BusinessWeek Article: A whole new ball game? (Reform in collegiate athletics)

[Cheesesteak]

OCTOBER 20, 2003

A Whole New Ball Game?
The push to reform--and scale back--collegiate athletics is gaining yardage

A glorious autumn day. School colors flying. Bands blaring fight songs. Cheerleaders in skimpy skirts kicking up their heels. Stands vibrating from the stomping feet of fans. Fearsome young men raging with the fire of competition. Isn't this what college is all about?

Er...not according to a killjoy named Gordon Gee. In September, Vanderbilt Chancellor Gee grabbed headlines when he announced that he was disbanding the university's athletic department. Granted, no teams were cut, no athletic scholarships lost. But Gee did strike a chord. In trying to pull the athlete back into the academic community, he became the public face of a movement that is making a serious stab at reforming college sports. "Other universities have called and said: 'Good, you jump off that cliff, and if it works, get back to me,"' says Gee. "I suspect they're sweating bullets, with all this national attention."

Why? Because Gee's success or failure just might help foretell the future of an extracurricular activity that has grown into a $3 billion-a-year annual industry, according to Smith College economist Andrew S. Zimbalist, author of Unpaid Professionals. Behind the crowds and TV hype, pressure is building either to turn class-skipping athletes into students or recognize that -- at least at big-time sports schools -- it's too late to turn back the clock. And that's pitting reformers against an army of alumni boosters, politicians who control state schools, TV networks, and commercial interests -- all of whom would feel the impact of downsizing college sports.

The endless debate over the proper role of sports in university life would probably not be raging so fiercely if it weren't for a particularly troubling spate of scandals. Months after Maurice Clarett led Ohio State to the national title in football, the running back was charged with receiving special treatment on an exam and accused of lying to police about what was stolen from a car loaned to him by a school booster. The men's basketball team at Fresno State was put on probation after someone else did players' course work. The University of Washington was hit with a two-year probation for recruiting violations.

And it isn't just the players. Georgia basketball coach Jim Harrick resigned amid charges of academic fraud. Alabama fired head football coach Mike Price for "indecorous" behavior involving a drinking spree and a stripper. Iowa State basketball coach Larry Eustachy resigned after photos surfaced showing him drinking and kissing coeds at a party after a game. Most bizarre, Baylor basketball coach Dave Bliss threw in the towel after trying to cover up illegal payments to a player -- before he was murdered -- by allegedly spreading rumors that he dealt drugs.

Some reforms have already been put in place: stricter academic requirements for entering freshmen and for athletes to remain eligible. Others are long-range and more ambitious. They include shortening the football and basketball seasons, and, most fundamental, pulling back from the commercial forces that have turned college sports into an entertainment spectacle.

Leading the charge are faculty senates, including many from the six athletic conferences that form the Bowl Championship Series (BCS); the powerful Association of Governing Boards of Universities & Colleges; and the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. (NCAA) -- generally considered the marketing arm of college sports. "What's unusual here is having a faculty group and a trustee group aligned," says Robert Eno, co-chair of the faculty group, the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA), alluding to trustees' usual fervent support of athletics. "It's odd. It's unprecedented. We're all surprised, but it seems to be working well."

Crisis is nothing new to college sports. Violent deaths in football led President Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 to threaten the game's abolition, which spurred the forming of the NCAA that same year. What's different now is the amount of money sloshing around. Schools that make it to the top bowl games can pull in up to $13 million apiece. And in March, 1999, CBS (VIA ) signed an 11-year, $6 billion TV contract, mostly for basketball. (Football contracts are awarded by individual conferences.) As a result, schedules and seasons have expanded, expenses have skyrocketed, and scandals have multiplied.

FOLLOW THE MONEY
Now, says Myles Brand, head of the NCAA since January, "change is in the air." Predictably, the current reform movement started over money. The coalition of faculty members was born in the fall of 2002 after a professor of classic languages at the University of Oregon, James Earl, became alarmed by a single act of university spending. "I picked up my newspaper one morning and read about the university spending $90 million to expand the football stadium," says Earl. "The faculty had never been told about it. We went nuts. We're poor as church mice here. How could you spend $90 million on a stadium when we can't even pay the faculty's salaries?"

Earl was then president of the Oregon faculty senate, and he wrote to the presidents of the other universities in the Pacific 10 Conference. By the beginning of 2003, faculty senates at 45 to 50 universities had contacted the COIA to voice their support. In January, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities & Colleges, the advisory group representing the trustees of over 1,200 institutions elected to join the COIA in its reform push. The final member of the triumvirate to weigh in was the NCAA. Says Brand, the first university president to head the NCAA and the man who fired basketball legend Bobby Knight at Indiana: "Reform was one of the conditions under which I took this job."

The three groups met in Chicago in April and endorsed a series of educational and budgetary reforms. Some had already been enacted by the NCAA over the previous two years, all of them aimed at improving academic performance. One rule stipulates that athletes complete a set percentage of the requirements to graduate each year. Another raises grade-point-averages athletes must achieve in college, and a third boosts the academic qualifications athletes must have to enter.

The reformers also back a carrot-and-stick plan, rewarding teams that do well academically with more scholarship slots and money from television and punishing teams doing poorly by taking away scholarships and ultimately barring them from post-season play. These measures will be voted on by Division 1 presidents in April and are expected to pass. "We are also looking at the kinds of courses that student-athletes should be taking," says Brand. "We want general education courses, not any old course."

Critics, however, point out that stronger regulations aren't enough. They require accurate and honest reporting. "You can toughen up academic standards, but that leads to more academic fraud," says Howard Chudacoff, a history professor at Brown and the university's NCAA faculty representative. Brand insists that maintaining academic integrity is a primary objective and says the NCAA will modestly boost its investigative staff, which now numbers 15.

The April meeting also set longer-term goals involving "transparency" in athletic budgets. The sources of money for college sports are often murky: Cash from boosters often goes unreported and can cover under-the-table payments to coaches and even players. Facilities can be a mystery all their own. "It's always difficult to account for capital spending, athletic or otherwise," says Brand. On Aug. 6, the NCAA received a $50,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to back a study of capital spending on athletics.

What's not murky is that as more money goes to new stadiums, celebrity coaches, and better training facilities, critics of the

[OldPony]

Great article. A fair statement of the struggles facing college sports. The first step needs to be the breaking of the BCS cartel. Then many of the other reforms can be instiuted. When state bugets get tight as they are now, many of the states will have the argument about how much they are spending on athletics which could cause a huge fallout. Let's all hope so anyway.