The Quagmire of College Football
Commentary: Gladiators and beer: Why bowl games are the real final exams.
November 20, 2007
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1. Roar, Lions!
"I don't think of intercollegiate sports as something extracurricular."—Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University.
Columbia football was a comforting joke when I was there in the 1950s. We thought losing teams meant we had our priorities straight. Why wouldn't we rather be closer to the rigorously intellectual University of Chicago, which had dropped football altogether in 1939, than to, say, Auburn, an undefeated football team that needed a university of which it could be proud?
College football was a bigger deal than the professional game in those long-gone days, although that was already changing. The phrase "student-athlete" was being crafted for widespread dissemination by the executive director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Previously, it was assumed that athletes were students, even if they were majoring in left tackle. Somewhere between 1969, when Chicago restored football, and 2002, when Lee C. Bollinger, champion of affirmative action and the future scourge of Iran's President Ahmadinejad, arrived at Columbia from gridiron powerhouse Michigan, everything changed.
The National Football League (NFL) had become America's number one sport -- and the college game, its minor league. The NCAA had become a highly effective marketing organization with rules carefully written to prevent spending free-for-alls and the sort of obvious corruption that would damage the "industry." The most dedicated football factories from the NCAA's highest league—Division 1A—now formed powerful conferences that vied to play in sponsored Bowl games. TV money was the fuel (and gambling an important side business). To stay competitive at the new, high-stakes level, colleges had to cheat and players had to juice.
And here was the affirmative action angle: The rise of a gladiatorial athletic culture meant that colleges, like the military, needed to recruit in the ghettoes—not just in white ethnic coal-mining towns, but in black inner cities. So the ranks of football teams were filling with tough, hungry teens, often gifted football players with psycho-social problems, who were used to fighting to survive, if not to studying to pass.
Because so many were African-Americans, criticizing the behavior of football players—their arrest records, graduation rates, illiteracy—became "racist." Apologists pointed to the opportunities that football gave young men who could not otherwise afford college educations. Critics pointed out that the huge disparity between the number of black athletes and black non-athletes on campus proved that many colleges were merely interested in cheap labor. According to the most recent NCAA annual report, 22% of all college athletes are black. Only 8% of all college students are black.
If all of the above mattered only to college football itself, it would be interesting mainly to the Sub-Cultural Studies Department. But that's not the case—not for the other students on campus, nor for the campuses, nor for the communities of which they are part, not even for the larger society. Among the effects, Title IX, which, in 37 words made into law in 1972, tried to level the gender playing field, has yet to fulfill its great promise because so much of the funding and energy is channeled into all-boy, big-time football.
If big-time college football were merely another of higher education's various advertising ploys, like many of its semester-abroad programs or film-study courses, we could just roll our eyes and move on. But it teeters on the edge of being a scam and a tax fraud. Universities mortgage their endowments and their souls to build stadiums and buy top coaches and players; and yet, as Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist keeps pointing out, less than a dozen of the hundred-odd top football programs even make a profit, much less successfully fund other sports on campus, no less—har har—libraries and laboratories.
Every so often, provocateurs suggest that college football players should be paid, at least some percentage of TV and ticket profits, not to mention those briskly selling college jerseys. The colleges recoil in appropriate horror, claiming "the end of amateurism," not to speak of "higher" education. What they are scared of, though, is creating an employer-employee relationship—which would entail workman's comp for injuries, perhaps better health insurance, and the loss of a non-profit status that gives them tax exemptions and control over a non-union workforce that Zimbalist calls "unpaid professionals," the muscle and bone of the system.
Let's take a break and yawn here. So what? There's a war on. And college football fans, amiable louts who like to paint their faces, tear down goalposts, and burn cars after a big game, surely need to get off. Better they should do it in the stadium and the quad—and sometimes downtown—than run loose in our neighborhoods.
But a dangerously numbing effect lurks in the corruption of college football—the altered transcripts to admit high school stars who can't do college work, the under-the-table payments to potential box-office attractions, the passing grades in Mickey Mouse courses given by co-opted or intimidated faculty members—that makes cynics of classmates and fans, and pimps of trustees and sportswriters. God knows what damage it does to undereducated players who don't have the skills (or the luck) to move on to the NFL.
In retrospect, so many of them seem shamed by their exploitation. Some even want to talk about it. But no one wants to listen to losers. Hey, you got your chance for a free education and you blew it!
These days my mailbox is filled with requests to donate to the $100 million Fund for Excellence in Columbia Athletics. En route to a losing season after last year's "encouraging" 5-5 record, the best in a decade, Columbia takes this fund-raising seriously. Until recently, a New York City highway billboard invited us to "Meet the New Cats Uptown"—complete with pictures of the roaring Columbia Lions logo and Coach Norries Wilson, a former University of Minnesota lineman, in his second year running the team.
President Bollinger says, "I think of athletics as co-curricular. This means to me that mediocrity in athletics is simply not acceptable."
I'm not sure what this means to me. At Columbia, I roomed with, sat in the same classes with, and ate the same lousy cafeteria food with football players. They were more like me than the players I later reported on in the Big Ten (including those playing for then-Michigan President Bollinger), or the powerhouse Southeastern Conference, or the Big East. I took comfort in that. Meeting last year's Columbia players, I still felt comfortable, especially with the writers on the team. Why would I want to contribute to change, if that means putting in place the kind of "excellence in athletics" at Florida State, or even Notre Dame of late?
A recent survey in The Chronicle of Higher Education highlights at least one of the problems. In recent years, there has been an enormous increase in donations to athletic departments, while overall donations to colleges have stagnated. "Excellence in athletics" as funded by Boone Pickens at Oklahoma State ($165 million) does not trickle up to the Philosophy Department—and for good reason. A sports donation can buy not only naming rights and a box of good seats with sideline passes (excellent for business entertaining), but access to parties and meals with coaches and players. How much is sherry in a professor's apartment for a Wittgenstein chalk-talk worth?
On the other hand, if I send my money in to the Columbia fund, I'll have the honor of joining the likes of Robert K. Kraft, Columbia '63. According to Judy Battista of the New York Times, Kraft credits his experience playing Columbia football with teaching him the teamwork, perseverance, and subjugating of ego necessary to make enough of a fortune to donate five million dollars to the new athletics fund. And here's one small tip of the cap he gets in return: The playing field at Columbia's Lawrence A. Wien Stadium will be called the Robert K. Kraft Field. (How much for the Robert M. Lipsyte End Zone?)
Kraft's fortune also enabled him to buy the New England Patriots, who seem en route to their fourth Super Bowl in the last seven years.
Kraft is such a great philanthropist and dedicated alumnus that I feel sure he will not allow our Lions to become a Patriot act, running up the score to dominate opponents and intimidate future rivals, or breaking rules by trying to steal the signals that rival coaches send their players. Unless, of course, the alternative is mediocrity.
