This is a continuation of the previous Reggie Bush post. For me personally I absolutely despise the NCAA for just about everything that they do, but mostly for the failure to admit the role that money plays in their decision making. That is the way it has always been for me. I hold no punches, the NCAA is flat out the most hypocritical organization since the International Olympic Committee officially dispensed with the notion of amateurism. The belief that the actions of the NCAA are made for the benefit of student-athletes is what I detest. It is not about the rights of student-athletes it is about money, and it has been as such for decades.
Before I launch into the heart of the matter a brief history lesson. I think the NCAA should limit itself to the rules pertaining to those enacted on the field play. That is where the NCAA got its start. Before it was the National Collegiate Athletic Association it was Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee. The rules committee was started in 1873 when people from Princeton, Rutgers, Columbia and Yale met and thought that a uniform set of rules might have some merit at a time when games were played and decided based on what amounted to house rules. In time Walter Camp joined the IFA and instituted many of the rules that made the game recognizable to us. A second group of rule makers emerged in the early 1900’s, the Conference Committee. In 1906 the CC merged with the IFA, which resulted in and name change to the Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee, and produced a series of rule changes. In 1910 the IFRC changed their name to the National Collegiate Athletic Association and produced another series of new rules, just like Bill Maher but real and binding. The new rules in 1906 and 1910 are the basis of our current rules. They included such classics as legalizing the forward pass, institution of a neutral zone, 10 yard first downs, 4 15 minute periods, seven men on the line, and making only backs and receivers eligible for a pass. It has been down hill since then for the NCAA in my opinion. The only on field rule of any true significance to be added was the legalization of free substitution which was added first in 1941, retracted in 1953 and reinstated in 1964. Because the NCAA now had a uniform product on the field they began to branch out to areas not immediately pertaining to the game on the field. One positive has come from this move, scholarship limitations, which now sit at 85 per team. That’s about it.
I really think that the NCAA should govern the rules on the field and let everything else go. As is they are not really stopping anyone from cheating in the least. It is very easy to beat the NCAA, you want proof look no further than Reggie Bush. By all accounts he is looking positively bulletproof right now. He looks bulletproof because he shuts the hell up. He won’t talk to the investigators about what he allegedly did. He didn’t talk about it from the start and now because he can afford to buy the silence of those who brought in allegations about him they are not going to talk. He is going to skate on this and there will be much pissing and moaning about how USC has cheated and gotten away with it. Fair enough, but if every rule residing in the NCAA’s massive 476 page bible of by-laws was enforced across the board, every major program would be in violation. Every single one of them. NCAA rules are broken every day but relatively few are ever reported to the NCAA so relatively few are investigated, and even those investigations are very easy to dodge. All that has to be done is to shut your mouth. If you can keep your lips zipped you can beat the NCAA.
It does not help matters that all of the rules that can possibly be violated have a tendency to contradict each other. For instance the NCAA rules that you can not make money from anyone as a result of your athletic prowess. Simple in theory and understanding but this particular rule is incredibly easy to circumvent. The loop hole springs from the fact that you can profit from a sport that you are not on scholarship for, usually baseball. There is also an issue in which the way in which the rules are enforced. None of the rules are enforced in a uniform matter, usually in a more case by case form. Consider if you will Jeremy Bloom and Tom Zbikowski. Both men competed at a professional level in a sport other than their scholarship sport, skiing for Bloom, Boxing for Zbikowski. Both made money from their other sports but Bloom was deemed ineligible to play for Colorado while Zbikowski was, and still is eligible to play for Notre Dame.
The problem lies in the associations belief that they are bigger than they really are. Most people imagine the NCAA as a giant monolithic organization that casts its specter over the entirety of intercollegiate athletics. Watching everything that happens recording it and then based of those events acting to solve any problems or violations that might occur with its member institutions. In some respects that is a good assessment of how the NCAA does business, but it only applies business(read money). For example a reporter for Louisville Courier-Journal was forcibly removed from the press box by the NCAA for blogging about the Cardinals Super Regional game with Oklahoma State. By NCAA rules he was providing live updates of a game, an act the circumvents the NCAA’s broadcasting contract with Disney. When it comes to processes that involve the NCAA’s stream of revenue the image of the monolithic entity sure seems to fit. Where that image does not fit is where it comes to enforcement of the rules that govern the actions of players and coaches off the field. For this I present an alternative image of the NCAA. If money is not involved in the proceedings the NCAA is playing Whac-A-Mole. The association can only move on an action and investigate something if it is reported to their offices in Indianapolis. If it is not reported nothing will be done. Even if the violation is reported there is a good chance that nothing will come of it. Every time they hit the mole another springs at another point. They do not have the man power to sufficiently monitor and investigate every violation that comes before their face. Often the NCAA will simply look at the investigation compiled by the reporting institution, determine if the investigation was properly executed, and if it was they agree with what ever punishment the reporting institution might have imposed on its self.
One thing that really hurts the Association is that the rules by which all member institutions agree in principal to follow are archaic at best. In my estimation this is due to the retro active nature NCAA rule creation. A recent example of this would be the recent decision to place a blanket ban on all text messages between a prospective recruit and a coach. Aside from the fact that the rule is about as easy to skirt as, well, its just easy to beat, its also about 5 years too late. Coaches have been using text messages for a long time. The sensible action would have been to place a restriction on the number of texts that could be sent, like they do with phone calls and letters. Instead the NCAA overreacted and placed a blanket ban on text messages to recruits. This is one example of dozens that are out there. The rules of the NCAA do not keep up with the pace of changes that emanate from the hyper competitive environment that permeates the highest level of revenue sports. In that environment finding creative ways to circumvent the rules, while not out and out encouraged it is damn near a requirement to stay competitive with other schools. Compound that with the NCAA asking its member institutions to police themselves and its not very hard to see the problem.
It does not help matters that all of the rules that can possibly be violated have a tendency to contradict each other in enforecement. The complecations that arise come from have multiple rules to deal with what is in essance the same situation. For instance the NCAA rules that you can not make money from anyone as a result of your athletic prowess. Simple in theory and understanding but this particular rule is incredibly easy to circumvent. The loop hole springs from the fact that you can profit from a sport that you are not on scholarship for, usually baseball. There is also an issue in which the way in which the rules are enforced. None of the rules are enforced in a uniform matter, usually in a more case by case form. Consider if you will Jeremy Bloom and Tom Zbikowski. Both men competed at a professional level in a sport other than their scholarship sport, skiing for Bloom, Boxing for Zbikowski. Both made money from their other sports but Bloom was deemed ineligible to play for Colorado while Zbikowski was, and still is eligible to play for Notre Dame. There end up being multiple rules to deal with the same issues. That greatly complicates matters for the compliance staffs of athletic departments everywhere. It is easy to see how a misinterpretation of a rule can lead to problems with the monolithic bureaucracy.
Make no mistake about it the NCAA is a bureaucracy which makes it easy to beat. Its so large and intwined in so many different areas that it can not activly control all of them at once. Not surprisingly they control the topics that control the money, thats why it is easy to get away with breaking rules, so long as you don’t break rules in big money areas. The margin for rule breaking that presents its self when you ask all member institutions to police themselves is as wide as the Grand Canyon. The rules of the NCAA as presently constituted logically lead to that type of behaviour. There is no threat of investigation from the NCAA, there is no fear that anything bad will come of bad actions. With a group of bylaws as easily beatable as those that the NCAA has it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that violations occur. The illusion that it is just one or two programs or coaches in one place or another who are breaking the rules is laughable. Violations are far too easy cover up and there is very little that the Association can do about it without spending a lot of money. The NCAA needs to drop the act. They can’t keep up with everyone, they can’t even come close. They would need to have an investigative force to rival to the FBI to actually possess the total control which they pretend to have.
However the Association continues to present that image of total control when it is clear that they have very little. Any and every time the NCAA acts on a violation they are doing so retroactively which, handily enough, brings me to my next point. When was the last time that the NCAA caught anyone in the act of violating a rule? As far as I can tell never in my time relatively short time alive, possibly before hand but I don’t know. The NCAA always acts retroactively which is one of the biggest issues I have with them as an institution. They don’t have to power to actively police all the actions partaken by all member institutions. All the information that they receive comes from member institutions or from a secondary source such as a news outlet. Simply put, they are struggling to stay above water they can keep up with the volume of activity that takes place on any given day. It seems to me that when the NCAA does usually find a violation of their bylaws that is egregious in nature they attempt to make an example of the guilty institution by placing exorbitant violations on the offenders. See the death penalty that the NCAA placed on SMU in 1987 or the stripping of Chris Webber’s awards and expunging of UM’s record for his time there. I don’t like the NCAA’s penchant for retroactive punishment. I don’t think that we shoudl reward people who beat the system, but simply removing the offenders name from the record book does nothing. If Reggie Bush’s name gets removed from everything he did at USC I will still see him as one of the best running backs ever. I don’t think what he, or Webber or SMU did was cheating the game, he wasn’t juiced. Sure they cheated the system, but they didn’t cheat the game. There is a distinction that needs to be made between the two. Even if you think that cheating the system is the same as cheating at the game it is tough to make examples of anyone when everyone knows just how easy it is to beat the system.
I seriously doubt that the wholesale changes that need to be made will ever come to fruition. The NCAA likes to project the image of the student athlete and will occasionally and selectively enforce some aspects of the rules to keep a positive image but there will never be the type of enforcement that is needed to “clean up” the sport and it really comes down to economics. The better the product on the field the higher the profit margin. The values that would present themselves if the NCAA were to institute stricter control are entirely intrinsic, they might seem great but its not going to change the way they make decisions with their money. The fans might feel better if they know that everyone is going to class and that everyone is following the rules and that no one is cheating the system. But they won’t pay for that. No fan pays for his or her ticket because they know that the starting QB is a Bio Chemistry major who has a 3.560 GPA. People pay the ticket price to watch a good Football game nothing more nothing less. Fixing the loop holes in the system would cost a lot of money and would drive the prices across the nation up. The NCAA members won’t do it because it will eat into their revenue stream. Making sure that everyone gets that warm fuzzy feeling when they think about the NCAA is not worth it. Why invest all that money in cleaning up what is “hurting” the sport when it is a lot easier and cheaper to ignore the existence of the problem. That is the NCAA’s stance right now, and it will continue to be the position it takes for one simple reason, it pays better to ignore it. Industries and organisations can be made to clean up their acts, and they have been in the past, but it costs money to do so and they typically only do so with the promise of a tax break or a subsidy from the government. They usually won’t do it of their on accord, but only if something is in it for them. Closing the loop holes in the system is not an impossibility per se, but the price is very high. The NCAA could be made to close the loop holes by one group of people only. The TV executives who invest so heavily in NCAA sponsored sports and events. They could threaten to withhold their investments if the NCAA didn’t manage to clean up its act, or they could give them money to ensure that they do so. But they won’t because the warm on fuzzy feeling we get from fair and equitable play is not worth a penny to them. The dirty little secret that the NCAA and TV types know is that we will watch their product regardless of how corrupt and self serving the process of distributing the product of College Football is, the public at large will still eat it up. They no one has to do anything. It is an I scratch your back you scratch mine situation if one ever existed, nobody does
I don’t want the NCAA to clean up its act, I could care less about that, its really not worth it to me. However that does not mean that I don’t object to the NCAA because I do, for a reason that supersedes all of those that I mentioned above. For years the Myles Brand and Co. have upheld the pretense that what they do, and the way they act is always for the benefit of the student athlete. That the way in which they as an institution act is not about the money. All I want from the NCAA is an admission that it is about the money, because that is the truth. It hasn’t always been that way, hell for years they only allowed one televised game per week. However that changed with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson’s battle in Albuquerque when university presidents and athletic directors saw the money that could be made from the product they possessed. It is not that they changed the way the system works. They didn’t change the rules to spawn what we now see. What they did see was a system that, with a few tweaks would enable massive amounts of profit for everyone involved. From that moment of realization, where the proverbial light bulb went off it has been about the money above all else. I am fine with that fact. This is America after all and everything is about money, that’s just the way it is. But the pretense that the NCAA is in place to protect the rights of student athletes needs to be forgotten. Simply admitting that money is important to them is not going to solve any problems in the larger sense. What it will do is put what they do and how they do it in proper perspective and that is something that is needed.
