The Brutal Truth About College Sports
College football near the turn of the previous century was so brutal that Harvard and Yale broke off their rivalry and the Army-Navy game was suspended. Plays like “the flying hurdle,” launching the ball carrier over the opposing line, caused 18 deaths in 1905, prompting President Teddy Roosevelt to threaten abolition of the game nationwide. Stricter rules resulted, and the supervising Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States was created, later called the NCAA.
That was the last serious reform of college sports. One hundred years later, we find ourselves in an eerily similar position.
Big time college sports are a mess. While headlines hype the new football season and speculate on an eventual champion, accounts surface daily of athletes’ stealing, assaulting women and getting busted on alcohol and drug charges. And when a title game is played, shadowing the coverage will be news of woeful graduation rates.
Meanwhile, the juggernaut that is college sports keeps getting bigger, with more television networks airing more games, not just on weekends but during the week, and colleges expanding their seasons to meet TV’s unquenchable thirst—up to 40 games each basketball season and 70 in baseball.
Football recently joined in when the NCAA voted to add a 12th game to the regular schedule starting in 2006, with the goal of adding revenue to financially strapped athletic programs. That makes for a harder season. Schools already operate strenuous summer training camps to prepare for a season that often starts before Labor Day. This summer’s training had tragic results. A University of Missouri linebacker collapsed and died during pre-season practice in July; an Illinois Wesleyan lineman died after an August workout. The second player succumbed to heatstroke; the first, to viral meningitis, prompting a lawsuit alleging poor emergency attention.
Deaths directly attributed to college football are rare—10 in the past 20 years, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research—but injuries are not, and an expanded schedule will likely cause more.
“Half of Division I-A football players already will have injuries requiring surgery sometime during their college competition,” says James Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan, referring to the biggest football programs. “Coaches and medical trainers agree that the 12th game will cause a significant increase in injuries.”
College sports’ current crisis has generated unprecedented reform efforts by groups inside and outside the establishment. The Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics and the 16-year-old Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletes, for example, both work in cooperation with the NCAA. The Drake Group has bypassed the NCAA; its plan for full disclosure of all classes taken by athletes was read into the Congressional Record in March by Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky in hopes of getting Congress involved.
Their combined efforts have netted tougher NCAA academic requirements, but reform energy still gets bogged down in issues like the political correctness of team names. Substantive improvement has been minimal. The system is broken, and the impact is far reaching.
“The transgressions that universities commit in the name of winning sports undermine the values of the institution,” says Derek Bok, former president of Harvard. “In all too many cases, they tarnish the reputation of the university by compromising its admissions standards, its grading practices, and the academic integrity of its curriculum.”
To create winning teams, reformers believe, universities break rules on training, on the allocation of funds to athletics, and most frequently on athletes’ eligibility. Deception begins early, when schools recruit sports prodigies who are ill-equipped—or uninterested—in academics. Popular rhetoric maintains that these students are preparing for pro careers, just as medical students are training to be doctors. This is naïve thinking. The best 1% to 3% may become professionals, but far too many of the rest are left with no degree and a clouded future.
“The biggest problem is recruiting fine athletes who should not be in college,” says Andy Geiger, who retired this summer as Ohio State’s athletic director after 11 years that included a national football championship and scandals in football and basketball. “Do we really want a gifted athlete at our school for any reason other than our own gain? Are we only in it to use these kids and then spit them out?”
At the core of the college sports problem is an obsession with winning. Winning is admittedly the goal in all competitions and is a treasured American characteristic, but universities are supposed to live by different standards from those that govern big business, the New York Yankees, or war.
“Everybody wants to win, but we are still in the business of educating and developing young people,” says John Swofford, commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference. “We need to do a better job of differentiating between the collegiate and the pro model. In college, winning at the expense of the other values is not winning at all.”
Adjusting how society values winning will not be easy. Students really love a winner; alumni and fans, too. Television loves winning most. That’s why CBS pays $6 billion over 11 years, mostly to broadcast the NCAA basketball tournament, and Fox is paying $320 million for 15 football bowl games starting in 2007. Only winners need apply.
What can stop such rampant enthusiasm? Academic scandals and athletes behaving badly do not seem to get the nation’s attention. Maybe damaged young bodies will.
“While depriving young people of academic opportunity is insidious, more compelling is the health risk,” says Mr. Duderstadt, the former Michigan president. “What would get the public turned around in all of this is for them to realize that, here in the prime of their lives, the level of competition and the intensity of a game that is playing to television and the fans are putting a lot of kids at significant physical risk.”
So, here in 2005, we have echoes of a college sports crisis that shook the country a century ago. While teams today are forbidden from throwing ball carriers over the line of scrimmage, they bring their players in during the heat of the summer to train, and then set them out to play a grueling schedule in hopes of reaching a postseason bowl.
And if a student-athlete’s performance in class or on the field falls below expectations, he is cut loose, without an education or that golden career in the pros. Reformers have yet to fix the problem. Maybe it’s time, suggests Drake Group Director David Ridpath, that the athletes themselves take control.
“How would it be at the start of the Orange Bowl if all the players refused to take the field?” asks Mr. Ridpath, speaking with the heart of a reformer. “They’re saying: ‘We’re not getting an education and we’re not getting taken care of. We’re being exploited and we’re not going to play.’”
A fantasy as interesting as it is unlikely, but it illustrates the frustration of those struggling to save college sports. Are they alone, or is the American public finally ready to listen?