News Journal: The triumph of big money over college sports

Talk about guilty pleasures. I’ve loved college sports all my life and still watch a lot of games. But even rabid fans have to question how we got to where we are today.

Since the autumn in 1869 when Rutgers challenged Princeton to play the first intercollegiate football game, we have upheld the ideal of student athletes who play for the love of the game. It is long past time to separate that myth from today’s reality.

I used to believe football and basketball programs at Division I universities helped pay for “non-revenue” sports like track and volleyball. That’s simply not true anymore. A USA Today study recently showed that there were “just 20 among the 228 public schools in NCAA’s Division I whose athletic department generated enough revenue to pay its way in 2013.” “The vast majority of public colleges in Division I,” the study went on to say, “subsidize their athletic programs with millions from mandatory student fees or their general funds. Oregon State, for instance, threw more than $12 million to its athletic department in 2013 to pay its costs. The University of Maryland, now heading to the TV-rich Big 10, subsidized athletics with $15 million.”

Student athletes? In a rare fit of public candor, the quarterback of Ohio State’s 2014 national championship team tweeted back in 2012, “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.” He has a point. The National Labor Relations Board did some research on student players’ “football time” in conjunction with Northwestern University’s football players request to unionize. Football activities required between 40 to 60 hours per week of the players during the fall, and 12 to 25 hours the rest of the school year. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that players for top ranked teams put in even more time.

Student athletes? Exactly how can you expect a “student” to devote even 40 hours a week to his “extra-curricular activity,” and find any time at all for his supposed full-time pursuit of a degree? The scandal at the University of North Carolina involving no-show classes and grade inflation for athletes was egregious, but everyone knows that academic standards at most schools are different for members of revenue-producing teams.

Student athletes? Basketball may actually trump football as an indicator of the triumph of big money sports over academics. “One and done” has become the norm for the very best players. Play college ball your freshman year and then leave school with a multimillion dollar NBA contract. Supposedly these kids attend classes in the fall and winter, to maintain their eligibility, but you have to wonder what incentive they have to go to any classes at all in the spring.

Student athletes? Richard Southall, director of the College Sport Research Institute at the University of South Carolina, summed up the reality well when he said, “We pretend that it’s feasible to recruit high school graduates with minimal academic qualifications, give them a full-time job as a football or basketball player at a Division I NCAA school, and somehow have them get up to college-level reading and writing skills at the same time that they’re enrolled in college-level classes. We’re kidding ourselves.”

Exactly right. We are kidding ourselves. We are watching a rush to the bottom in big time college sports. Two football teams played for the national championship last year; four teams this year. And don’t be surprised to see eight teams before the end of ESPN’s $7.2 billion seven-year deal to broadcast the BCS. After all, the basketball national championship stands at 68 teams and counting. There is just too much money to be made. We’ll be watching football when the baseball season begins.

In the same seven-year span the University of Michigan will pay its new coach, Jim Harbaugh, between $40 and $50 million. How did they agree on that number? That’s what he was making as an NFL coach in San Francisco. The difference between college and professional football is in the process of being erased.

Ever wonder how someone can say something outrageous with a straight face? Here’s my pick of the year so far, from Mark Emmett, President of the NCAA: “We have to emphasize the centrality of academic success as the touchstone for why we participate in college athletics.”

You don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. Senator from Delaware.