Tonight, we have a national championship game that in some sense presents the dilemma facing the NCAA in microcosm. On the one hand, you have UConn, a relative power in the game representing the Big East, a BCS member conference, the best conference in basketball and one that is deep in bed with both ESPN and CBS. It is presided over by a coach who had his hand slapped by the NCAA for "failure to maintain an atmosphere of compliance" earlier this season. The NCAA punished Calhoun for violating one of its core principles - the institution and its leaders are to be held accountable for compliance, i.e. institutional
control - by suspending him for three games NEXT season. We wouldn't want to interfere too much with the TV product that CBS paid billions for now would we?
On the other hand, we have Butler, a supposed mid-major who has had players represented on the Academic All-American team in each of the last four years. The Bulldogs are members of the Horizon Conference, a league without a regular national TV contract and composed of schools that do not play Division I football. There has not been a hint of scandal in Butler's past. Who do you think NCAA President Mark Emmert is secretly rooting for?
Major college athletics is supposed to be about the experience of a student-athlete, with an emphasis on the first part of that hyphenated word. Again, the final game is instructive. While admittedly only a crude measure, the Academic Progress Rate is a standard established by the NCAA to measure schools and administer penalties for failure to encourage sufficient academic progress among their athletes. An APR of 925 is the minimum needed to avoid penalties, which translates into a roughly fifty percent graduation rate; not a particularly tough standard, but the NCAA never sets the bar too high. What about our finalists: UConn, 930, barely over the edge; Butler, 1000, a perfect score, enough said.
The last couple of weeks have not been good ones for the image protectors at the NCAA. We have seen pay for play scandals at both Auburn and Oregon, the participants in last year's BCS National Championship. We have the Jim Tressel saga at perennial power Ohio State, where the head coach not only failed to notify his superiors about violations but actively engaged in covering them up by alerting quarterback Terrell Pryor's "mentor" about them, presumably so he could help the cover up. Of course, there is Tennessee with its twin scandals in men's basketball and football, that have cost basketball coach Bruce Pearl his job, but not until the Vols exited the tournament, and will result in penalties for both programs that have yet to be determined. So far, the reaction of the NCAA to the play for pay revelations coming out of Auburn and Oregon is mostly silence. Won't it be fun if both BCS National Championship Game participants are placed on probation and, heaven forbid, forced to forfeit games from the 2010 season. Oh, and I almost forgot about that tawdry Fiesta Bowl saga which is outside the NCAA's control.
What is going on in collegiate athletics can be traced to one place: NCAA headquarters. The punishment being meted out by the NCAA when it manages to catch rules violators is so disproportionally light in connection to the potential rewards that there is no incentive to comply. First, the chances of actually getting caught aren't too great because the NCAA has a small enforcement staff, and if you do, a few games suspension for a coach or a player is hardly a penalty to be concerned with when the potential payoff is millions of dollars. The incentive for the institution is just as great. Winning football and basketball programs generate millions of dollars that flow back to the institutions. Granted, the immediate dollars the athletic departments generate go to operate the departments, but winning programs create happy alumni who donate more. They also generate favorable publicity for the school and that generates more interest in the school and more applications for admissions. Set against that backdrop, why should a coach comply with the rules he thinks his conference rivals are not obeying?
It's time the NCAA took one of two steps to clean up college athletics. One, and the less drastic of my two suggestions, is to bring back the death penalty. Although it remains on the books, it has not been administered since it was given to SMU. It would seem that the NCAA is now too afraid of the TV networks to hand out the three most meaningful penalties in its arsenal: exclusion from the post-season, exclusion from TV appearances and the death penalty. If you wondering when might be and appropriate time to hand down a death penalty see Auburn, Tennessee, Oregon and Ohio State. UConn probably deserves to be excluded from TV and the tournament for two to three years and Calhoun, the only coach I know whose recruiting was so dirty it inspired a rules change, should be issued a "show cause" order, i.e. demonstrate to the NCAA why he should be allowed to coach. (The reason that D-I schools now play exhibition games against lower division schools and not AAU teams is Jim Calhoun).
The other solution for this mess is just to do away with scholarships altogether. Do you see these kind of scandals in the Ivy League or the Patriot League (okay, some schools in the Patriot League give out scholarships, but still...). You don't see these problems in D-III either. Would some of the players we see now not be able to attend college? Sure, but tell me, does everyone on Auburn's football team or UConn's basketball team really belong in college in the first place? If the NBA and the NFL want minor leagues, let them pay for them like Major League Baseball does. The NBA already has the NBDL - start using it for the players who don't really belong in college. The system we have now prostitutes higher education and demeans the very institutions that participate in it. It's not in the best interest of the institution and it's not in the best interest of most of the athletes to be placed in a situation where the athlete does not really want to be and is unlikely to be academically successful. If there were no athletic scholarships, then the athletes who do participate are students who we are more likely to feel assured want to be students and not stopping at a way station on the way to a pro tryout in order to fulfill some mandatory wait time.
Even if the NCAA is not up to either of these ideas it must take a good hard luck at itself. It is at crossroads and the very nature of college sports is at risk. The business model has been very successful but the public may not want to buy in much longer if game stories continue to be crowded out by scandal stories. As for tonight, well, Go Bulldogs.
