Despite its familiar feel, the OSU implosion seemed to represent a significant milepost in the national conversation about big-time college sports—if not a moment of truth, then at least a moment for truth. The fact that the conflagration had claimed a member of college football royalty, combined with the contemporaneous cascade of other scandals—including those that currently smolder at Auburn, Oregon, Boise State, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Oklahoma—appears to have opened the door to the possibility of finally starting that deeper discussion. In August, a summit of university leaders, convened by NCAA President Mark Emmert, agreed to raise educational standards for incoming freshmen and streamline the association’s bloated rule book. Summit participants vowed to address in the coming months the issue of athletes’ financial needs, but Emmert reiterated his opposition to paying students. Meanwhile, a class-action lawsuit filed against the NCAA by former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon, which challenges the non-compensation of college athletes, is slated to go to trial in early 2013.
The sports commentariat has begun to question, more frequently and volubly, the very foundation of amateurism and higher education that the stakeholders in big-time college sports cling to. And even some of the stakeholders themselves are easing their grip: Mike Slive, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, which is widely considered to be the dominant football conference in the country, has advocated providing additional financial support for athletes, and in July confessed that the scandal headlines had cost major college sports the “benefit of the doubt.”
This moment may come to nothing. Given the NCAA’s history of fecklessness and the powerful financial interests aligned with the status quo, meaningful reform will be difficult. But it raises an interesting question for the future of sports coverage: Is the Scandal Beat, with its singular focus on busting rule-breakers, paving the way to reform or helping to block the way?
Sharecropper Economy
Even at its most righteous, college athletics—and I’m referring here to the so-called revenue sports, football and men’s basketball—is a multibillion-dollar enterprise based on an exploitive business model. Universities get gobs of money that helps float their entire athletic departments, and coaches and administrators are paid handsome salaries, all from the talent and effort of an essentially unpaid labor force of young athletes.
The NCAA’s 346 biggest athletic departments, which are classified as Division I, took in combined revenue of $8.7 billion last year. Ohio State’s budget alone topped $100 million; and Jim Tressel, prior to his resignation, was earning an annual salary of roughly $3.5 million. (It’s worth noting that Tressel was only the sixth-highest-paid college football coach in 2010; Alabama’s Nick Saban topped the list at $6 million.)
Meanwhile, the “compensation” for OSU’s football players, like all collegiate athletes, tops out at tuition, room, and board—but only for those on scholarship. This fact—that the kids get at least a shot at a free college degree—is what defenders of the system lean on when the matter of exploitation comes up. But even allowing for improved average graduation rates (which the NCAA trumpeted last year despite decidedly mixed results, especially at the more prominent sports schools), the idea that meaningful education is behind all of those diplomas is at least debatable, when one considers the number of “general studies” degrees and the evidence—turned up by the Scandal Beat—that classwork is not always handled by the athletes alone.
On the subject of watchdog journalism, Bob Gibson, Executive Director of the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership, recently said: “If we don’t have a watchdog function, then we have a lapdog function, and that doesn’t serve the voter very well. We need journalism that goes out and challenges what is being given reporters as the facts. We need to look behind the facts and find out where they’re coming from, and what the interests are of the people who are giving us those facts. Local government and state government and the federal government today are even more than ever in the news business themselves. They are putting out news as if it was the entire package and expecting people to buy it and I think Americans have to be a little bit skeptical and have to look behind where those governments are putting out facts.” (Gibson appeared on the Charlottesville, VA, interview program Politics Matters with host Jan Paynter discussing journalism http://bit.ly/pm-gibson)
#1 Posted by Politics Matters, CJR on Tue 13 Sep 2011 at 01:25 PM
I believe you incorrectly characterized the Ohio State investigation. There were allegations of sweetheart auto deals, but they were disproven. Most of Dohrmann's supposed allegations of more players being involved were directly refuted, with Dohrmann clinging to an anonymous source that wouldn't even talk to the NCAA. Since when is one anonymous source without corroboration sufficient to verify a story that drags people through the mud?
Your story here is part of the problem. One media outlet just repeats what another says without fact checking of their own, and false allegations become the accepted "truth" of the situation. Everybody is so anxious to get a scoop that nobody seems to care if it is actually true. Web site hits and copies sold have replaced journalistic ethics.
#2 Posted by Brian, CJR on Tue 13 Sep 2011 at 05:42 PM
The University of Wisconsin football "program" has always congratulated itself on developing its own players but this fall the Badgers' starting quarterback is a 22-year-old college graduate and professional baseball player who was developed somewhere else. Russell Wilson bailed out at North Carolina State University, where he starred for three years and earned a baccalaureate degree, with one year of football eligibility left. Effectively a free agent, he was hotly recruited by both Auburn and Wisconsin, which got the nod largely because Wilson was awed by its imposing offensive line. The Wilson situation is a breath-taking example of the cynicism and hypocrisy of big-time college football but since it involves no infraction of NCAA rules, not an eyebrow has been raised by the sports press in Madison--or anywhere else, for that matter. It may be true that the Scandal Beat reporters you write about focus on crumbs and ignore the muffin, as Rick Telander puts it, but an even bigger problem is that the football-crazy public in general and alumni fans in particular think the muffin is finger-lickin' good. The commercialization and corporatization of college sports, the huge amounts of money involved and the slick marketing campaigns have made athletic departments bigger than the schools they represent. The tail is wagging the dog and except for a few spoilsport jounalists hardly anyone sees anything wrong with that. Just win, baby! Wisconsin's hired gun from North Carolina will play only one season in Madison but if he takes his fellow "student athletes" to a big bowl game or, who knows, a national championship, he'll go down as the greatest Badger athlete who never set foot in a UW undergraduate classroom.
#3 Posted by Jim Doherty, CJR on Wed 14 Sep 2011 at 03:06 PM
I have known several world-class musicians who have been recruited to university music schools with offers of full scholarship plus expenses (essentially the same deal that scholarship varsity athletes receive).
These young musicians are not only allowed, but encouraged, to take as many outside, paid performance jobs as they can handle. Indeed, I knew some who played in the local symphony, at full wages, while they were in school.
Why is it acceptable for an oboe player but not a football, basketball or tennis player, who is not allowed any outside income, even unrelated to the sport, while making considerable income for the university?
Never made any sense to me.
Why is it alright for the oboe player to
#4 Posted by efgoldman, CJR on Sat 17 Sep 2011 at 10:26 PM
Thank you for questioning Dohrmann and his ridiculous reporting. SI treats him like Woodward and Bernstein when in reality he totally misses the real story.
#5 Posted by Richard verbit, CJR on Tue 20 Sep 2011 at 07:41 PM
Well this wasn't the first coincidence of scandals in football history. Just lately we had the president and head coach of a school get fired for something as such. It makes you think twice about putting on their football uniforms.
#6 Posted by Kelly, CJR on Tue 3 Jan 2012 at 12:25 PM