John LeBar - College Sports on the Brink of Disaster: The Rise of Pay-for-Play and the Fall of the Scholar-Athlete

Copyright 2022, by John LeBar and Allen Paul
Foreword 2022 by Scott Hirko, PhD

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Cover design by David Ter-Avanyesan

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ISBN: 978-1-68358-448-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-68358-449-0

Printed in the United States of America

To PAUL AUERBACH

A Scholar-Athlete in Full

Public faith in higher education cannot be sustained if
college sports are permitted to become a circus, with
the institution itself little more than a supporting sideshow.

The late A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI,
former President of Yale and Commissioner of Baseball

Table of Contents

College Sports on the Brink of Disaster

Foreword

It should be no surprise college sports as we know it is under attack. College sports is in a significant cultural and social predicament. To understand how and why we arrived at this critical juncture, this book provides a well-written, carefully researched, and rational understanding about the complicated and confounding existence of intercollegiate athletics.

Today we find college sports under the most threatening assault since the NCAA was founded in 1906. In many ways, the issues have not changed in 115 years: the health and welfare of athletes, organization and managing athletic competitions (especially in football), and runaway spending. These issues and others have corrupted the college sports landscape to the point of collapse. College sports belong to all of usnot a chosen few of rich coaches, misguided college presidents, and conference commissioners, many of whom have abandoned the public trust in their own pecuniary interest.

This volume captures especially well the current financial, legal, and sociocultural environment of college sports in America today, and provides a road map of how we got here and how to extricate ourselves from such a debilitating mess. The explosion of revenues in the last 40 years has led to a system rife with abuse, corruption, and many complicated legal entanglements. Indeed, John LeBar and Allen Paul point out that these problems center almost entirely in the big-time revenue sports of football and basketball, where shortsightedness and money-grabbing tactics of higher education leaders since World War II have changed the paradigm of intercollegiate athletics competition from amateurism to commercialism.

How big-time college sports fit within higher education has always posed a baffling problem for academic leaders, scholars, coaches, administrators, athletes, legislators, and even the public itself. This book is a much-needed reference on why and how athletes have been used as pawns on the playing field to benefit coaches (particularly white male football and basketball coaches), the ballooning of athletic department staffs, and the building and expansion of palatial facilities to meet the publics increasing appetite for the spectacle of football and basketball.

Society has long demanded athletic success from its institutions of higher education. Crisis after crisis is apt to describe the history of college sports, beginning with the surge of violence that led to President Teddy Roosevelts 1906 threat to ban football, to the point-shaving and other cheating scandals in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to the show me the money decisions of college presidents and conference commissioners, which has degraded the college sports model.

Under the NCAA, that modelonce prized for its amateur idealshas morphed into a purely commercial approach that, in many ways, mimics the professionalization of sports. A fixation on maximization of revenues, instead of offering a holistic education to those who play the games, has left the public bewildered and many fans disenchanted with college sports. Athletics leaders who built and now feed a $20 billion-plus annual athletic enterprise must answer how and why the public trust collapsed on their watch.

If the present system is deemed valuable as a public trust, reform is needed. As the authors note, saving the collegiate model must involve decisions that prioritize academics before economics to truly align athletics with time-tested educational values. The voices of athletes, who have been largely silenced about their role as essential workers in building the college sports enterprise, must be heard. It hardly comes as a shock that federal judges now condemn the system as monopolistic and abusive with respect to just educational and financial compensation for the athlete.

College Sports on the Brink of Disaster is reaching readers at what may be the moment of no return. It provides indispensable insights about the games we all could and should love. I hope this book will make you, as it did me, think long and hard about the proper role of athletics in our colleges and society today.

Scott Hirko, PhD

Director, Sport Management Program, Defiance College Scholar in
Residence, Newhouse School of Public Communications,
Syracuse University;
Assistant Project Manager, College Athletics Financial database

Introduction

See the Pyramids along the Nile

See the pyramids along the Nilethe opening line of Jo Staffords 1952 smash hit song, You Belong to Meis an apt metaphor for big-time college sports in America today. It suggests a spot-on logo too. The Nile, of course, carries rich alluvial siltmetaphorically an ever-rising tide of cash. Along its banks, a chorus of rich coaches, college presidents, the NCAA, the College Football Playoff, and money-hungry leadership wails from the peaks of their respective pyramids the refrain Stafford made famous: You belong to memeaning the river of cash. Time and time again their cries have been acquiesced to despite the detrimental impact on the vast majority of college athletes, on the very purposes for which colleges and universities were established, and despite the incalculable wasting of human resources that could benefit America in a myriad of ways. Suffice it to say these pharaohs harken back to the despots of ancient Egypt, while voices at the bottom of the pyramids are muted and largely ignored.

The metaphor of the pyramid is hardly a facile construct. It is widely used by many who profoundly understand the gamescreative thinkers, analysts, reformers, and administrators, who view the inexorable slide toward total professionalization of big-time college sports with deep concern and