Category: college sports

college sports

NCAA athletes going pro in something other than reading

Posted on by Beau Dure

The North Carolina academic scandal is getting enough traction that we may be able to replace “North Carolina” with “national.” CNN has done its own investigation, finding plenty of issues with football and basketball players (not specified: any women’s basketball players?) all over the place.

The scrutiny is good, but a couple of things here are worth nit-picking:

– “NCAA sports are big business, with millions of dollars at stake for winning programs.” Sure, but we have to stress again that a lot of NCAA programs lose money. It’d be interesting to see how many of these academic problems are at big-time programs and how many are at schools that want to have big-time programs.

– “Imagine yourself sitting in a class where nothing makes sense.” Yeah, that was me in “symbolic logic,” which required prior knowledge of arcane mathematical concepts but didn’t tell us of such a requirement until the drop/add period had passed. (Pardon the self-indulgent tangent.)

– “In December, the Drake Group, which pushes for academic integrity in collegiate sports, organized a lobbying trip to Washington to push for an amendment to the College Education Act of 1965. Director Allen Sack said he wants to see a College Athlete Protection Act — legislation that would keep athletes on the bench as freshmen if they are academically more than one standard deviation lower than the average student admitted to the university.” Wouldn’t this punish Duke and Stanford a lot more than it would punish Florida State, one of the schools with some academic issues?

– One bit of context I haven’t seen in these stories: What has happened to Prop 48, a big controversy in my college days (issues of race and standardized testing), and Prop 16? How have we suddenly slid backwards to the point at which big-time athletes aren’t getting it done, even though the standards are getting tougher?

– And the underlying question: How are all these people graduating from high school if they’re reading at a fourth-grade level?

Should be an interesting year ahead for the NCAA.

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college sports, sports culture

Divert sports funding to arts?

Posted on by Beau Dure

A Gary Gutting piece at the NYT’s philosophy blog starts out reassuring us that the lack of humanities majors isn’t a bad thing (after all, we can’t everyone being like me) then meanders to suggestions for shoring up the “cultural middle class.”

Then it gets interesting:

Fair treatment for writers and artists is an even more difficult matter, which will ultimately require a major change in how we think about support for the arts. Fortunately, however, we already have an excellent model, in our support of athletics. Despite our general preference for capitalism, our support for sports is essentially socialist, with local and state governments providing enormous support for professional teams. To cite just one striking example, the Minnesota State Legislature recently appropriated over $500 million to help build the Vikings a new stadium. At the same time, the Minnesota Orchestra is close to financial disaster because it can’t erase a $6 million deficit. If the Legislature had diverted only 10 percent of its support for football, it would have covered that deficit for the next eight years.

Over all, taxpayer money provides more than a billion dollars annually in tax exemptions and stadium subsidies for N.F.L. teams. Other sports also receive generous support. Even major universities subsidize professional sports through their (mostly money-losing) athletic programs, which provide a continuing influx of professional players. Universities could reduce their efforts to field teams playing at near-professional levels and direct the money saved to artistic activities much closer to their core mission.

Provocative question.

You could easily argue that sports mean more to the typical city than a symphony does. Go to a town like Boston — the music is fantastic, but the sports teams (especially the Red Sox) are a massive presence.

At a college? Hard to say. Even within the arts, you find intriguing budget decisions. I always wondered why my school had a bunch of antique instruments but could barely manage a working set of tympani. But then you move over to the athletics department and find the best possible facilities for nearly every sport. Some college soccer players go “pro” and are stunned to find some travel arrangements and other aspects of pro life don’t measure up to what they had in college.

But as a former college musician, I’m not sure I can complain about that. I have to admit most sports teams at Duke had larger crowds than I saw for our Wind Symphony concerts. Also, it was just a bit easier to make the Marching Band than it was to make the soccer team.

Are the arts really closer to a “core mission” of a college than the sports teams? I don’t know about that. I’m not really sure why I got course credit for Wind Symphony, Percussion Ensemble AND my P.E. courses, but my friends on the volleyball team got no such credit for their sport.

So, again — provocative question.

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basketball, college sports, mind games, olympic sports, winter sports

At Ozy.com: Magnus Carlsen, hoops freshmen, curling

Posted on by Beau Dure

If you haven’t checked out Ozy.com yet, please do. It’s a terrific site capturing the next wave of what’s important, what’s interesting and what’s cool.

And I’m not just saying that because they’ve given me the opportunity to write three terrific pieces:

– Magnus Carlsen, the new face of chess (written before he won the world title)

– College basketball’s big freshmen: Jabari Parker, Julius Randle, Andrew Wiggins

– Curling: From the Olympics to Arizona, it’s catching on. Can the USA harness that interest and build better teams?

The medal projections here at SportsMyriad are ongoing. Freestyle skiing just takes a while.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

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college sports, sports culture

Are all scholastic sports a waste of time?

Posted on by Beau Dure

That’s the question raised in this pointed essay from The Atlantic: The Case Against High-School Sports and a follow-up from CollegeSportsScholarships.com.

The examples cited are extreme. The Atlantic found schools that managed to fund its football teams while the science labs rotted. The University of Oregon’s students apparently slipped academically as the football team got better. That’s not good. But it’s one school — not a huge sample size.

That said, these are legitimate questions that fly in the face of some sacred cows. We’ve been programmed to think athletes (particularly female athletes in Title IX arguments) are more likely to stay in school and succeed. But that’s not always true, and we all know it. Especially not in college. There’s a reason the NCAA started tracking graduation rates so obsessively.

Another issue here, especially for the soccer crowd: Are schools a better place for sports than clubs are? From a school budget point of view, maybe clubs are better. From a family perspective, maybe the schools are better. You can’t tell me a kid is better off hopping in a car a couple of times a week to go practice with a club somewhere else when there’s probably a perfectly good field or gym right there at the school.

Football is the easiest target when schools need to cut back. That’s a lot of money to spend. But it’s hard to cut football out of a school’s social calendar. And unlike soccer, basketball, tennis, golf and several other sports, football doesn’t offer a lot of non-school options.

I was raised with the old ideal that kids needed to develop mind and body (and spirit, in my YMCA days). My tiny high school had a full athletic program, and roughly 90 percent of us played something. I admire that ideal, but I understand the expense argument.

So here’s a heretical idea: How about having more intramurals and less travel?

Maybe you could have tournaments within each school. From those tournaments, pick All-Star teams that compete against a couple of big rivals and then into state tournaments.

This would get many more people involved at big schools. I can already tells you how many players in youth soccer have no chance of making a school’s varsity or junior varsity with only two teams per school. Why not spread things out a bit?

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college sports, olympic sports

College sports: End “shamateurism” but don’t pay players

Posted on by Beau Dure

Jay Bilas, with whom I’m proud to share an alma mater, stirred things up recently when he exposed the NCAA for selling shirts with athletes’ names on them. Bilas is a thoughtful guy, not a rash flamethrower, so his interview with Richard Deitsch is worth a read. He distinguishes between bad policy and bad people.

Key quote:

This is about NCAA policy, and a small part of the larger, overall point that the NCAA’s policy on amateurism is unjustifiable in this multi-billion dollar commercial enterprise of college sports.

He’s right, but that shouldn’t lead us into “pay the players” territory. Here’s why:

1. College athletes already get something substantial out of their playing careers. Here’s another Dukie, Seth Davis:

Davis took some criticism on Twitter, but he also heard from someone who pointed out that college loans are crippling a lot of people these days. Athletes have a little less to worry about on that front.

2. Most college sports programs aren’t profitable.

Granted, colleges sell a lot of merchandise on the backs of their sports teams. Merchandise isn’t always easy in accounting terms. When I buy a Georgia sweatshirt, the football team plays a big role in my purchase, but so does the fact that my father was on the faculty there for 40 years. When I buy an MIT shirt for my kids, a smaller percentage of that purchase reflects my admiration that so many smart kids at the school participate in sports. (It was 20 percent until a few cuts were made a few years ago. Cal Tech, by the way, is on probation. Seriously. And yes, it doesn’t make the NCAA look good.)

3. Nonrevenue sports shouldn’t just be collateral damage as colleges ramp up spending wars in football.

I have another idea, and it’s related to what I’ve discussed in the past on getting the NCAA to drop the ridiculous regulations and focus on actual cheating.

Let players make and keep outside money.

EA Sports wants to use current player likenesses in their games? Fine. Pay them. (Obviously, they should also pay former players like Ed O’Bannon, whose lawsuit should have settled long ago.)

Someone wants to pay Johnny Manziel $1,000 to sign autographs? Fine. Let him keep it.

Katie Ledecky breaks a world record and is eligible for bonus money? Are you kidding me? What organization in its right mind would say she’s not eligible for it? (As Philip Hersh points out, swimmers who have turned down the money and gone to college have had better careers, which just adds fuel to the question of why people have to choose.)

The NCAA, for its part, says the following:

The NCAA membership has adopted amateurism rules to ensure the students’ priority remains on obtaining a quality educational experience and that all of student-athletes are competing equitably.

But how does “amateurism,” defined by NCAA practice as not making a dime off one’s rare talents, achieve either of the underlined goals?

If Katie Ledecky takes her world record bonus, does that mean she won’t study hard? Will swimmers who otherwise would have been able to keep up with a world record-holder somehow be disadvantaged if the record-holder collected her money?

The point we can’t stress enough: That money isn’t coming from a college that’s trying to recruit Ledecky. No college is gaining an unfair advantage.

And if she’s a student in good standing, who is the NCAA to say she’s not receiving a “quality educational experience”? My “priority” my senior year wasn’t the handful of classes I needed to graduate — it was the newspaper. I saw Seth Davis in the office a good bit as well. That’s how we got employed after graduation.

I’ll repeat from posts past: The NCAA’s enforcers should be concerned with two things:

1. Making sure schools aren’t paying players.

2. Making sure players are students in good standing.

And that’s it.

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college sports, sports culture

When the sports police lose the plot …

Posted on by Beau Dure

ESPN and Sports Illustrated surely didn’t coordinate their stories on the NCAA and other investigations in sports. But taken together, the pieces show troubling issues for those who try to keep sports fair.

The main Sports Illustrated piece isn’t available online as far as I know, at least not yet. It’s an investigation about an investigation, in which Pete Thamel and Alexander Wolff show how the NCAA’s probe into the University of Miami went horribly awry. Thamel followed up online with a look at turnover on the enforcement staff and general NCAA dysfunction. Wolff goes a different direction and reports on Nevin Shapiro, the Miami whistleblower. (He apparently made a lot of money betting that the Hurricanes wouldn’t cover the spread against Duke. I’m tempted to take that as flattery, but I probably can’t.)

ESPN’s Chris Jones has a column on Georgia’s Kolton Houston, who at one point was banned for life as a repeat drug offender until the Bulldogs produced proof that his body has residual norandrolone from a doctor’s mistake in high school. Those who follow Olympic sports, particularly cases like Torri Edwards’ and Alain Baxter’s, may recognize the pitfalls of “zero tolerance” applied by people who aren’t paying attention to details.

Then we have the saddest case, indirectly involving the NCAA. College football coach Todd Hoffner lost his job through overzealous overreaction in the post-Jerry Sandusky era. Worse, he was branded a child pornographer. His mistake? His kids asked him to shoot a video, the kids (toddler/early elementary age) dropped their clothes, and he didn’t immediately erase the video. The people who prosecuted Hoffner, both within Minnesota State-Mankato and in court, would be hard pressed to say their actions were in the best interests of his children.

The Hoffner case is a classic overreaction and should be a cautionary tale. The Houston case is a reminder to all anti-doping authorities to get all the facts, not just what a lab result tells them.

Can anything be done about the NCAA? Perhaps simplifying would be better. Rather than having layers of compliance protocols that make the U.S. tax code look like the rules for the first Ultimate Fighting Championship “there are no rules!” event, maybe focus on two things:

1. Schools can’t pay athletes.

2. Student-athletes must be students in good standing.

So much else the NCAA oversees is just so much hair-splitting and bureaucracy. Do we really care if someone gave an athlete a ride home? Or if athletes in Olympic sports have sponsors? Or about any of the procedural hoops USL, NPSL and WPSL teams have to clear so they can have college athletes on their teams?

Drop a lot of the overregulation, and maybe they’ll do a better job with the actual cheating.

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college sports

Duke apparently not destroyed by lacrosse backlash

Posted on by Beau Dure

To recap the Duke lacrosse case in brief: Team members accused of rape, media firestorm ensues at Duke, evidence emerges that they couldn’t possibly have done it, students exonerated, district attorney disbarred.

Most people then moved on. The exceptions were the families of the team members who were not accused of rape, claiming the school and others didn’t do enough to protect them. That case, we learned in March, has lost steam.

The other people who did not move on: The cottage industry of people with an ax to grind against Duke, political correctness, “liberals,” academic elites or others who have supposedly wronged them in some way. They insisted Duke’s response to the case represented PC anti-masculine anti-athlete bias, and it would kill Duke’s ability to attract students, let alone student-athletes.

Here’s a quick look at application data (up from 19,358 to 31,785 in last eight years).

And here’s a look at how student-athletes are faring:

So in short: I think those folks were wrong.

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college sports

War on nonrevenue sports, ctd: How college sports programs die

Posted on by Beau Dure

My old paper in Wilmington has a thorough report on UNC-Wilmington’s decision to cut a few sports.

Title IX influenced the decision-making on what to cut, but the figures show some women’s programs bringing in more money than their male counterpart. (In most cases, though, the expenses are higher.)

The numbers also show men’s basketball, the non-football school’s showcase sport, as the biggest revenue-generator by far. But it had expenses of $1.87 million against revenue of $557,624.

So if you were going strictly on finances, you’d cut the basketball team and leave the others.

They’re not going to do that, of course. Cutting the basketball team would be a huge blow to UNCW.

But then does that mean college sports serve an intangible purpose of school spirit rather than the tangible purpose of giving student-athletes a chance to compete?

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college sports

Duke, Lance Thomas and the NCAA’s “strict liability”

Posted on by Beau Dure

Could Mike Krzyzewski’s program get the same scrutiny as John Calipari’s? Dan Wetzel asks this question at Yahoo.

From the headline and the first few paragraphs, you might think it’s simply a question of whether the sanctimonious NCAA will look the other way when a case involves a much-touted model program like Duke. But Wetzel isn’t one of these knee-jerk Duke-bashers waiting to see Coach K and company get their come-uppance. (Disclaimer, in case you don’t know: I have two degrees from Duke.) He raises much more difficult questions.

First, shouldn’t athletes have a little more freedom to cash in on the money and prestige they’re bringing to their schools? That’s a big one addressed only in passing here, and Wetzel focuses on the next one:

Second, is the NCAA’s “strict liability” policy simply overkill?

That question is usually raised in more sympathetic circumstances. A 17-year-old kid gets stranded without a ride or without dinner money, a booster gives him a ride or a hamburger, and voila — the school’s in trouble.

Thomas, at least as portrayed in this lawsuit, isn’t a kid stuck without a ride. The suit says he had money for a lot of jewelry and insinuated he could pay the rest. (Bear in mind: I don’t recall people talking up Thomas, a good college role player, as a sure-fire NBA prospect.)

This isn’t the first time Duke has been in this situation. Corey Maggette had a much more damaging case against him — taking money directly from the wonderfully named AAU hoops coach Myron Piggie. That money would theoretically make Maggette ineligible. And so people often ask: Why are other schools punished for “strict liability” while Duke isn’t?

Wetzel, again, didn’t write his column to snipe at Duke. He doesn’t think Duke knew about Thomas’ jewelry or gained any competitive advantage from it:

It’s unlikely Krzyzewski knew about this purchase. Smart money says Thomas hid the jewelry from any member of the Duke staff. Right now Coach K is probably furious and mortified. There is very little benefit to having a starting forward blanketing himself in jewelry and winding up embroiled in a lawsuit. The diamonds didn’t draw Thomas to Duke. They didn’t maintain his academic eligibility. They didn’t make him stronger or faster.

And the same is likely true for the Maggette-Piggie case. But it was likely true for Memphis and John Calipari when it had results stripped away because of a recruit’s test scores were fishy.

Wetzel thinks the Thomas case may be enough to more people question the mighty NCAA:

The NCAA can’t ignore this because it’s Duke, but if it’s Duke that loses its national title over a jewelry-store loan, of all things, how can the NCAA continue to ignore that its entire busted rulebook?

I’m a little more skeptical just because I’m used to seeing people gloat over my alma mater’s problems — to my knowledge, there’s no book called “Memphis Sucks” — but I can also imagine Dick Vitale screaming for years if Duke loses its 2010 title over this case.

Here’s the underlying problem: The NCAA can only punish athletes while they’re still playing in college. If the NCAA knew Maggette had taken money from Piggie before he finished his one year at Duke, Maggette wouldn’t have finished out the season.

Instead, the NCAA goes after the institution. Even if the institution had nothing to do with it.

Let’s toss out a solution and see if any lawyers can speak up:

Suppose the NCAA and all its colleges included a clause in scholarship offers stating that any misrepresentation of their “amateur” status would result in a forfeiture of their scholarship money plus fines.

So in that case, the NCAA would tell Maggette to pay up. And Maggette, who has carved out a long NBA career racking up big stats for bad teams, would need to send a check. Thomas’ jewelry would be a matter between him and the jewelry store.

And let Duke, Memphis or every other school worry about the normal business of college sports — practicing only during prescribed periods, meticulously counting the text messages they send recruits, that sort of thing.

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