Letting the Patient Die

On Monday night, two teams, one representing the University of Connecticut and the other the University of Kentucky, played for the national championship of men’s college basketball.  It was an entertaining game throughout, hard fought, well defensed, filled with clutch shots and mostly thrilling action.  The outcome hardly mattered, except to partisans of both schools.  What mattered more, particularly to the NCAA which sponsored the game, was the spectacle of it all and the money it generated.

As the game unfolded no one gave a thought to whether or not the game was more or less entertaining simply because both programs involved had players who were essentially low paid professionals.  It didn’t matter at that moment.  It’s when the games end and the money is counted, the status of the players becomes paramount.

The central lie of the phrase student-athlete that the NCAA is that education isn’t even a by-product of the major college sports experience, let alone the focus.  Every player on the floor Monday night knew full well why he was there—because he had bartered his time and talents with a basketball for an education work around $40,000, all in, a year, at the school emblazoned on their jersey.  Most will be long gone before they can earn a four year degree.  It was never their intent.

It’s not a devil’s pact nor is there anything particularly underhanded about it.  In most respects it’s a rather mundane commercial transaction between those with talent and those who want that talent to further their own economic interests.

If colleges want to enhance their brand and reputations and meet their expanding budgets with dollars generated from sports, then that’s a choice they can and should make.  The boards of trustees that govern these schools make just those kinds of decisions every time they meet.  Sometimes they hire a professor because of his stature in that community and hope her presence can convince more high school students to come to their school.  Other times they approve capital budgets that include money for workout facilities, again with the hope that the investment pay off through increased tuition and donations.

Yet it’s these major sports like men’s football and basketball where the high minded among them start drawing arbitrary lines and concocting fictions that belie exactly what the eye can see.  Every fan, every faculty member, every college president, every trustee on every college board watching Kentucky’s freshman players well understood that most were there for the year because the NBA prevents them from playing in their league until they are out of high school for a year.  That didn’t stop them or anyone else from enjoying the game.  It didn’t cast a pall over the proceedings nor did it reduce its entertainment value.

And yet, and yet, the NCAA and its member schools continue to insist on trying to preserve a fiction that if it was ever useful certainly no longer is. It’s a fiction that benefits not the athletes in these kinds of games but the adults who benefit financially.

Exhibit 1 were the remarks by NCAA president Mark Emmert, delivered early this past Sunday morning.  Emmert like other NCAA presidents before him usually gives some sort of state of the institution speech before the national championship game so there wasn’t news in the fact that Emmert was speaking.  But what promised to be news was what Emmert would say with regard to the recent developments at Northwestern.  That Emmert chose Sunday morning, a deliberately sleep time of the day and week, was likely no accident.

Emmert claimed that the NCAA is well aware that college athletics is at a tipping point and that he and the handful of major conferences are working on a plan, the same plan they’ve been working on for 5 years now without anything to show for it.

Emmert also casually dismissed the idea of players unionizing and said that this wasn’t an answer to what supposedly ails the system.  Like all industries enjoying the benefits of a mostly unregulated market in the face of increasing calls to regulate, Emmert defended the NCAA and said it was best positioned to solve the problems it faces and not the courts and not the NLRB.  The fox always knows best how to guard the hen house.

Exhibit 2 was the obligatory op-ed piece that then appeared in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, co-written by LouAnna Simon, president of Michigan State and chair of the NCAA’s executive committee and Nathan Hatch, president of Wake Forest and chair of the NCAA’s Division 1 board of directors.  Do you get the sense that the NCAA is a bit top heavy?

Simon and Hatch’s column mostly parroted what Emmert had to say.  It shed a bit more light on the NCAA’s thinking but barely and even that those thoughts were badly buried by the organization’s key talking points: unions are bad.  That of course fits nicely with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial philosophy so it’s no surprise that it was the hook. 

Simon and Hatch spent some time reminding us that most of the money generated by the NCAA goes back into the product in the form of scholarships and other support to student-athletes.  They also reminded us that only a small percentage of those in the major sports of basketball and football go on to pro careers and that the NCAA is not just about supporting them but all the others involved in non-revenue sports.

All true, of course, but so what?  That’s just an argument as to why the NCAA deserves the biggest cut of the pie.  It’s not an argument as to why the laborers shouldn’t get their taste.  Even Simon and Hatch couldn’t sustain the premise.  They said in very non specific ways that they are working on things, lots of things, like finding a way to limit the amount of time Division I athletes spend on their sport, keeping them healthy and giving them a little more money to reflect the real costs of spending a year in school.  They didn’t say that they are looking to actually pay them unencumbered cash.  They didn’t have to because they won’t.

That Simon and Hatch and Emmert and others at the major conferences recognize the problem is probably a good thing.  That they can’t ever seem to find consensus is a bad thing, for them.  No one on any NCAA committee wants to deal with a solution forced by the point of a bayonet, to paraphrase Hootie Johnson.  But it’s what they will get as sure as the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passes another bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act that has no chance of being enacted.

 You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand that the NCAA’s way of doing business is under siege or why that’s the case.

If history teaches us anything, and it teaches us everything, it’s that any economic system in which all the advantage goes to a select few at the expense of those whose labors drive that advantage won’t just fail but will be toppled by an uprising.  The NCAA and its member schools have created an economy that depends almost entirely on the stupidity of those supplying the services, which is what makes the actions of smarty pants at Northwestern seeking the legal status of a union so deliciously ironic.  They used the education that the NCAA provided to them against them.

The reason that the NCAA and its member schools cannot seem to come up with a workable plan is because they can’t seem to adequately define the problem or, more accurately, define their objectives.  Where the students and those pushing them want a greater share of the pie for themselves, the NCAA and its schools are almost singularly focused on preserving the notion of the “student athlete” not as a mean to protect those who toil but in order to preserve the biggest slice of the pie for themselves.

But this isn’t going away without a solution that works for now and for the foreseeable future.  The NCAA can’t afford to let perfect be the enemy of good even as they toil for years for a solution they don’t want.  There are solutions in which the schools that generate the billions give something more tangible back to the players that generated those billions.

In purely economic terms, this really is a question of whether or not the players in Monday night’s game deserve more for their efforts than the $40,000 worth of education they’ve received this academic year. This is the point that should be debated and the one around which solutions should be crafted.  Instead the NCAA changes the conversation because the tougher problem, crafting workable solutions, simply isn’t in their economic interest.

As we repeatedly learn from John Calipari at Kentucky, and really from many, many others in both basketball and football, the players aren’t that interested in the intrinsic value of an education as their compensation.  Maybe if or when most wash out of a pro career they’ll reevaluate their priorities and decide that an education might hold the key to their long term futures.  But telling young kids to be patient or to trust the adults in the room that have taken advantage of them for so long isn’t an answer that they want to hear or that would work in any event.

What the NCAA misses in that strategy is that it’s not just the players that are impacted, but the sponsors, the networks and, finally, the fans as well.  All understand full well the implications and can see the future and know that if this problem doesn’t get fixed it becomes the metastasizing cancer that kills the patient. 

The biggest tragedy that will befall college sports is not that players in some sports will get a cut of the money they’ve helped generate.  It’s that there will be no money to divide because rather than serve the patient they let it die instead.

Lingering Items--Retribution Edition

Time will be the real arbiter of whether or not the NCAA did the right thing in severely punishing Penn State University, but for those complaining perhaps they missed the meat of NCAA president Mark Emmert’s reasoning.

That Penn State was made an example of is probably beyond question. But of what, exactly? With no sense of irony, Emmert railed against the fact that the culture of winning has become so all consuming that it has created an atmosphere of “too big to fail” programs at some universities.

The phrase “too big to fail” is thrown around a lot these days and I’m not sure that it could ever apply in this context, but the point is still taken. At Penn State as in many places, the wants, needs and desires of the football program came to dominate the entire ethos of the university. When Joe Paterno, as well entrenched of a head coach as there has ever been, could literally impose his will on his own superiors by halting any further investigation into or a reporting of the allegations regarding Jerry Sandusky, it’s pretty clear to any objective observer that the tail is wagging the dog and that’s usually a huge red flag.

It’s easy to understand how it gets to that point and that’s perhaps where the NCAA is still turning a blind eye, particularly in the context of “too big to fail.” Everything the NCAA stands for at the moment is about money and how its two most prominent programs, football as practiced in the Bowl Subdivision and Division I men’s basketball, can generate even more of it. That money is used by the universities as a way of offsetting the costs of running big time programs and other non-revenue generating sports and that money also is used by the NCAA itself to run the rest of its so-called mission.

The athletic budgets at some schools these days runs upwards of $100 million. The bulk of that money goes toward football but it’s also used to run the multitude of other programs that provide great opportunities for student-athletes but serve only as a drag on the budget. Few athletic programs these days are self sustaining so it takes subsidies from the university’s general fund, along with private fundraising, to cover the difference. Those are dollars that can’t be used elsewhere in the university community.

That puts a great deal of pressure on football and basketball. A winning program is critical to a large university because it generates far more money than a losing program. They really are the tide that raises all of the university’s ships.

This really was the basis of Paterno’s “grand experiment” at Penn State and in a larger sense the basis for how the NCAA itself operates. The revenue generating sports serve as a catalyst for everything else that needs to get done and for awhile it worked, at least until it didn’t.

As the program under Paterno’s leadership began to assert its control over the university generally, the construct flipped. Arguably the NCAA never had that solid of bearings in the first place.

In any case, that’s the context in which Penn State’s punishment was handed down. By essentially assuring that Penn State will not be competitively relevant for years, the NCAA really is attempting to change a culture of winning at any cost that the trustees of the university still seem unwilling to change.

The question is when will someone step in to teach the NCAA the same lesson?

Nothing about what the NCAA is doing generally is meant to change this equation. The agreement to go to a half-assed playoff system is about first generating even more money and second finding a new way of splitting that ever-increasing pie. It will only continue the emphasis on winning at every level of what’s an increasingly corrupt enterprise.

Penn State will serve as a cautionary tale for awhile but it will end up being forgotten eventually, sooner rather than later. But as sure as you’re reading this, there’s a handful of programs around the country that are heading in the same direction that caused Penn State to spin out of control. How big is Nick Saban in Alabama? How about Les Miles at LSU? Where will Ohio State get under Urban Meyer? The next time any university makes another compromise in favor of the football program, and its probably happening a dozen times a day across the country, will be another clue that its trustees missed as to why the program ultimately exploded in a wave of some scandal or another.

**

Speaking of the Penn State trustees, if they think their job is done because they decided, albeit reluctantly, to take down the statute of Paterno, they are mistaken.

We’ll never know for certain, but had the trustees stepped in and shut down the program at the end of last season and carried it into this season, it seems unlikely that the NCAA would have lopped on additional penalties.

As it was, the NCAA was faced with an incredible situation. The Freeh report revealed in letter and form how the trustees were willing participants in allowing the culture of Penn State to metastasize to the point where they, too, were essentially underlings of Paterno. They voted down reforms in previous years that would have changed the culture of the university if adopted. They cast a blind eye when Paterno insisted on dealing with his player disciplinary issues outside of the university's general population. The president of the Board failed to inform the rest of the Board about the problems bubbling up on the Sandusky front. The trustees as a group acceded to Paterno’s demands for a more lucrative contract even as the controversy was developing. Then as the problems played out the trustees were very reluctant to act. Firing Paterno was the easy part. What they failed to do was take a more firm stance on the program itself.

All of this put the NCAA in a nearly untenable position. Its reaction may have been unprecedented but so too was the situation it faced.

**

As it turns out, Paterno isn’t the only one to feel like the Sandusky scandal wasn’t a football scandal. I’ve been fascinated, actually, by the number of head coaches and columnists that have been critical of the NCAA for sticking its nose into a situation where they claim it doesn’t belong.

If the trustees won’t do anything, who then is left?

But you don’t have to answer that question to appreciate that that NCAA had no real alternative and stay true to its ever murkier mission. Even if you take the view that the NCAA only deals with competitive balance issues, this was certainly one of them.

By protecting the football program from the public revelation that its long term assistant head coach was a long term serial pedophile, Penn State and Paterno were able to retain a favorable reputation long after Paterno ceased to be an effective head coach. It helped in recruiting. Put it this way, what parent would knowingly send their son to be coached by someone who was inclined to protect a pedophile at the expense of his victims? Exactly.

Penn State was able to stay competitive because of this cover up and for that, at the very least, it deserved punishment by the NCAA.

**

Switching gears to the Cleveland Indians, it had to make you tingle just a little to know that the Indians obtained Brent Lillibridge for the stretch run. All it cost them was a minor league pitcher with a stellar record and a reputation for not being able to throw hard. Doug Jones anyone?

And if that didn’t make you tingle then surely you did when general manager Chris Antonetti said that the Indians’ willingness to improve the team right now hinges on the outcome of this week’s Detroit Tigers’ series.

Seriously, the Indians don’t understand the fans’ indifference?

I always thought the Indians were just one weak hitting utility player away from challenging the Tigers and now we’ll be able to test that theory. I also always thought that the Indians were run on a day to day basis without any real long terms plans and now we know that’s true.

It is a rather fascinating circumstance where Antonetti would place so much emphasis on one series as if the rest of the season to this point was meaningless. You almost get the sense that the Indians’ relatively decent first half of the season ended up being Antonetti’s biggest nightmare. But in the overall context, it make sense.

These Indians aren’t built to compete for the long haul and Antonetti isn’t much making progress in that regard. They are built to play .500 ball at best while keeping a meager payroll intact.

The truth that’s revealing itself is that there really isn’t much Antonetti can do anyway. Because of a lousy farm system beget by years of bad drafting, the Indians lack the currency to make a run at anything other than the Lillibridges of the world. On the flip side, the Indians lack any real assets for which someone would pay with the kind of prospects they really need.

That means that the Detroit series is really irrelevant. Still it’s fun to contemplate how Antonetti will react if his next worst nightmare comes true: the Indians sweep the Tigers.

**

For the first time since, I think, the Nixon administration the Cleveland Browns enter training camp with all of their draft picks signed. You can thank the rookie salary scale in the most recent collective bargaining agreement for that.

That leads to this week’s question to ponder: what will Browns’ fans do with all the pent up angst usually reserved for wondering when their number one pick will be signed? And since it’s been a few weeks since we had a question to ponder, let me add another, related one: What’s a training camp without the obligatory “I can only coach the players who are here” quote from the head coach?