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The Sandbox newsletter is an exclusive benefit of our paid Insider membership. Insiders have access to a unique blend of exclusive data, analysis and emerging best practices. Explore the member benefits here.

March 23, 2024

(Not Just) March Madness

Collegiate athletics is wackadoodle.  

By  Rachel Toor

The Sandbox

Inside Higher Ed Insider
sandbox egg

From Rachel Toor

I was immune to the college basketball virus for the first seven years I lived in the N.C. Triangle. When I was offered Duke basketball tickets, I sneered and said, "Give them to someone who cares."

Then I got infected. My disease tends to flare up every March. 

I stopped paying close attention to intercollegiate athletics (even though I now live in Go Zags! land) so I had to call my work wife.

Me: Wait, what? Stanford and Cal are in the ACC? Cross-continent travel for every team? And Washington State and Oregon State got kicked off the playground? And Dartmouth's basketball players now are unionized? And you can get a cornhole scholarship? 

Doug: Yes, all those things. And more. When I started covering college sports almost 40 years ago (!!), an athlete would be disqualified and a team could be barred from a bowl game if a coach gave a hungry recruit a free meal and a bus ticket. Now a university's boosters can legally collect millions of dollars and use them to woo a talented quarterback or a point guard to compensate them for use of their names, images and likenesses. To me, these changes are mostly for the better, because they are more honest about the pre-professional nature of big-time college sports. But they create a wild-west atmosphere that is chaotic and deeply unsettling for college leaders.

Me: What about football? Remember when I wrote that piece for you that inspired hate mail (one dude called me "missy"!). I simply suggested that it might be time for us to drop football for moral reasons (CTI). 

Doug: I would discourage my hypothetical grandson from playing football if I had a say, but the game's violence seems not to faze most Americans. (It's cute that you think morals matter, by the way.) This may be March Madness, but football is king in America.

Me: What are the stories you're paying attention to? 

Doug: The big story related to college sports is the slow but inevitable death of the concept of amateurism at the highest level of college sports, and the accompanying consolidation of power among an ever-smaller number of universities that play at that highest level. I've laid out my scenario a couple of times in articles I've written, but the gist of it is that I believe 40-50 universities will eventually walk away from the rest of their peers to compete among (and share money only with) themselves, leaving the rest behind and inviting Congress to strip the tax exemption that sports programs enjoy because they are considered educational. Killing the golden goose, as it were.

Me: Yesterday you texted me, "See, they have a chance!" We'd talked about how I had gone to watch my alma mater's team practice in the Spokane Arena on Thursday. I hadn't gotten tickets because, really, who wants to see a blowout?

With 18 minutes to go in the second half, I started watching. OMG. OMG. OMG.

After the game was over, after I'd screamed so loud Harry left the room, I had to go for a run to get my pulse rate down. 

Back in the day, my university president wrote an essay that starts, "It breaks your heart." Baseball makes for great literary fodder, but college basketball in March is something else. I'd forgotten how quickly I can invest. How much pleasure I get from being entirely stressed out. How there's eternity in an hour (or in 33 seconds).

We can critique until the cows come home, and there is much about athletics I just don't get, but these games, well, they can cause your jaded little heart to swell.

Fixing a Long-Broken System of Athletics

The writer is a current president

Early in my career, I served as a department chair and the dean gave a dozen of us letters of reprimand. She felt that we had all handled a particular task poorly. Someone said—and it may have been me—that if we all failed, perhaps the problem was the task, not the people. 

I thought about this when I saw the Knight Commission suggesting that now was the time for university presidents to take leadership in intercollegiate athletics.

This is not the first time that the Knight Commission or other groups have looked to university presidents to take more leadership and solve one or more problems in intercollegiate athletics. In fact, the 1929 Carnegie Report, the first attempt to thoroughly examine college athletics, made that recommendation and almost every subsequent examination has done the same.

Many groups still feel college athletics has problems and university presidents need to fix them. So, if this approach has not been successful after such a long period of time, perhaps it is the task, not the thousands of people who have served in this role for the last century. And, given this, maybe we need a better recommendation.

For several understandable reasons, this has not been successful. 

University presidents, regardless of their path to the presidency, generally have no experience with athletics before they are put in the position of having athletics report to them. Given the obvious learning curve, and all of the areas on which a president must focus, it is easy to see it might be difficult for us to solve problems that have existed for so long. 

Even if we could figure out some solutions, we are not ultimately in charge and cannot make decisions without the support of the board that hired us and, obviously, could fire us. Boards are often filled with people who are fans of the athletic programs and are reluctant to do anything that might impact the institution’s success. And, even if they are not fans, they know others are and do not want to hear the complaints, very loud complaints, from that group.

In order to solve many of the problems with college athletics, we would either have to unilaterally do something that no other university is doing (significantly reduce costs), which is risky for all of the reasons above, make the current, generally bad, financial situation in college sports worse (give more of the money to athletes without reductions elsewhere), or work together as a group on some of these issues, which in many cases this would violate anti-collusion laws. So, it is difficult for one president to do it alone and doing it as a group also has real challenges.

This is not to say I do not think presidents have a role to play in any changes in college athletics. In fact, I would be uncomfortable if we did not have a significant role. However, it seems that we need to recognize that for change to happen, we need to change the task in some meaningful way. That may involve federal intervention or some other important to external change, so presidents could be successful in this task.

Of course, that will likely only happen if there is actually widespread desire for change. Despite all of the talk about the general public's unhappiness with NIL and the transfer portal, we have not seen any decline in fan interest. Recent attendance and television ratings would suggest that interest is as strong as ever. 

So, frankly I have my doubts that there will ever be the type of change some are seeking. And I am sure 100 years from now, some will still be suggesting that presidents need to fix the problems in college athletics. 

Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested in reading The Sandbox. Encourage them to join by clicking here. 

JOIN TODAY

We believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion. We believe in access. We know the field isn’t level but think everyone should get to play—not just those with pedigrees and good breeding but also the scrappier ones who may have had a rougher start in life. This applies to institutions (community colleges as well as research universities), leaders (the Ivy-all-the-ways and those who came from less “traditional” backgrounds), and animal companions (we're not speciest).

Harry running

Harry doesn't need a conference for athletics.

The Sandbox

Not your typical weekly newsletter. This is a space where presidents and chancellors can say what they really think without fear. Everyone is welcome to read, but only those who have been in the top job can submit to us. The Sandbox, by Rachel Toor, is an exclusive benefit of our paid Insider membership program.

 

 

The Sandbox Archive

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‘President Resigns Abruptly’

May 10, 2025

‘A Council of Sheriffs’ and Other Ideas to Help Save Higher Ed

May 3, 2025

Former Presidents Are Eager to Step Up

April 26, 2025

It’s All About the Benjamins

April 19, 2025
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