THE NCAA IS TREADING WATER IN A CESSPOOL

The college bowl season is over. We had 41 bowl games with a total of 82 teams participating meaning that over half of the Division I schools were in a bowl game.  There are so many bowl games now that teams with losing records are needed to fill out the bowls so that they'll manage to have two teams in each bowl.  It seemed minimal enough a few years back when the mark was to win 6 games, at least ½ your games,  to be eligible to get into a bowl game.  With the explosion of bowls we now have teams with losing records that  receive that acclaim.  It does seem overdone.

In contrast the pro football season is slowly winding to a finish in February as it concludes its playoff system. Starting in August and finishing in February  seems excessive for a football season. However, those teams are all private enterprises. It appears they can talk people into buying tickets to sit in the snow and watch games in December, January and February.  Indeed they  added a 17th game so the season would be even longer this year. It is unclear why the players union agreed to that silliness but the owners of the teams  wanted that extra game for extra revenue from their modern gladiator events. In contrast chasing money is not supposed to be what College athletics is all about.

What is endlessly surprising is how hard the colleges are  trying to emulate the professional sports quest for more money.  College athletics and the NCAA have constantly promoted their athletic events as those of student athletes. In that sense the contests were extracurricular activities as were the practices and efforts the athletes made. As more money crept into college athletics as a result of the fan base wanting to see these contests on television the various sports, and particularly football and basketball, have morphed into contests that are there to simply gobble more money from the media without any pretense of being concerned about the student athletes or even to create a logical structure. In basketball, season ending tournaments were created which had little purpose after a full season of conference schools playing each other, except that all the members in the league could play each other in a tournament to bring in the additional radio and TV revenue from those games. Generally winning the tournament only advanced the winner to the NCAA tournament in a few of the conferences as the larger conferences  regularly send six or more teams into the season ending NCAA tournament regardless of how they did in the conference tournament. The extra time and effort the athletes would spend away from school was apparently not an issue. One student noted that last year he and his cohorts were out of school for 5 straight weeks for this tournament sequence !

In football the conferences managed to break themselves into divisions so they could have a playoff at the end of the year to determine their conference champion. However the NCAA sanctioned a football tournament which ignored the results on the field and allowed  a group of proclaimed “experts” to pick the 4 teams for the playoff, as next year they will pick the 12 teams for the playoff. The experts are not  compelled to take conference champions but are allowed to select the teams which those ”experts” deem are the best. An example occurred last year when they picked Georgia, Michigan, Ohio State and TCU for the tournament. Michigan and Ohio State were from a single conference, one of which was the champion but the other was simply the runner up in one of the divisions of that conference. They also picked TCU which lost its conference championship game and therefore was the runner up in that conference.  This year they skipped an undefeated conference champion, Florida State, from a “power conference” and replaced it with a one loss team from another conference that they declared was a better choice.  The expert’s logic boggles the imagination.

While the innumerable bowl games and the  Division 1 football championship series both seem to be misguided they are the epitome of logic when compared with the other current gibberish underway in the NCAA . The NCAA has long been controversial as there are many things that it did not seem to pay attention to that were important while they would nitpick on others. Supposedly the NCAA is supposed to ensure that its members are making  their student athletes  attend class and get a degree along with their athletic efforts. For many decades the non-policing of these rules has been a running joke on a national basis. Many schools made a point of shepherding their top athletic stars through a substandard or nonexistent academic effort which led to the student getting to the end of their college playing days without a degree and little or no preparation for facing the vocational world in spite of their years in college. I believe the epitome of this was when Maryland won the NCAA basketball championship a little over 2 decades ago and their graduation rate on that team was 0.00%.  Having achieved a graduation rate of no one I don't recall any actions by the NCAA to rebuke Maryland. Such major failures as this go on endlessly while we read in the paper that the NCAA has disciplined the Michigan football coach for 2 sets of violations, one apparently having to do with buying a lunch or some such thing for a recruit and the other for trying to steal opposing teams signs that they use to send formations and plays onto the field. The humor of the sign stealing event is that when you watch a game on TV you can tell that all the teams are trying to steal each other's signs as the team signaling on to the field have three or four people sending dummy signs so that the team stealing the signs won't know which ones are correct. It is good to know that the NCAA is right on top of these major issues but isn't wasting its time ensuring that athletes get an education.

We then have the NIL (name, Image, likeness)debacle which has now infected college athletics where players may go sell themselves on the public market to earn money. It is interesting that there was a cry that went up to allow players to do this so that they would be able to be  compensated for their athletic efforts on behalf of the school. It used to be thought that getting a subsidized or free education which may be valued at $50,000 to $100,000 or more per year was some kind of compensation. This argument seemed to have lost its pertinence when the NCAA and the various conferences and schools began to collect huge amounts of income from there radio and TV packages. We are told that the major schools hauling in this money such as Michigan and Ohio State received over $200 million in the past year. Apparently the schools never managed to find a way to make some of this money available to the student athletes in the form of savings that they could collect when they left the school or for support to finish their education. Of course even though there was some sharing by schools within the conferences these types of situations also left certain schools awash in money whereas others we're working hard to cover they're athletic costs with the income they received. The trouble with the LIH payments is that they have now been exploited to where these schools are actually promoting those payments that an athlete can receive at their school and are using those payments to recruit incoming athletes. We are told that schools have now arranged for their football fans to put up money in trust funds promoted as charities to pay the football players an annual amount. Presumably that works for other sports as well. The University of Texas has managed to create such a system which pays its football lineman each $50,000 per year. Other schools have copied this system. The NCAA doesn’t care and It is mind boggling to think that the IRS and the Justice Department have not yet collapsed the system on the grounds that this is not a charitable enterprise. This is just big time football universities run amok. 

If the LIH we're not bad enough we now have a transfer portal that has been opened up allowing players at schools to elect a transfer one or two times each year, once during the month of December through the beginning of January and the second time in the spring. When the portal opened up at the beginning of December this past year over 1000 players entered the portal on the first day. The sad part of this is that this is right at the time that most teams and conferences were completing their final games and the bowl games then occur later in the month of December. Many of the teams in the bowl games found that some of their key players had entered the transfer portal and would not be available for the bowl games. It is unclear why the NCAA created a transfer portal that would have players electing out exactly when they were coming to the culmination of their season. The wisdom of that is elusive. There also used to be a waiting time of one year before the player who transferred  was eligible to play. Now there is no waiting time for that first transfer. Indeed some number of players have transferred multiple times in their college career as they hopped around looking for a school that suited them. All of this seems to suggest that what is important for these athletes is to satisfy their athletic goals and not get an education. The trouble with this mentality is that less than 1% of these athletes will ever earn a living as a professional. In seeking collegiate glory, if they don't get an education and a degree, they are likely to be awash vocationally when they leave school. It would seem that a much better use of  of the new found money would have been to try and ensure that tutors and other assistants were provided for players to complete their degrees and resume normal functioning when they are done with their athletics. Simply putting money in the pockets of 18 to 22 year olds without completing an education seems counter intuitive. Having players sit out for a certain number of semesters when they transfer, except for graduate students, could solve a lot of this silliness.

It might also be valuable for the NCAA to look at a restriction on schools that hire coaches away from other colleges before an athletic season is completed. This seems to particularly be a problem at the end of football season when a number of coaches leave their existing institution having been hired away by another institution and the original school is left high and dry for their game or games at the end of the season. This seems to occur because a school is anxious to hire the new coach and so they go out recruiting and the coach that receives the offer wants to hurry up and get to his new school. A good example is Brian Kelly at LSU who has now left multiple schools without staying to coach his team’s bowl game so that he can move on to his new school.. This happened at University of Cincinnati, which I believe was ranked 5th in the nation, when he left it to go to Notre Dame and then he did the same at Notre Dame to go to LSU. I do not recall if he did this to the schools where he coached prior to the named examples and he is not the only coach to have done this. I don't know why the schools can't be told to leave the coaches alone until the season is over. If there were a restriction that the school hiring a coach away before the season was over could not play in the postseason in the succeeding year I presume the schools would learn to do their recruiting in January and not during the end of the football season.

We also now have the problem of conferences raiding other conferences as the Big 10 and SEC did this past year.  That started an extensive sequence of schools moving to new conferences. This shuffle has  major problems.  It means that all the athletic teams will now be traveling much longer distances to play in games at excessive costs and inconvenience. Picture Rutgers playing UCLA in volleyball !  The students that are participating, will have a considerable additional time away from the classroom. Apparently the college finance offices weren’t worried to much about academics.  Money first, academics second.

All of these problems exist at this time. There is no evidence that the NCAA is really doing anything positive to resolve them. It seems to be befuddled by the excesses which money  has caused in collegiate athletics. As if to make these problems even worse rather than resolve them the NCAA now has a new president, Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts, who has come up with a proposal to let the rich schools compensate up to 1/2 of their players from’ trust funds in the amount of at least $30,000 per year. Somehow he and his staff came up with this concept. Supposedly they felt this would allow the wealthier schools to do something to balance the system. It seems that what it really does is give certain of the athletes an extra pile of money leaving other athletes out of the picture and allows the schools making the most money to keep adding money and incentives to their system leaving the other schools out of the picture. In  essence the rich keep getting richer and the others have to try and get along. This seems very similar to the problem our nation has had in the last three or four decades as our politicians have consistently come up with programs that made the rich richer and left everyone else to try and get along. It must be that Charlie Baker is so ingrained in this system that instead of trying to find a way to correct things he simply is mimicking one of the major problems of our society.  Hopefully the presidents, athletic directors and boards of trustees of our public institutions will not sleep through this incongruous proposal, nor the others referenced above.

All of these issues need to be addressed. We have had enough of the NCAA being confused and muddling through without addressing at least the major issues. It would be nice to get some people involved in that organization who will at least start trying to do some things to resolve this mess and not just let it keep growing because they are befuddled. Almost all of the Division  I universities are public institutions.  They are taxpayer supported.  Academics should be the priority. The current situation seems to imply that when the University of Chicago President removed the school from the Big 10 in 1946 to participate at the Division III level because the school was becoming too athletic oriented, he may have been a modern soothsayer.

Silence Dogood