After a preseason filled with dispatches of dastardly deeds gone awry, the college football world last summer ashamedly showed its ugliest scars.
Academic impropriety and monetary mismanagement and malpractice on the part of agents, coaches, parents and players forced the NCAA to display the hidden set of lacerations that have long dotted its metaphoric face. No more could the special ointments and creams and makeup that once concealed such scars be used. With all its problems on full display, the entire college football industry -- the business -- had to answer for its repulsiveness.
Well, it had to, but it chose not to.
Using the charismatic grin of a 21-year-old quarterback as cover, the association in recent months has dodged the criticisms that riddled it at the start of one of the wildest debacles of a school year in its 104-year existence.
Nearly eight months after reports began surfacing about cheating scandals and illegal memorabilia sales and improper benefit payments involving players at several of the nation’s top football schools, including Georgia, the NCAA has done little publicly to ensure such a summer will never happen again.
Instead of going on the offensive, trumpeting change and cleaner practices within its prized sport, it has been silent. The NCAA mostly has spent the past month trumping up its record television deals and proclaiming the success of a widely watched BCS national championship.
What explains the relative silence? The NCAA has no idea what the best fix for its problems is.
If some, like mega agent Scott Boras, had their way, Reps. John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Henry Waxman (D-California) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and other U.S. Congressmen would put the NCAA on the carpet for a rapid fix to be done in a federal sense.
“For me, the NCAA is not the governing body that is best capable of administrating the business of college sports,” Boras said Thursday before speaking at Georgia Tech’s annual preseason baseball benefit. Although he specifically deals with Major League Baseball’s highest profile contracts, Boras understands the plight of college athletics. After all, his business took a hard hit last summer after it was revealed agents’ runners provided players illegal benefits.
“There has to be a legislative enactment,” Boras said. “There has to be Congressional and or federal policies whereby this process -- which is a multi-billion dollar industry -- is governed through a committee modernly.
“We can’t live with antiquated rules.”
He’s right. The rules of the past that permitted a college athlete get his books, meals and lodging paid for cannot fly anymore. They deserve even more.
Sure, most education-first fanatics may disagree, saying college athletes receive enough just compensation with free tuition, but consider this: many student-athletes (particularly in football) come from backgrounds where money doesn’t freely flow.
Take Boras’ example. Son of a California dairy farmer, he had very little when he arrived at University of the Pacific on a baseball scholarship. Due to NCAA rules, during the school year, unlike other students, he was unable to work a job to earn enough to maintain a normal lifestyle on the side. As a result, something as seemingly insignificant as having a modest array of clothes was an issue.
It’s still one at college campuses across the country.
“You walk around college and you’re at a private school and everyone is dressed to the nines and you’re not,” Boras said. “You know that you’ve got your meal ticket and your school paid for, but when you don’t have anything and you don’t look like everybody else on campus, you end up wearing athletic sweatshirts all the time and then you’re tagged. You’re an outsider. And you don’t like that.”
Of course, one shouldn’t be naïve enough to believe that all athletes are without proper finances, but some are. That explains a players’ convictions for selling his jersey or championship ring to the highest bidder. Even the most clean-cut players admit in private that if it wasn’t wrong to do such things, they’d be doing it, too.
Such is the quandary facing some of sport’s brightest unpaid performers, performers whose shows rake in hundreds of millions for individual schools annually, performers who see the scraps of that revenue.
“The reason why I say federal legislation is because we’ve got to bring this to an understanding where we’re talking about the labor force,” Boras said. “Much like the person working in the cafeteria where state labor laws apply to them and federal labor laws, the same thing has to apply to these athletes.
“There has to be a factor melded into it that this is generating millions of dollars and we need policies that will allow for stipends to be given to the athletes like other financial aid recipients get from their jobs. Just give them those same rights.”
These are one man’s ideas. Does anything better exist?
Didn’t think so.
Contact Coley Harvey at 744-4248 or charvey@macon.com
