The NCAA's core purpose is to: govern competition in a fair, safe, equitable and sportsmanlike manner, and to integrate intercollegiate athletics into higher education so that the educational experience of the student-athlete is paramount. Yet, the commercial success of college football and basketball is more than the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) can effectively govern.
This is not news to the university football and basketball programs that fund most of the other university-sponsored sports programs while favorably encouraging alumni to generously contribute to the general fund of each university.
College football is set to start its new season Sept. 1, but a kind of dispirited consensus has taken hold about a sport that has been played on American campuses since 1869: its reputation has never been more damaged.
More money equals more problems...Should these commercial athletic enterprises be treated as nonprofit organizations for tax purposes, given their substantial revenues and liberal spending practices?
College football has never been more prosperous, with five of the major college sports conferences recently signing billion-dollar broadcast deals. The amateur facade of big-time college football and basketball games are broadcast by TV networks owned by collegiate conferences and commercially broadcast nationally to viewers with billions of dollars generated in cable fees, advertising and other commercial services along with large expenditures in gambling on each game's outcome.
Consider how the impact imbalance of the compensation restrictions on the student athletes, while their coaches and collegiate administrators are so well compensated, can stimulate student and alumni incentives to risk amateur NCAA violations. Such amateur athletic violations have been documented in many major college football and basketball programs--including Michigan, Ohio State, North Carolina, Southern California and Georgia Tech.
The problems of college football seemed to move from the admittedly serious to the plain hard-to-believe last week with the news that a major donor to the University of Miami had admitted to providing cash payments, prostitutes and lavish gifts to 72 Hurricanes players from 2002 through 2010. “While we would like to think that the Miami scandal is a watershed moment in intercollegiate athletics, previous history would suggest otherwise,” said Bruce Svare, a professor of psychology at the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York.
The former University of Florida coach Urban Meyer said the most disturbing part of the Miami story, if indeed all the allegations were true, was that numerous coaches were said to have aided the activities of the booster, putting him in contact with players and recruits.
Meyer said the NCAA’s punishment model is futile, with the rewards for breaking rules outweighing the risks. He said the punishments for coaches who committed recruiting violations had typically amounted to the loss of recruiting privileges, like a limit on the number of days they could spend traveling, or the loss of the chance to telephone recruits. He said that coaches who “knowingly and willfully” violated rules need to be suspended.
“Everything that they’ve done recently has proven ineffective,” Meyer, now an ESPN commentator, said of the punishments. “The only way to do it is take away their livelihood and tell them, You cannot coach.”
Source: The New York Times, August 21, 2011