority is winning national championships, not academic excellence.

Cheating scandals such as the one at the University of North Carolina are not limited to a few rogue universities. On the contrary, some violations of academic integrity are to be expected in any school that requires athletes to give so much time and attention to sports that an army of tutors and academic support personal is needed to keep them eligible. Most academic counselors are dedicated professionals, but the line between tutoring and doing athletes work for them can get a little fuzzy. 

Helping athletes stay eligible becomes academic fraud when athletes’ work is done for them or when they are pushed into classes with little or no academic content.

The evidence is overwhelming that big-time college football players have little time to make college education a priority. The National Labor Relations Board in Illinois recently issued a detailed report on football at Northwestern University stating that football players “are under strict and exacting control by their coaches throughout the entire year.” Pre-season training begins six weeks before the start of the fall semester. During this period, coaches provide “hour by hour” schedules of football related activities which last from 5:30 in the morning to 10:30 at night for an average of about 50 or 60 hours per week.  

The NLRB report estimated 40 to 50 hours per week during the season devoted to games, weight training, mandatory meetings, practice, and travel. Players often go to the coaches’ offices at 8 p.m. to watch game film for a couple of hours.

In a survey of college football players undertaken several years ago, the NCAA found that football players devote about 40 hours a week on football- related activities in preparation for 12 regular season games, thus reinforcing the findings at Northwestern.

Athletes recently challenged the NCAA in a number of antitrust cases. Without those challenges, the NCAA would have made no effort to introduce significant educational reforms. The athletes deserve the stipends and scholarship enhancements ordered by the judge in the antitrust case brought by Ed O’Bannon.

However, as a college professor, I am more concerned that big-time college athletes receive the educational opportunity they were promised than the compensation that comes with further professionalizing college sport. Denying athletes those educational opportunities constitutes a breach of contract.

In order to defend athletes rights to an education, the Drake Group, an organization whose mission is to defend academic integrity in college sports, has proposed educational reforms which should be embraced by every accredited institution of higher education and be institutionalized in NCAA rules and regulations where appropriate.

These reforms include:

• Allow freshman eligibility for only those athletes whose high school grade point average or standardized test scores are within one standard deviation from the mean academic profile of their entering class, thus giving special admits time to adjust to a more competitive academic environment than they may be use to.
• Athletes must maintain a cumulative GPR of 2.0 in order to be eligible for sports, thus sending a clear message that education gets top priority. Athletes who fall below 2.0 should be given two semesters to raise their GPA to that level or lose their athletic scholarship.    
• Provide extensive academic remediation for athletes who are ineligible to play as freshmen and limit their practice time to 10 hours a week. Remediation should begin in the summer before these athletes enter college.
• Require that all academic and counseling support services for college athletes be under the direct supervision of and budgetary control of the institution’s academic authority, administered externally to the athletic department, and be consistent with counseling and support services for all students.
• Require institutions to provide “whistle blower protections” for those who disclose unethical conduct or institutional rules violations related to the conduct of athletics programs. 
• Require all NCAA institutions to award multiyear scholarships that extend to graduation and that cannot be cancelled for injury or contributions to a team’s success. Cancelation should be permitted only for voluntary withdrawal or serious violations of team rules.
• Require the faculty senate (or other highest faculty governance authority) to closely examine athletic department and coaches’ rules (other than those promulgated by the NCAA) to ensure they are compatible with educational best practices. Faculty should have the final say on this.
• The NCAA’s 20 hour a week (4 hours a day) rule should be strictly enforced and the scholarships of players who skip supposedly “voluntary” workouts during the year to devote their time to non-athletically related activities should be protected.
• Institutions should work with faculty senates to ensure that athletic contests are scheduled to minimize conflict with class attendance, and no athlete should be prohibited from taking a class that may occasionally conflict with a practice, or team meeting.
• Institutions should have a tenured faculty-only Committee on Academic Oversight elected by the faculty senate to report annually to the senate on the academic progress of college athletes and, when possible, to compare such data to non-athletes. This report would list independent studies taken, grades received, and professors teaching. It would also include a list of athletes’ advisors, courses taken, faculty who taught those courses and grades received. Care would be taken to adhere to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

This is only a partial list of reforms that should be instituted. In the coming years, Congress should take a very close look at the way college sports in American higher education is governed. Perhaps the NCAA should be totally replaced by a federally chartered corporation that is willing to institute meaningful reforms that go well beyond the proposals mentioned above. America’s colleges and universities are a national treasure. Should college sport be governed by an organization that appears to have put education on the sidelines?

The authoritative report last week by the former federal prosecutor Kenneth Wainstein on the sports scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that the corruption continued for at least 18 years and that the participants included at least 3100 students and multiple members of the UNC faculty, staff and administration. These numbers far transcend the usual college sports scandal, and commentators have been quick to raise a number of questions, mainly concerning how the NCAA will react to Wainstein’s findings, how UNC will gain control of the situation, etc.

However, to my knowledge and Google search, no one has asked one obvious question: how could the sports media, both local and regional, not have known about the academic transgressions and investigated them? In fact, the local paper, The News & Observer, has a long and proud history of investigating local college sports teams. 

As far back as the 1980s, when Jim Valvano was North Carolina State men’s basketball coach and before his death from cancer turned him into a holy figure for ESPN, The News & Observer revealed how Valvano had brought in recruits with abysmal SAT scores -- one, Chris Washburn, had 470 out of 1600 (at the time, students received 400 for signing their names).

But where was The News & Observer during the 18-year UNC scandal? Because so many athletes, coaches, and staffers were involved, how is that the paper’s beat writers who spent enormous amounts of time, on a daily basis, with the school’s football and basketball players, and the teams’ staffers and coaches, never heard about the phony courses and phony grades? And if they heard, as journalists, how could they not have followed up on such important leads? And what about all the other journalists in North Carolina who covered the Tarheel football and basketball teams during those years?

The answer resides in the nature of sports media coverage of local college teams and players. Having lived in Bloomington, Ind., for the exact same 30 years that Bob Knight resided -- should I say reigned? -- there as men’s basketball coach, I have some insight into how a scandal can fester and never appear in the local or even the state media.

Stories of Knight psychologically and physically abusing his players circulated frequently in Bloomington, but because the local and state basketball writers were beholden to Indiana’s athletic department for access to the team, the pressbox, the media handouts, etc., and feared the department’s wrath, they never wrote about what some of them saw with their own eyes. 

Finally, an outside journalist, Robert Abbott, a news -- not a sports -- producer with CNN, investigated the rumors and did the story that began the end of Knight’s years at Indiana.

I do not know the exact circumstances of the relations between the local and state media in North Carolina and UNC Chapel Hill, but I imagine that it is similar to what occurred in Bloomington, and what has long taken place in other college towns with prominent sports teams. 

But will all this change in the future? Will the internet further shrink the global village and expose college sports scandals with greater speed and efficiency than has occurred at UNC Chapel Hill?

Possibly but, then again, the internet has existed for the 18 years of the UNC academic fraud and did not turn up the facts.  Maybe the real solution — and the courts may impose this — is to professionalize college sports and end the pretense that all its participants are also students.  When that occurs, there will no longer be any need for sham courses, sham grades, etc. 

And important educational institutions like UNC Chapel Hill will not be tarnished by the fallout from similar academic fraud.

While most of the challenges to the theory of amateurism in college athletics come from reformers who detest the whole enterprise and would like to see it radically transformed or eliminated, the defenders of intercollegiate sports do themselves no favors by pretending that they do not pay the athletes. In fact, we in America's colleges and universities not only pay them, we compete for their services in a marketplace where the price paid per athlete varies dramatically from institution to institution.

We disguise this price competition by pretending that various things are true. We pretend that a scholarship that produces the same net cost of attendance to a student-athlete at all competitive institutions is the same thing as providing equal value for equal work. The work may be equal, defined by the rules of games that are reasonably uniform, but the pay we provide to the athlete is not at all equal. 

This is because the product we give the student-athlete, let us say a four-year college education, has very different prices at the various schools. A Stanford degree costs approximately $60,000 x 4, or $240,000, while an Ohio State University degree costs approximately $22,000 x 4 or $88,000 (in-state) or $38,000 x 4 or $152,000 (out of state). 

Thus a full-scholarship athlete from the state of Ohio being recruited by Stanford is being offered compensation worth $240,000 while Ohio State is only offering that same person $88,000. Even an out-of-state student being recruited by both institutions will only get an offer of compensation worth $152,000 at Ohio State, well below Stanford's offer of $240,000.

Additionally, universities bid for the services of student-athletes by offering a host of non-monetized but nonetheless valuable benefits. These include publicity, exposure on television, endless specialized training, and a wide range of other benefits that if purchased outside the university would have significant market value. Here, the recruited athlete receives these payments as in-kind compensation that builds value for future professional opportunities.

These non-monetized benefits also vary by institution. If the institution is part of a group that gets superior television coverage, the value of the benefit is much greater to the student-athlete than a similar benefit from an institution without superior television coverage.

The academic benefits are also of considerable value since only a fraction of these paid athletes will find professional sports careers. The elaborate academic advising centers, for those who use them, provide a benefit that if purchased in the outside market place for tutors and other support professionals would be a significant cost. The scale and effectiveness of these academic centers also varies significantly by institution, representing yet another variable compensation item offered to student-athletes.

Why then, when college athletics is under attack as if operating a standardized monopoly cartel that controls and standardizes competition for athletic talent and manages its affairs in constraint of trade, do the NCAA, the conferences, and the institutions not respond with the facts? These facts prove that a competitive marketplace for athletes exists, and that colleges and universities compete in this marketplace by paying much different compensation to student-athletes to recruit their services for individual institutions.

If professional football and basketball allowed players to compete right out of high school, the competition would, of course, be different, because the most marketable athletes would go pro immediately. This, however, would not reduce the competition among universities for the remaining college-level talent.

We may imagine that we can preserve the notion that athletes play for the home school because of loyalty and commitment to the institution, but the fact that we recruit talented athletes from across the nation and the world, and that student-athletes make the best deal they can for the highest value package of benefits a university provides, makes it clear that this is an open market for student-athlete talent. 

It is possible we do not pay them enough, it is possible we should have different rules about how we pay them, but it is not really possible to pretend we do not pay them different amounts by school.

Some may think that recognizing the widely varying pay provided to athletes at different institutions detracts from their status as students. This, too, is not the case, since we pay different amounts to many categories of students to achieve various institutional objectives without anyone imagining that the full scholarship academic superstar is less of a student than the full-pay middle-class student without financial aid. These two students are equally students, but differentially paid by the university to attend and in one way or another enhance the institution's programs.

The resistance to external payments to student-athletes can also come from failing to distinguish different kinds of pay and the effect these might have on the integrity of the college sports programs. Right now, under the current system, the NCAA and the institutions regard athletically related income as a major violation of the rules (as the recent controversies over Johnny Manziel and the University of Georgia's Todd Gurley exemplify). This restriction will likely fade away in the face of legal challenges and already has been weakened by the settlement of the video game lawsuit. Ideally, in the future, it should only be a problem for student-athletes to earn money from leveraging their college athletic celebrity status in advertising or sports promotion (as coaches do) if there is a conflict of interest or a conflict of commitment.

The conflict of interest would occur, for example, if a student-athlete is paid by an apparel manufacturer for appearances when a different and competing apparel manufacturer has a university contract. In that case we have a conflict of interest, and the university can forbid the arrangement.

The conflict of commitment would occur if an athlete, during the season, participates in a television production that conflicts in time and place with the practices, games, and class attendance required of student-athletes. This conflict of commitment would prompt the university to forbid that deal too.

While this may seem complicated, in fact, most universities have already dealt with all these issues in their contracts with coaches. This is not just about football or basketball, and applies to other sports where there's a market for professional talent. Coaches cannot accept endorsement contracts, television appearances, or other commitments without permission of the university, which reviews proposals to ensure that there is no conflict of commitment or interest.

Take for example, a coach in a non-revenue sport, say tennis. This superstar coach is recruited by a private for-profit tennis club to provide coaching advice and training before and during a major pre-Olympic national tennis tournament. The coach wants to do this, and would be well paid, but the university, after reviewing the activities required by this opportunity, denies the request to participate. The outside activity would take too much of the coach's time during the college tennis season, thereby creating a conflict of commitment.

While it is fine to imagine that in some magical and imaginary time college athletics was an amateur activity carried out for the fun of the game and the glory to alma mater, that time probably never existed, and in any case no longer exists. We buy student-athletes in a highly competitive marketplace and pay widely differentiated compensation to these athletes depending on their value to us.

Sometimes the best defense against attacks is a clear understanding of the financial structure of a marketplace. Then we can fight about something real, rather than shadow-box about imaginary amateurs.