College Sports in Crisis

One day last January, Ramogi Huma, a former linebacker for UCLA, joined by nearly two dozen current and former players (as well as NFL cornerback Daylon McCutcheon), held a press conference to announce that the way big-time college athletics is organized has to change.

"We put our bodies and even our lives on the line," Huma said. "Providing maximum medical protection for us is the least the NCAA should be doing, along with ensuring that those who do not go on to professional careers in football--almost 99 percent of us--are prepared academically for other careers."

Huma and his companions demanded a series of reforms--including better medical and life insurance, bigger stipends for student-athletes, the removal of caps on what they earn in the offseason and employment counseling. He also said that administrators--and everyone else who's involved--should "help student athletes make education their top priority and improve graduation rates."

Huma announced the formation of the Collegiate Athletes Coalition, a group dedicated to bringing about those reforms. He had powerful friends with him, and not just other linebackers. One was Tim Waters, an official with the United Steel-workers union, a partner of the CAC's in trying to change the financial and academic look of major college athletic programs.

"It's scary," said Waters, "that all this money is there, and the student-athletes aren't even being considered. It's a sign of exactly what's wrong. The athletes are committed to this. The NCAA had better open its eyes and look at the situation. We are serious. We aren't going to go away."

According to the determined Waters, whose union has worked with students on other issues, "The players are definitely being exploited. You've got some under-privileged students trying to make their way by using their athletic talent. They're not getting a free education like the NCAA would have the general public believe. They work hard and generate a lot of money."

One indication of the money in college athletics is that CBS agreed to pay $6 billion for the rights to telecast the NCAA men's (continued on page 88)Crisis (continued from page 84) basketball tournament through 2013. "Amateur" seems a misnomer when used in connection with some college athletic programs whose budgets run into the millions. Then there are the million-dollar shoe deals, to say nothing of vast television revenues for teams that make it to bowl games. Agents are severely restricted when doing business with student-athletes, but the competition to represent athletes after graduation can be intense. Some agents use "runners," sometimes women under-graduates, to put in good words for agents with star athletes. According to the athletes, the women often get their attention by giving them expensive presents, apparently paid for by agents lurking off-campus. Total revenues generated by college athletics have been estimated in the billions.

Huma's press conference was just one of the signs that a new controversy has hit American campuses. Cary Nelson, professor of English at the University of Illinois, told Lingua Franca that the formation of the CAC is "part of the overall movement to empower contingent or casual labor at the universities."

In June, Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, president emeritus of Notre Dame, added his voice to the reform chorus. "We're not in the entertainment business, nor are we a minor league for professional sports," he said. "Your school is not worthy to be the champion of the country if you're not educating your kids."

Hesburgh spoke in his role as cochairman of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. The commission proposed a series of reforms, including banning schools with low athlete graduation rates from postseason play, removing corporate logos from uniforms and reducing the length of seasons. NCAA statistics show that 48 percent of football players at major universities graduate and only 42 percent of the basketball players. In the 114 biggest basketball programs, the graduation rate dips to 34 percent.

The first stirrings of this reform movement can be traced to 1997 and the formation of Rutgers 1000, a group of students, faculty and alumni who want Rutgers to de-emphasize athletics and join a conference such as the Patriot League, where scholarships are primarily need-based. In 1999, a small group of faculty members met at Drake University and decided to attack the problems of academic corruption in college athletics. This fall the Drake Group, which grew out of the conference, plans to focus public attention on exploited athletes--and complicit faculty members.

"Members of the Drake Group want professors to demand their classes back," reported The Chronicle of Higher Education last February. "Back from coaches who won't give their players time to study, back from tutors who write players' papers for them."

One of the Drake Group's most visible members is Murray Sperber, professor of English and American studies at Indiana University and the author of Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education.

"The whole fig leaf that this is amateur sports is eroding on a number of fronts," Sperber says. "Athletes are basically vocational students. In big programs, they're working 30, 40, 50 hours a week. Some are trying to go to school around that, some aren't. In any case, they are not getting paid very much."

Casey Jacobsen, a standout basketball player at Stanford, told USA Today, "All these people are making money off the venues where we play. But people don't feel sorry for us. They have no sympathy for us."

Linda Bensel-Meyers, professor of rhetoric at the University of Tennessee, has plenty of sympathy and has become a vocal advocate of reform. Her cooperation with ESPN.com in 1999 in exposing academic irregularities at UT made her so unpopular on the Knoxville campus that she says she is afraid to walk across campus. She plans to work with the Drake Group to launch a federal class-action suit to bring about reforms. (See Raw Deal, p. 85.)

In another sign of reform, the National Basketball Development League, sponsored by the NBA, begins play this fall in eight Southeastern cities. The new league will give athletes who have no interest in attending college what amounts to a minor-league option. Players must be at least 20 years old to qualify for the league.

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"There's been a movement to reform college athletics practically from the day it began," says Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College and author of Unpaid Professionals: Commercialization and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports. According to Zimbalist, today's reform movement represents "a serious moment, an important moment. How far it will go in actually changing the landscape, I'm not sure, because commercialization is a juggernaut. The top shoe deals can bring $3 million or $4 million to a school. The school might get a million, a million and a half in cash, and the rest of it comes in kind. And usually there's some supplement for the coach's salary."

The commercialization of college sports involves remarkable numbers. Earlier this year the University of Michigan signed a seven-year equipment and licensing contract with Nike, estimated to be worth more than $25 million. The deal, which goes into effect this fall, also entails a $1.2 million cash payment from Nike to the university.

Huma, Bensel-Meyers, the United Steelworkers and distressed faculty members across the country cite a series of recent scandals that suggest the extent of problems in college athletics.

In 1999, the University of Minnesota spent $1.5 million for an eight-month independent investigation of its men's basketball program. The investigation concluded that "between 1993 and 1998 there was systematic, widespread academic misconduct" in the school's basketball program.

The report finger at coach Clem Haskins and noted that he was "disadvantaged by his substantial failures of recollection." The investigators found that Haskins had given cash to players and instructed athletes to mislead university attorneys when questioned about their academic conduct. The report also found that a former secretary in the academic counseling office had prepared more than 400 pieces of course work (including papers on such topics as the menstrual cycle, eating disorders and women's gains in the workplace) for at least 18 players. "I thought I was going to actually learn how to write a paper," one former Gopher told the St. Paul Pioneer Press." But then I sat down and she just started typing. In the two years I was there I never did a thing." University president Mark Yudof described the Minnesota mess as "one of the most serious cases of academic fraud ever reported to the NCAA."

In March 2001 the University of Kentucky announced that it had uncovered 45 violations of NCAA rules in the football program, with many of the transgressions apparently committed by assistant coach Claude Bassett, the football team's recruiting coordinator. Bassett admitted in a television interview that he had given $1400 in a money order to a Memphis high school football coach. He was also accused of forging a letter from Emery Wilson, dean of Kentucky's College of Medicine, virtually assuring a potential recruit's family that their son would get into medical school. The letter was written on Kentucky football team stationery and the dean's name was mispelled as "Emory." Bassett was fired and took a job as head coach at a Texas high school.

Last January it was reported that a high school coach in Memphis had informed college coaches that the requirements for recruiting his star linebacker, (concluded on page 176) Crisis (continued from page 88) Albert Means, were $200,000 cash and two Ford Expeditions. Means, who was unaware of the alleged deal, enrolled at the University of Alabama, where he played seven games as a freshman. After the report surfaced, Means transferred to the University of Memphis. The FBI and the NCAA have investigated the recruitment. His new coach says, "You hate for these kinds of things to happen. But when we get one of the top players in the U.S. in his position, that's a big bonus for us.

From the viewpoint of the reformers, who say that athletes themselves are increasingly disgusted with academic corruption, developments at the University of California last April were encouraging. Alex Saragoza, ethnic studies professor and vice president of educational outreach, quit after it became known that he had given credit to two athletes for course work they did not do. Apparently another student-athlete blew the whistle.

"We're starting to gain momentum," Huma told Playboy. Earlier this year the Stanford basketball team signed up with the CAC along with the basketball and football squads at Arizona State and Oregon. Huma says he expects to enter the 2001-2002 academic year with several more schools on his side. "The goal is to establish a national players' association. We feel that given athletes' roles as huge moneymakers, they should have more say in what goes on in the legislative process of the NCAA. We want student-athletes across the nation to sign our Declaration of Unity and start their own chapters. We want to establish working relationships with other schools, but they will have complete autonomy in their own chapters."

"There's an underground of student-athletes who have protested and been isolated," says Bensel-Meyers. Huma concurs. "Student-athletes get a lot of flak from regular students. If you utter anything about policies that need to be changed, they look at you like you're crazy. It's hard to articulate the position of the student-athlete. We earn our education a number of ways. One hundred percent of the players I've spoken with are for reform. The United Steelworkers have been great with their resources. Without the Steelworkers we wouldn't be close to where we are now. I think we're a force to be reckoned with."