The NCAA was founded in 1906 to protect young people
from the dangerous and exploitive athletics practices of the time….
In many places, college football was run by student
groups that often hired players and allowed them to compete as non-students.
Common sentiment among the public was that college football should be reformed
or abolished.*
*Copied and pasted from the
NCAA website under “history” tab
It might be laughable if it
weren’t so sad. But these are the NCAA’s own words, their early mission
statement, if you will. Let’s take a look at what has happened in college
football while they have been keeping it safe from harm over the last 100 years,
especially in the wake of their sanctions against Penn State, levied as
punishment for lack of institutional control and an apparent disregard of
troubling facts and subsequent crimes against helpless children.
They have safeguarded over a
corrupt bowl system where individuals make hundreds of thousands of dollars
while schools and students take massive losses to participate in exhibition
games. They have stood by as graduation rates plummet to a point where many
teams have less than a 65% rate. (Five of the eleven BIG TEN schools had a less
than 65% rate including Ohio St (63%)and Michigan St (55%). However, those are
slightly better than Oregon (54%), Texas (49%) and Oklahoma (44%). Lastly, they
have helped foster an environment where coaches are viewed as demi-gods earning
unprecedented salaries where most head coaches earn more than the presidents at
their school. In fact, some assistant coaches even out-earn the top
administrator. Let’s take one point at a time to fully digest the ineptitude of
the NCAA in regards to major college football with a look at the most egregious
first, the bowl system.
First, a little history
lesson to help us understand how long the NCAA has been looking the other way. In 1902, in conjunction with the Tournament of
Roses parade, Michigan and Stanford were selected to play in the first-ever
East-West exhibition game. The game was so lopsided (49-0, Michigan) that
Stanford asked for the game to be halted at the end of the 3rd
period. There wasn’t even an attempt at another postseason game until 14 years
later, 1916, ten years after the NCAA was formed to be the self-proclaimed safe
guard protecting athletes from exploitation.
The Rose Bowl (1916), as we
know it today, became the first of the bowl games and was soon followed by the
Cotton Bowl Classic, Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl. They were formed to continue
to pit teams from different regions of the country in a postseason contest. By
the 1950’s alliances were being formed and contracts signed to insure certain
conferences would always be connected with certain bowl games. Each decade
brought the addition of more and more bowl games with the “major” bowls
clamoring for the right to showcase the highest ranked teams.
In the meantime, as bowl
games grew in size and number, the 1970’s saw the other 3 NCAA football
divisions, IA, II and III, institute a national tournament with a field of 32
teams. Each game being played at the higher seeded teams’ home field until the
championship game, which is now played at a neutral site. Inexplicably, the
NCAA allowed the FBS champion be decided first by a single poll and then a
combination of polls (writers and coaches) and then finally by a near
clandestine organization know as the BCS (Bowl Championship Series). This group
would provide their own rankings and pit the two highest rated teams to play at
one of the major bowl sites (Rose,Sugar,Orange and Fiesta) on a rotating basis.
This sometimes meant that the site might host their traditional bowl game and
then the BCS championship a week or so later.
Let’s make sure we have a
clear understanding here. You can Google corruption in college bowl football
games and have many selections to choose from with the Fiesta Bowl leading the
way. There was a federal oversight committee formed to look at the BCS. There
was a lawsuit levied to break this system and many highly publicized situations
where unbeaten teams were not selected to compete for this fabricated top
prize. It is as simple as this; three of
the four NCAA football Divisions has a nationwide tournament to crown their
national champ. The one that doesn’t has a corrupt bowl system that wouldn’t
allow a playoff to take place. (Imagine the NFL ranking teams throughout the
year and then selecting the top two to play in the Super Bowl…that would go
over well, wouldn’t it?).
Still craving some more fun
facts about the quagmire the NCAA has watched over for the last 100 years? How
about this one…
~A team is “allocated” so
many tickets for the big game, for the bigger bowls the number is 10,000. The
school is required to buy the remaining tickets they don’t sell to their fans.
~The fill-in-the-blank Bowl
will save plenty of space for your marching band, but they too must purchase
tickets, even the tuba section.
~Staggering amounts of money
are paid for the teams attending the major bowls, I mean, millions of dollars
paid out, yet very few teams break even…the smaller bowls, like the ones
Rutgers goes to every year, has teams suffering financial losses.
Speaking of the Scarlet
Knights from NJ, it’s a good place to visit the next point of how lopsided the
major college football world has become under the watchful eye of the NCAA.
Their most recent beloved, fleeing for the greener pastures of the NFL, head
coach Greg Schiano had an annual salary of 2.1 million dollars. That figure
made him the highest paid employee of the State. (That should embarrass New
Jerseyan even more than the Xanadu project in the Meadowlands). However, it
gets worse.
RU gave Schiano an
interest-free, $800,000 loan to build a home on school property. Now everyone
knows how tough it is for a multi-millionaire to make it in today’s world.
Rutgers surely does. They forgave $100,000 of this interest free loan for each
year Schiano stayed at the school after signing the latest deal. (He still owes
RU some cash).
This is the same school that
froze salary increases for professors; cut desk phones to reduce costs in the
history department and charged all students a $1,000 activity fee to help with
the shortfall in the athletic department that occurs annually.
Let’s stop picking on the
Jersey guys. If they wanted to reward a coach that didn’t even win more games
than he lost, that’s their business. If it doesn’t bother them that it took a
chemistry professor 20 years to be able to afford his first home and they
essentially gave one to their football coach of only 10 years, then why should
it bother us?
A few more fun financial
facts from around the league of shame the NCAA has given safe harbor:
~64 of the FBS head coaches
make more the $1,000,000 annually.
~32 make more than
$2,000,000.
~The annual head coach
salary in 2006 was $950,000, in 2011 it was $1.47 million an average increase
of 55% in just 6 seasons.
Here are some head coaches' salaries, followed by their school’s President’s wages:
- Mack Brown, University of Texas, $5.1 milion/$600,000 (for you English majors he makes $4.5 million more than his president.)
- Nick Saban, University of Alabama, $4.6 million/$512,000
- And just so you don’t think I’m just picking on the big boys, Randy Edsall, who led that juggernaut of a football program UCONN to it’s first-ever Big East title only to be throttled by Oklahoma while losing thousands of dollars to play in the Orange Bowl and then fleeing to the University of Maryland, $2,000,000 while his president earns $450,000.
I believe the NCAA is
currently working on a book entitled, “How to build a demi-God without even
trying “. Look for it in bookstores as
soon as they figure out how they can punish Dottie Sandusky for believing her
husband is innocent.
Now, I am not trying to say
the NCAA is completely responsible for the craziness that has become big-time
college football (or maybe I am?). Yet, let’s refer back to their own words, especially
the ones that said…. college football was
run by student groups that often hired players and allowed them to compete as
non-students…
I wonder if they mean
“non-students” as in never intending to earn a degree. It seems like the
aforementioned graduation rates indicates that there is a large number of
student-athletes that disregard the first half of that moniker. So, that means
that technically they are being paid to just play football. Apparently, the
NCAA doesn’t really consider a scholarship worth thousands of dollars as
payment.
Well, maybe the NCAA is
rethinking their position which is over 100 years old and that IS ok to just go
to college to play football.
How about this? An old
friend of mine who used to administer a personality test designed to give NFL
teams more information about their draftees told me he has seen 4-year players
leave the room in tears because they could not READ the questions.
Enough?
Let’s go back to the other
three levels of college football the NCAA safeguards. They all have fewer
scholarships available for football, with DIII having no athletic scholarships,
period. The Patriot and Ivy Leagues, (DI-AA) also forbid athletic scholarships.
All three of these divisions have higher graduation rates than the FBS. Also,
all three of these divisions have an aforementioned playoff system. If we use DIII 2011 as an
example, 32 teams begin play at the lower seeded team’s field on Nov 19. By the
end of the following weekend, there are only 8 teams still standing, with the
final two teams playing for the title on Dec 16.
The FBS had 35 bowl games in
2011-12. The first one was played on Dec 17 with 16 of the games being played
from Dec 31-Jan 9. That means 70 teams were active for at least two weeks after
their season ended and 32 for over a month. In the lower levels, half the teams
are sent home (or back to school) each week after the season ends so there are
only two left on Dec 16 thanks to the national playoff system. That’s three
weeks of meaningful games, leading to the national title game. In the FBS,
teams spend 5 weeks preparing to play in the Chick-Fi-La bowl, and others like
it, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to their schools. And if
they win, they can raise their chick-fil-a high in the air and shout; “We’re
number..um..number..well, somewhere between 3-70..but we are not too
sure….ok..we’re number 38.”
Here’s what has evolved in
the FBS under the ever so watchful eye of the NCAA. Teams used to play 8, maybe
9 games per year, and have their season ended before Thanksgiving so
student-athletes could prepare for their final exams and spend holidays with
their families. (For those of you involved with a FBS football program, final
exams are held at the end of each semester in most classes to test your
knowledge of the subject matter from that semester. A semester is a block of
time in a school year…oh, never mind..)
Now, teams have 11-12 games
each year and play into December. If they can win half of those games, they
will more than likely secure a bid to a meaningless bowl game that will cost
their school hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here’s the best part, many FBS
coaches get bonuses on top of their inflated salaries if they receive a bid and
their athletic directors’ often do too. So what this leads to is schools
scheduling as many weak opponents as they can in order to ensure a bid. The
extra games added to the schedules over the years, means one or two more home games,
which means more money in the bank, which means, they might not lose as much
money this year to attend the Meineke Car Care Bowl. Where, by the way, they will
play in front of friends and families and otherwise half-empty stands. The
friends and families will spend plenty of their hard earned dollars to view
this classic battle between two mediocre teams while their coach, and possibly
AD receive a bonus to their salaries.
Let’s revisit those Scarlet
Knights from Rutgers for a better illustration. The team of Pernetti (AD) and
Schiano (multi-millionaire coach, who needed an interest free loan to buy a
house) were experts at the Bowl schedule scam. Already competing in the
historically weaker Big East league, they made sure the Knights could keep on choppin’
into December with an even weaker non-conference schedule. In their 8 victories
last year, 6 came against teams with losing records. As a matter of fact, the
overall won-loss record of the teams they defeated was 52 wins and 63 losses.
RU regularly schedules one or two lower
sub-division opponents (this year it was North Carolina Central who won only
two games in the lower division), as well as the historically weaker of the two
service academies. However, the hard work preparing these cupcake schedules
paid off in the end, again, because they faced off against a 6-6 Iowa team in
the Pinstripe Bowl. By the way, AD Pernetti also has a bonus coming to him via
his current contract if the RU athletic program breaks even or turns a profit.
He has never collected on that one.
So here’s what this
all means to me, especially in light of the recent NCAA sanctions against Penn
State. In 1906, the NCAA was formed …to protect young people from the dangerous
and exploitive athletics practices of the time…. their words, not mine. So
for over 100 years, we are talking a century here folks, the NCAA has stood by
as the highest level of college football has become more dangerous and more
exploitive. In many ways, certainly by their lack of response, the NCAA has
provided a safe harbor for this culture to exist, all while claiming to be the
protector of what is good and right.
The culture they
enabled and promoted through their lack of action brought us to a point where a
janitor who witnessed a brutal sexual assault of a defenseless child had a
clouded vision of what to do next. He seemed to wear the same glasses a hulking
assistant coach wore when he was an eyewitness to another act by this monster.
The head coach, AD, VP and President, when given asst coach’s account of what
he saw, did no better than those in the position of direct intervention. If we
can give complete faith in a report commissioned by the same University who
harbored this monster, (and we might as well since the NCAA based their actions
on this version of the truth), then, even the local and state authorities
failed to act in the most humane way. The trail ran from a janitor, through the
President of the university and no one could see the right path and in this
case, the only path.
If a deranged
sociopath, (I’m talking about Sandusky, not Bobby Petrino at Arkansas), can be
enabled by an esteemed institution due to his involvement with football, then
what else is happening elsewhere? Football coaches out-earning their school’s
presidents by millions, poor graduation rates, and a bowl system so corrupt,
that when one more game is added to the mix and called a playoff, it is viewed
as a major victory, this is the NCAA’s legacy.
The NCAA has failed
for over 100 years to do what they vowed to do, sounds like their Grand
Experiment has failed on a grand proportion. Perhaps they should get to work on
the second half of the mission statement formed in 1906. However, there is no
common sentiment among the public that college football should be reformed or
abolished. Penn State football failed to derail a monster in their midst for 15
years, the NCAA has failed for over 100 years. It seems to me maybe one lead to
the other.
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