In any event, these “student-athletes” are prevented from earning any additional money that might be construed as related to their role as an athlete. Schools can sell the players’ jerseys and other memorabilia at stadium gift shops, they can put the players on billboards, feature them in television ads, and trot them out to impress the boosters, all without a dime going into the athletes’ pockets. In March, HBO’s “Real Sports” did the math and found that under the revenue-sharing model used by the NFL and National Basketball Association, where players get 57 percent of league revenues, members of the University of Texas’s 2009 football team were each worth $630,000 while those of last year’s national champion Duke University men’s basketball team were worth $1.2 million each. A USA Today story that same month calculated the median annual cost of an athlete’s grant-in-aid package: $27,923, a relative pittance.
It is a disjuncture of the market value that begs to be disobeyed, a fact that isn’t lost on the Scandal Beat reporters. “I once heard athletes described as sharecroppers, and I always thought that was pretty accurate,” says Charles Robinson, the senior investigative reporter for Yahoo Sports who has had a hand in breaking some of the biggest corruption scandals in recent years, including the latest out of Miami.
Robinson and his colleagues have captured the surface consequences of this perverse economy (the rampant cheating), but their work also has atomized a story fundamentally about economics into an endless cat-and-mouse game of rules violations.
Rise of the Scandal Beat
Reporters first began to seriously grapple with the chicanery in college sports in the 1940s, when a point-shaving scandal that began with City College of New York spread to six other universities. “Big-time college basketball, the commercialized, Madison Square Garden variety, got another brutal kick in the teeth,” read a Time magazine story from 1951, “the worst yet, in a game already punchy from its own scandals.”
In the 1960s, Jack Scott, a former Stanford sprinter who became athletic director at Oberlin College, set out to save college sports by crusading against its over-commercialization and over-authoritarian coaching culture. “Scott really gave voice to a lot of the ills underlying a lot of this stuff and he did it in a very smart and organized way,” says Sandy Padwe, who served two stints as Sports Illustrated’s senior editor in charge of investigations from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s. “Slowly, but surely, people began to realize that the only way to get at the root of this problem was do it investigatively.”
But it was in the 1980s that college sports ballooned into the sprawling, hype-besotted business we know today—and, not coincidentally, when the Scandal Beat really took root. A 1984 Supreme Court decision ruled that the NCAA’s television plan—which limited the number of televised football games and the opportunities for schools to negotiate their own terms—violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, paving the way for the explosion of modern college football broadcasting. In 1982, CBS began exclusively broadcasting the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, at a price of $16 million a season (it grew to $55 million by 1988). Last year, the NCAA grossed $680 million from fees on television and marketing rights.
As the money in the newly corporatized college sports world soared, and the NCAA’s rule book grew fatter and more nitpicky, so too did the incentives to break the rules. A post-Watergate zeal in the nation’s newsrooms and the failure of the NCAA’s enforcement arm to keep pace further crystallized the mission of the Scandal Beat. “College sports was fertile ground,” says Armen Keteyian, a former investigative reporter for Sports Illustrated who is now the chief investigative correspondent for CBS News. “It was like a hundred-to-one in terms of scandals to the number of NCAA investigators. They were naïve, and they didn’t have the depth of knowledge to do these kinds of investigations.”
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