College football scandal
A few weeks ago the University of Southern California, one of the preeminent football schools in the country, cleaned house in the wake of a football scandal involving former star player Reggie Bush. Mike Garrett, USC legend and former Heisman Trophy winner, and longtime athletic director at USC, was out and a new broom swept in former USC quarterback and Rhodes Scholar Pat Hayden, with marching orders to clean up the mess in his role as the new athletic director. The mess it turned out was a rank violation of governing bodies (NCAA) rules because it turned out someone had been slipping money to amateur athlete Reggie Bush when he played for USC, which is most certainly a no-no. The money appeared to be in the low thousands paid during his college career. The NCAA investigated and obviously wanted to make an example of USC.
I probably would have passed the entire issue by except there was something so self righteous about the NCAA pronouncements and USC’s response that got me wondering just what it was all about.
To hear them tell it, the actions taken by the NCAA and USC were an attempt to keep the game clean and amateur, and not let money, commercialism and greedy sports agents take over the college game and lead naive young ball carriers astray. I decided to test that rationale and dove into the Internet, which is treasure trove on information and every reporters dream.
I started with the keepers of the holy grail of amateurism, the NCAA. The 2009-2010 NCAA Budgeted Revenues from television and marketing rights fees adds up to $638,980,000, which is 90 percent of its revenue for the year. Additionally, they pick up in championship revues (which I assume means bowl games) an additional $62,300,000. The money surely goes out to universities, teams, conferences and overhead, but any way you look at it, amateur college football is a big business.
Forbes Magazine annually rates the “most valuable college football teams” much the way they would rate business enterprises. The top school was Notre Dame with a team valued at $101 million, showing an annual profit of $45.8 million. University of Texas is next at $92 million with a profit of $46.2 million. Then there’s University of Georgia at $90 million with a profit of $43.5 million. Michigan is at $85 million with a profit of $36.2 million, followed by University of Florida at $84 million with a profit of $38.2 million. And a few places down the list our own USC valued at $53 million showing a profit of $13 million.
It’s not that I begrudge the teams, their value and annual profit. The colleges, like the pros, have plunged into selling special stadium boxes and sponsorships, and demanding bigger cuts of stadium revenues. What bothers me is that the kids get very little of this enormous take. They virtually work for nothing. One thing is for sure, the head coaches in this amateur sport are anything but amateurs and they certainly don’t work for nothing. The coach of Texas gets $5.1 million per year, Michigan $2.9 million, Georgia $2.9 million, and the brand new coach at USC $4 million for the year, which is double what he earned at Tennessee.
One of the rationales for not paying the college athletes is that they get a free education, which is, in part, true. The problem is that for most of them, their major is football and between training, practice, traveling and recovering from games, there really isn’t a great deal of time and even less energy for academics. In many schools they don’t have very good graduation rates either. Notre Dame does very well with 93 percent of their players graduating. On the other hand, Texas graduates 42 percent of their players, Georgia 41 percent, and USC 57 percent. Michigan and Florida do better with 73 percent and 72 percent respectively. Some schools do wonderfully well and graduate 90-plus percent of their players, schools like the Military Academies, Boston College, Duke, but most languish in the middle with only one half of their players graduating within six years. And for many players, their education ends when their football career ends.
We’re all intrigued by the kids who sign big pro contracts for those big dollars. But when you think about all the kids playing college football and then the relatively small number that get drafted by the NFL, I suspect that you, the average Malibu reader, has about as much chance of getting drafted by an NFL team as does the average college football player.
To sum it all up, I believe we ought to end this hypocrisy and the kids playing college ball should be paid much the way baseball pays their minor leaguers. In baseball, a new kid plays rookie league, and then at three different levels: A, Double A and Triple A. At each level the base pay goes up. Some make the majors but most don’t. There is no myth that these are amateurs, because in fact all the players are professionals trying to make it professionally. For most of the college football players, playing on a college team is their professional career. They risk injury and lifetime physical problems, and they ought to be compensated. If college football is going to be a gigantic cash cow to the universities, a big payday for the coaches and a feeder system for professional football, and an enormous financial enterprise for the peanut vendors, the lawn parkers, the ticket takers and just about every one connected to the enterprise we call amateur sports, it seems only fair that the college players be treated fairly as well and we stop this charade that they are the amateurs.