Clean Sports 1

Clean Sports

[1] The college football season is starting with a familiar flurry of resignations and probations.

[2] At the University of Washington, Don James resigned as head coach after failing to notice that his

quarterback owned three cars. Of course, the athletic staff was not part of the money-lending

scheme that ensnared the player and brought down the coach. It was one of those pesky “boosters” who

always seem handy when blame is assigned.

[3] So among big-time teams, Washington joined Auburn University on two-year probation. The NCAA is

expected to add Texas A & M to the list as footballs are being teed up for the television cameras that provide the

money that seduces universities into being willing co-conspirators in exploiting young athletes.

[4] College football is a great show, and at its best, it still provides some of the emotion and spectacle

missing in the cogwheel perfection of pro football. But big-time college football has a corruption at its center

that can and must be cured. Why the nation’s college presidents and boards of trustees, acting through the

NCAA, have not taken the obvious steps is a mystery.

[5] One such step is to limit participation rights from teams that fail to honor Principle VII of the Knight

Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. The principle says that athletes will graduate in the same

proportion as non-athletes. The national graduation rate is around 50 percent. Five of the top twenty teams in

The Times pre-season poll - including reigning national champion Alabama - have graduation rates below 40

percent.

[6] Starting immediately, the NCAA should set up standards so that private and public schools can be

measured fairly against one another and then begin to punish schools that fail to graduate a proportionate

number of athletes on time.

[7] It should then do something about the money problem. Athletes make millions for their schools and

receive piddling amounts for tuition and board. Their poverty in comparison to their market value as college

players and potential earning power as pros make corruption inevitable.

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[8] A sensible first step is to lift students out of poverty by giving them realistic scholarships based on the

entire cost of keeping a student in school: tuition, housing, food, plus the allowances a parent would provide for

clothes, transportation, social activities, and spending money.

[9] With tuition alone an many NCAA schools running from $10,000 to $20,000, many middle-income

families spend a total of $30,000 or more a year in after-tax dollars. And it is the total cost of

keeping a student in comfortable style that an athletic scholarship should cover. Presently NCAA scholarship

cover only titin, room and board, books, and up to $2,400 in cash.

[10] Nothing can bring back the era of pure amateurism in college football. But simple reforms could make it

financially clean and academically respectable as well as entertaining.

[CleanSportsEditorial.docx]