Tag: College sports reform

Hey, Mike Leach: It’s actually bizarre and absurd that you don’t support players who skip bowl games

Mike Leach should *welcome* the chance to develop his younger players.

Mike Leach, Mississippi State’s football coach, is sort of funny and can be, at least situationally, a bright football mind. But when it comes to dealing with his players, he’s a doofus. He’s shown this time after time after time.

But he once ran a pretty snazzy offense that helped a team that hadn’t won in a while win some football games (though Texas Tech never finished ranked higher than 12th in the nation), so he’s also gotten chance after chance to make millions while overseeing college students that he appears to detest.

Here’s the latest evidence that he doesn’t view them as individuals with agency, able to make choices about when and where they should take the risk of playing an essentially meaningless bowl game:

Hey Mikey, wanted to let you know that a full 20 percent of the people in the state where you work are living below the poverty line. That’s more than 564,000 people. You make $5 million a year. You might want to reevaluate what qualifies as absurd or bizarre.

Anyway, as many, many, many people pointed out, it’s extremely hypocritical for a college football coach to express this opinion so vociferously after so many of his coaching brethren abandoned their teams prior to those teams playing in their bowl games. Brian Kelly (who is bad) left Notre Dame while the school was still just outside the playoff with a chance to qualify.

Mike Leach himself once left Oklahoma, where he was offensive coordinator, to become the head coach at Texas Tech:

This excerpt from Mina is an incredible burn, yes, but it also underscores the very reason that Mike Leach should not care one iota if any of his veteran players opt out of a bowl game: Because the weeks spent leading into any non-playoff bowl game aren’t about planning to win a football game … they’re about getting a head start on NEXT season.

Mike Leach should ask any savvy Mississippi State fan what they’d rather have: A win in the Liberty Bowl, or increased reps (both game and practice) for young players expected to step into more important roles next year?

It’s an easy choice, and also one that Leach himself should be smart enough to make. Mike Leach is not going to get fired for losing the freaking Liberty Bowl. Mike Leach will probably get fired if he goes 3-7 or 4-4 in the SEC again.

(I’ve made this argument before, if it sounds familiar.)

NFL-bound stars should skip their bowl games, and college fans should thank them

Of course there’s the matter of treating the players with basic respect, too, and allowing them to make a business decision about what’s best for them. To let them have the same right every single other person in college football — from the athletic director on down to the equipment manager — has always had.

Leach should understand that treating his athletes like the bright young adults they are will only help him continue to recruit talented players, but at this point he appears to have officially bought in on the idea that he’s eccentric or quirky or unfiltered enough to still resonate with good players.

The rankings — the Bulldogs’ 2022 class is ranked 11th in the SEC, with no five stars and one four-star player, according to 247 — suggest differently.

A cynic might believe Leach is pressuring his players not to opt out of the bowl game because he has money on the line. Amazingly, that’s not the case: Leach’s contract stipulates he gets a $100,000 bonus simply for participating in the Liberty Bowl. His own school doesn’t even care if he wins this game!

His players, meanwhile, get a swag bag and a per diem.

Maybe if Mike Leach wants his players to be obligated to play an entire season he can support a push for them to unionize and then collectively bargain for contracts where schools offer monetary bonuses for playing in bowl games.

That would be fair. As it stands, Leach’s players aren’t even guaranteed to have their scholarships next year. So maybe let’s save all the rah-rah coach talk for a time when everybody is tied to the team they’re supposed to be loyal to by the same sort of agreement.

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Darren Rovell is a sham

His NIL argument makes no sense.

You all know Darren Rovell, the indefatigable sports biz bro currently plying his trade at Action Network. His frenetic tweets about anything and everything having remotely to do with the gargantuan and incredibly lucrative business of sports are … well, sort of impressive, if we’re being honest. He gets to a lot! That guy really has an engine.

What he lacks a lot of the time is a processor. Such is the case this week, as he’s decided to be offended by the fact that college athletes being allowed to earn money from their name, image and likeness has … resulted in college athletes earning money from their name, image and likeness.

More specifically, he is mad that athletes at the schools where boosters were already spending lavishly are now directly getting some of the profits.

Aha! Now you see where our headline came from. It’s a rhetorical device based on his tweet. Clever.

You can go ahead and read that story if you want, but I’ll summarize and dismantle his main argument for you:

But it’s one thing for boosters to set up business deals for incoming athletes. It’s another for boosters to set up a slush fund to lure certain players to the school under the guise of name, image and likeness.

And that’s exactly what Horns with Heart is.

A group of Longhorns boosters announced Monday a fund that will blindly give University of Texas offensive lineman under scholarship $50,000 a year to perform charity work for yet-to-be-disclosed charities.

A slush fund! Let that business jargon roll.

Blindly give! The fact that the coaches at Texas will spend countless hours evaluating and then wooing these players must mean absolutely nothing.

Rovell goes on to argue that this plan is a sham because it’s not based on what he believes the market rate should be for the name, image and likeness of a college football offensive lineman.

Why Rovell believes he should determine the market value of an offensive lineman instead of, you know, the people paying the money is anyone’s guess. Also a mystery: Why Rovell has appointed himself the arbiter of the “spirit” of a movement that has simply returned basic rights to athletes who never should have lost them in the first place.

Rovell sees the Horns with Heart plan as an illegal inducement, meant only to help Texas recruit better:

The very announcement of the fund that offers any Texas offensive lineman an automatic $50,000 is indisputably an inducement because, whether it is overtly mentioned or not, recruits who come to the University of Texas know that their scholarship is tied to a $50,000 a year cash windfall.

But here’s the thing (which Darren knows very well!): Boosters were going to spend big money on making their chosen teams more attractive to recruits anyway. They always have. It’s just that the money went toward things like hiring new coaches or building lavish facilities or outfitting those facilities with slides and barbershops and gourmet food options.

Or by establishing actual slush funds used for everything from $20 handshakes to moving a recruit’s parent into a better house.

Donors have been giving money to schools for this sort of goofy stuff for decades now, and the schools never stopped and said “Hey, what about maybe building a new wing of the library instead?” because … here it is … the football players they were going to recruit with those overpaid coaches and gleaming facilities brought tremendous value to the university, regardless of what their name, image and likeness ended up being.

Besides, you don’t think current recruits are already taking into account the possibilities for NIL deals as they make their decisions? They already knew that landing at Texas would create a better chance for a deal than going to SMU or Baylor or Rice. Codifying it changes nothing.

The abolishment of the idea that players shouldn’t be compensated for their name, image and likeness didn’t create some new possibility for boosters to influence the success of their schools; that’s always been the point of their giving. It just meant they could do so by directly compensating those actually playing the games.

Rovell has lived in the numbers underlying sports for so long that he seems incapable of understanding why the people with the money would see college athletes as being worth the investment, even if this is all something of an unknown. He just doesn’t get it:

The (awful) insinuation here is that Gatorade won’t get its money’s worth due to the injury and that this is a valuable lesson for companies considering investing in NIL deals. If Bueckers isn’t on TV getting buckets, how’s she ever going going to deliver on her “market value?!?”

Well, she has 948k followers on Instagram, and they’ll probably see her sip Gatorade as she doggedly works toward a triumphant return.

Rovell is sharp and usually understands what’s coming and how the landscape is shifting. This time, he’s simply missed it.

Here in America, it’s generally accepted that people should go ahead and try to get paid whatever somebody thinks they’re worth. Rovell’s spasm over college athletes came in the same week that news broke he had signed a new $2 million deal.

Good for him. The guy works incredibly hard and realized early on how important the sports business beat would be. I’m not about to question whether I think that’s “market rate” for any reporter anywhere. That’s not for me to decide.

So it is with the young men who eventually get those Horns with Heart deals. They’ve done the work to get recruited to the University of Texas, and a group of boosters there has decided that affiliating with them at the price of $50,000 per year is worth it.

That’s the market rate, and the players at the football powerhouses will be able to demand it, because that’s where the money is, just as it’s always been.

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Powerful portrayals of the players stuck in a broken NCAA system lift ‘National Champions’ to must-watch status

Stephan James shines as a star QB who leads a title-game boycott.

There’s long been a belief among those who would reform college sports in order to ensure better treatment for the athletes who play them that a national title boycott is the surest — and perhaps only — path toward upending the system.

It finally happens, sort of, in the forthcoming film “National Champions,” which opens in theaters Friday.

The effort is led by LeMarcus James, a Heisman-winning QB played by the sublime Stephan James (who previously played John Lewis in “Selma,” and Jesse Owens in “Race.”) Though James is slated to be the No. 1 pick in the draft and sign a lucrative contract, he decides to begin an effort to boycott the game to help players like his best friend Emmett Sunday (Alexander Ludwig), who has no pro future and received no compensation for helping to build a winner and will not have long-term medical insurance to deal with his many lingering injuries.

The two leave their team prior to the title game in New Orleans, holing up in a hotel room nearby and turning off location services on their phones because they know their coach, played by J.K. Simmons, will try to track them down the second news of the boycott breaks.

Sunday’s elbow cracks as he bends it — the result of a hit he can’t quite clearly remember — as the two plot their course. They hope to go public with their plan to boycott and convince other players in the game — including the opposing team’s star running back — to also opt out.

This film is a heavy lift. When I asked James, a rising star able to carefully pick which roles he takes, why he wanted to play this character, he said he was fascinated by the message and the challenge of making a sports movie that doesn’t include sports. There are elements of the film meant to entice the audience with typical drama — for instance, the coach’s wife, played by Kristin Chenoweth, just happens to be having an affair with the professor who turns out to be the one advising the players — but ultimately this is a tightly wound film carefully built around the debate over the future of college sports.

While that debate is getting louder and reaching more people, it’s still only a whisper compared to the roar of all those people who just want to go watch the games on Saturday. So how do you get them to pay attention to a movie like this? That was Smith’s challenge; he saw the film as a “character piece” focused on the people buffeted by “a system that is, quite frankly, unfair.”

It largely works. The film falters in places because it has to build the narrative around a shadow version of college sports, filled with characters who are echoes of people we might know in real life. Real media stars make appearances but their dialogue is forced, and it can be difficult to get invested in the fortunes of the “Missouri Wolves” and coach James Lazor. (Though Russell Wilson, who got an executive producer credit, makes an appearance and demands reform, which I assume is genuine, so good for him.)

[pullquote align=”right” source=”Stephan James”]Art has an incredible way of communicating things that we can’t really communicate in any other space. To be able to be a part of a film where you’re able to see the human beings that make up this system — that we’re able to humanize them for people — and not tell anyone how to feel, but provide them with all the perspectives and opinions, I think that’s the greatest thing that we could accomplish with this film.[/pullquote]

The work of Smith, Simmons and Uzo Aduba carries the film, though, as it unfolds in unexpected ways that shouldn’t be spoiled. Aduba (Crazy Eyes from “Orange is the New Black”) plays Katherine Poe, an intriguing character from the beginning; as the NCAA’s outside counsel, she’s present for, but not involved in, early discussions of how to rein in James. You can tell she’s uncomfortable with the Good Old (and mostly white) Boys running the show. When the NCAA shifts from heavy-handed to dirty, it appoints her the attack dog and she’s willing to dig up dirt on James’ brother and use it to try to blackmail him into playing.

It’s a startling turn, one that is eventually explained when she reveals that she’s not in favor of football players being paid because she fears that there would be no money left for other athletes in that scenario. Poe explains that made it out of poverty thanks to a track scholarship (Aduba is so powerful in the role, she’s said, because she actually did run track at Boston University.)

A note on this argument, in general: It’s bollocks. Most college athletes don’t even get a full ride. At the Division I level, for instance, only football, basketball (men’s and women’s), women’s tennis, women’s gymnastics and women’s volleyball players are required to be given full scholarships. In women’s track, there are 12.6 scholarships to go around… for a roster that often includes 50 athletes.

Besides, if schools want to continue funding the Olympic sports programs, they’ll be able to. If they decide instead to dedicate all their funding to running minor league football and basketball, that’s on them and the market would surely create new opportunities for other athletes. Don’t believe Poe/Aduba. She’s very convincing; she’s also on the wrong side of history.

But this is also what National Champions gets exactly right: How a strained system continues to work because of our emotional attachments to it. This also plays out with Simmons’ character, who at first seems like something of a typical meathead football coach but eventually evolves into a man with layers. He’s something of an overgrown teenager, lusting after football glory every second of the day. He actually adores his players, but only in so far as he wants them to win football games, which is, for him, the ultimate success. The fact that he’s filthy rich and they’re barely scraping by hasn’t really occurred to him, because he spends so much of his time thinking about football (he’s also too busy with that to realize how integral his wife is in carrying the mental load of curating his image for boosters and fans, which is why she strays.) He earnestly believes that the lessons learned along the way to becoming a good football player and part of a good football team will apply to whatever else might happen to a person, and reckons he is, as has always been said, making boys into men. Above all that, he is paid handsomely for the singular pursuit of winning, and so he pursues it and feel, not erroneously, that doing so is his job.

This is, roughly, how big-time college coaches live.

National Champions also presents a couple of nefarious boosters who seek to manipulate the situation from both sides. You begin to wonder why these people have any say in what’s going on with a football team supposedly run by a university and then … you spend more time wondering why these people have any say.

That’s accurate, too.

How the film ends — with so many secrets revealed and every person involved compromised in some way — also feels about right, as does the ultimate decision for the NCAA to carefully consider James’ demands (for player trusts, disability coverage and the ability to collectively bargain) in the form of a committee.

The system leaves no one unscathed.

The system will never reform itself.

Whether any of this will resonate with the fans who continue to fund college sports is anyone’s guess. James told me that was “the hope.”

“Art has an incredible way of communicating things that we can’t really communicate in any other space,” he said. “To be able to be a part of a film where you’re able to see the human beings that make up this system — that we’re able to humanize them for people — and not tell anyone how to feel, but provide them with all the perspectives and opinions, I think that’s the greatest thing that we could accomplish with this film.”

The writing is taut enough to pull people along; the film has the tension of a good sporting even, with each side pushing and pulling. This all should work. This should become a major part of, as James put it to me, the “algorithm” surrounding the way we talk about college sports.

But I also thought that was the case when For The Win got an early look at the powerful script for the film “Concussion.” That it would mark some sort of noticeable swerve in the public perception of football. That it would introduce a new, more careful era for the way the sport is played. It may have, depending on your perception. But the system it fought against had all the money and the built in advantage that football is addictive and enthralling and comforting and offers, as Simmons’ characters bellows, the chance for glory — GLORY — even if it is only reflected.

This film faces those same odds. So it will have to be enough, for now, that a sincere attempt was made to point us where we can’t yet go.

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Do not listen to athletic directors who say paying players means they’ll have to cut sports

This is just propaganda aimed at fans and a thinly veiled threat toward athletes.

A new survey of approximately 100 athletic directors at Football Bowl Subdivision schools has revealed that more than 90 percent of them fear that allowing athletes to be classified as employees would “impact funding of non-revenue sports.”

The press release announcing this finding is written in a passive, garbled way because it’s coming from LEAD1, a membership association for athletic directors at the Football Bowl Subdivision level. This “news” is actually public relations/propaganda/lobbying/undisguised pre-emptive union-busting. It’s disgusting.

This “survey” is presented as a reaction to Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board who, back on Sept. 29, issued a memorandum that declared so-called “student-athletes” are, in fact, employees of their universities, meaning those at private schools (because the NLRB oversees employee treatment by private companies) are protected by the federal agency’s statutes that allow them to band together to negotiate for better treatment.

Let that really hit for a moment: An ASSOCIATION of athletic directors is sending a UNIFIED message meant to further their own interests, that …. uh, well … that … yeah ….. they … don’t want the athletes in their care to … yeah … band together to advocate for better conditions for themselves.

They hypocrisy would be stunning if we weren’t talking about college athletics. Since we are, it’s hardly even surprising. This is just how it goes.

What the athletic directors are really doing here, though, is classic union-busting by making a very unsubtle threat against some of the workers.

Though LEAD1 did not respond to my email seeking clarification on this, it appears this survey centers around comments Abruzzo made on Gabe Feldman’s podcast, Between the Lines. According to the LEAD1 press release, the vast majority of ADs polled “disagreed with a recent comment made in a podcast interview by … Jennifer Abruzzo that the employment status of college athletes would not significantly impact non-revenue sports, including those sports being cut.”

Except Abruzzo never went so far. Asked by Feldman to address the idea that non-revenue sports could be endangered, she says around the 25-minute mark:

“Yeah, I would hope that the consequence of the players rightfully being classified as statutory employees would not lead schools to spend less in other areas of college athletics.”

A few minutes later she says:

“I’m hoping that the impact, there won’t be a significant impact on other players in other sports.”

Abruzzo, who was nominated to her position by President Joe Biden, is choosing her words very carefully. Hope. Hoping.

That’s because she knows full well that ultimately whatever happens to non-revenue sports will depend on the people who get to decide what happens with those sports. And she’s hoping they do the right thing.

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I made a request, through LEAD1, to speak with one of those concerned athletic directors, but never heard back.

But of course I’m not sure that there’s anything they need to add to what they’ve already said by allowing LEAD1 to send out this press release. The message is clear: You give athletes more power, we’ll take away your non-revenue sports.

They’re seeking to set the non-revenue sport athletes against the revenue sports athletes, exploiting a divide that already exists to some extent on many campuses.

LEAD1 is also appealing to the public here by attacking the part of college sports that has long been used to make the whole thing palatable.

Not nearly as many fans truly care about non-revenue sports (or else they’d make a profit), but they do care about the idea of non-revenue sports. It’s part of the way they justify their schools making $100 million off the football team while providing players with scholarships they can barely use (since they need to attend to the full-time job of football) and a few thousand bucks. College sports can be pure so long as there’s a few field hockey players and wrestlers on campus who are actually there to learn first and compete second.

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The LEAD1 release also takes aim at the U. S. Olympic team, quoting CEO (and former basketball player and congressman) Tom McMillen as saying, “If these other sports are cut, our U.S. Olympic effort will be damaged as the majority of U.S. Olympians were sourced from our colleges and universities.”

What’s not addressed here — or most places — is why, exactly, it should be up to college football and basketball athletes to earn enough money so that their colleges can offer training grounds for U.S. swimmers and track stars.

Can you imagine anybody telling Elon Musk that he’s not entitled to the revenue he generates because it needs to be funneled to Amtrak? He would fly himself to Mars.

Obviously LEAD1 is just doing the only thing it exists to do, which is protect athletic directors at a particular set of schools.

But asking them their opinion on the inevitable change coming to college sports is a little bit like asking Kodak executives what they thought about new digital camera technology, what horse breeders thought of motor vehicles and what a cranky newspaper person made of that new-fangled internet. College sports as we know it is … evolving dramatically. Dying is too strong a word, because the people with the power will acquiesce and give away some of it rather than let the whole thing go by the wayside out of some duty to “amateurism” and the whole sham that allowed it to grow so unwieldy in the first place.

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Those people, by the way, are these athletic directors. Any sort of serious survey of the chief executives within these departments might first ask: Would you be willing to take a pay cut to help re-balance your department’s budget in the event that some players become eligible to get paid?

Because athletic directors make a lot of money. In some cases they make close to what the university president earns — despite being in charge of a much smaller and less-lucrative business.

Athletic departments have also grown exponentially. Some of this is good: Employing more athletic trainers and academic support workers is a win for students. But a lot of it is simple bloat, meant to sop up all that extra revenue from broadcast contracts for football and men’s basketball.

Are athletics directors concerned about their own lost salary, or the work it will take to run a tidier department? It does not appear LEAD1 asked those questions.

Nor did it ask any of them whether they might take the EXTREME step of telling a football coach “no” when he asks for his coordinators to get a raise on their 7-figure contract.

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The point is: Athletic directors are going to get to make these decisions. Nobody is forcing them into anything. They get to decide how to spend their department’s money. They set the priorities. This is how real businesses — ones that don’t benefit from having a cap on compensation for its primary labor — have to operate.

If these athletic directors are saying, “We will opt to cut non-revenue sports” then they should just go ahead and own that. They don’t, of course, because this isn’t about honesty.

Here’s the truth: The vast majority of college athletics departments operate without behemoth revenues from football and men’s basketball. Even at the FBS level, the vast majority of schools charge every student a fee that goes to support athletics and help balance the budget.

At lower levels (FCS, Divisions II and III), they make college sports work without revenue from TV contracts, or even from giant stadiums. McMillen says in the release “the financial model in college sports is unique given that football and basketball subsidize all of the other sports …” Which just simply ignores that the financial model at major schools is, in fact, an outlier.

Also, non-revenue sports don’t actually cost all that much to operate. At Penn State, according to the most recently available EADA report, the total cost to run every sport besides football and men’s and women’s basketball was $36.6 million out of a total budget of $148.9 million.

And that leaves out the fact that many of the athletes in those sports actually end up paying a significant amount in tuition.

It’s unclear why LEAD1 only surveyed 100 out of its 130 members, but I’m holding out hope that maybe a few simply declined to take part in this charade because they’re busy actually figuring out a model for how this all might work in the future.

The solutions aren’t all that complicated, and they can make life actually better for all athletes — which is what an association of athletic directors should be concerned with, anyway.

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Creation of a European super league in soccer could be precursor for college football evolution

More money shared between fewer teams? Sounds like a plan.

According to a report in The New York Times, “at least 12” of Europe’s most prestigious soccer clubs have agreed to form a breakaway league that would “upend the structures, economics and relationships that have bound global soccer for nearly a century.”

Essentially the teams — from England, Spain and Italy, so far — would create their own competition and sell TV rights for billions of dollars that would be spread among that small group of teams rather than entire leagues throughout the continent.

These machinations probably don’t resonate with American sports fans who don’t follow European soccer, but there’s reason to watch what happens next very closely: It could serve as a sort of blueprint for how college football evolves next.

We already have a situation where the “Power 5” conferences have all the, well, power … and therefore the money. We saw, last season, that even in a weird year disrupted by Covid there was no appetite to let football Cinderellas crash the playoff.

Now, with states across the country passing bills that would allow college athletes to own the rights to their name, image and likeness, the economics of college sports is set to change. As some of the money currently being swallowed whole by schools begins to trickle to players, the athletic departments that have long prioritized revenue growth will be pushed to get creative.

Clearly the best way to maximize revenue will be to further constrict the pool of teams sharing in it while making the television product even more exciting and therefore lucrative. So, SUPER CONFERENCES!

Connor O’Gara had an interesting proposal for how this would work a few years back, but it’s all pretty simple: Take the biggest brands in college football and bring them together in a way that ensures more games each year are attractive to a broad audience. Imagine having Alabama play a mostly SEC schedule but instead of playing Mercer or Southern Miss non-conference games they’re getting Notre Dame and Michigan. Plus they no longer have to share revenue with Vanderbilt.

College football powers have largely cut the NCAA out of decision-making already — in much the way the European clubs are trying to circumvent UEFA — and sure seem to be on a path toward consolidation where the brands most focused on operating like professional franchises work together to “upend the structures, economics and relationships that have bound” college football for the past few decades.

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Jalen Johnson is not a quitter for leaving Duke. He made a wise, and obvious, decision.

It only makes sense for him to move on to his NBA career.

Jon Rothstein is a person who tweets, quite often, the following: “Some people have hobbies. I watch college basketball.” This despite the fact that 1) watching college basketball IS a hobby 2) unless of course you make your living doing it, which Jon does. Because he’s a “CBS Insider.”

All of which is to say, Jon Rothstein is not a man who should be taken all that seriously on an intellectual level. He is not trying to make sense.

However, owing to that job as a CBS Insider (and the 235.4k Twitter followers he has amassed) it would be irresponsible to ignore him when he says something truly disgusting, as he did on Monday evening in the wake of Duke’s Jalen Johnson opting out for the rest of the season.

Rothstein spends a lot of his time sucking up to coaches, and that’s what he’s doing here, obviously. He’s upholding the notion that players owe something to their teams, and that to be considered a tough, dedicated player means to play on through anything, be it pandemic or injury. You have to earn the right to say you love the game. Or else you’re a quitter.

But here’s the thing: Johnson is dealing with an injury that has limited him, and he was always planning on going pro after this year and so, ultimately, this make sense. Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said as much in a release:

“While we are encouraged by what we are seeing medically, for Jalen’s future, we believe this decision is in his best interest. We are ultimately careful with every one of our players and will continue to support Jalen as he progresses toward his goal of playing professional basketball. He deserves to be fully healthy for the upcoming NBA Draft.”

Duke, meanwhile, is 8-8 and unlikely to make the NCAA Tournament. Will K try to salvage what he can from the season? Sure. Is he ultimately spending a lot of his time ensuring this doesn’t happen next year? Absolutely. College coaches are always focused on the future more than you realize. It’s how they keep their jobs.

But Johnson opts to do what’s best for his future and is labeled “a quitter” in some flippant tweet that, sadly, will resonate.

Perhaps what’s strangest of all is that generally we laud people for making prudent decisions and seeking better opportunities. But in this case Johnson was supposed to gut it out to, what, prove a point?

Freed from the constraints of “amateurism,” Johnson can now sign with an agent who will guide him toward individualized training. He doesn’t have to deal with classes and he can work out as much as he wants (the NCAA limits how often he can be coached.) He can get healthy and turn his attention to preparing for a draft process that will have a huge impact over the rest of his life.

Johnson didn’t opt out or quit. He made a calculated decision.

If you comb through the discussion that Rothstein’s tweet generated, you’ll notice a heartening number of people who, at this point, get it. Strip away all of the syrupy sentimentality that constantly covers our conversation about college sports and you know that Johnson and Duke had an arrangement: He’d help them win if they helped him get to the NBA. That’s it. And now both sides have moved on.

Jay Bilas, the ESPN analyst who played at Duke, was asked to react to this development and had, frankly, a disappointing takeaway. Bilas has generally been very clear-eyed when it comes to the hypocrisy that underlies the college system. He gave a long, nuanced answer that made it clear he wanted more information, but ultimately ended up here:

I think I can probably help Jalen Johnson and his family with that answer:

“Oh, I just wanted to get fully healthy while also concentrating on strengthening my game so that I can be at my very best for the start of my NBA career. Also, you may have heard there’s a pandemic and I thought I could better protect myself by controlling my environment more thoroughly.”

Look at that. Pretty simple!

Johnson’s critics will point out that he switched high schools a bunch, so this is a theme and to them I would say …. he still ENDED UP AT DUKE.

Anyway, I feel greasy for even expending this much thought on something Jon Rothstein tweeted, but Johnson deserves better. Rothstein isn’t doing earnest analysis, he’s just saying what he thinks coaches might like to hear because he hopes they’ll text him back.

He, too, is making a calculated decision about his future — at the expense of a college freshman.

[listicle id=996238]

Yeah, college sports is most certainly making the pandemic worse

What are we doing here?

Here at For The Win, we generally use headlines in the form of a question only when the question we’re asking is either 1) actually difficult to answer or 2) so ludicrous that to pose it with any seriousness is part of the bit.

I’m not familiar with The New Yorker’s philosophy on headlines, but after reading Louisa Thomas’ stunning piece entitled, “Is College Football Making the Pandemic Worse?” I have to assume this fits into the second category. It’s a New Yorker story, so you’ll have to work to get there, but the answer is, unequivocally, yes.

The angle here goes beyond the fact that unpaid athletes who generally end up paying for a lot of their own medical care are being put at risk. That’s been covered quite a bit. What Thomas points out here is that college football marching on — despite 80-plus game cancellations, despite the fact that a great many of us did not even gather in person for Thanksgiving — has not just given us bits of normalcy but inured too many of us to the realities of living through a world-altering pandemic.

Thomas posits that normalcy is not just being able to watch top young athletes compete. It goes beyond that. We’ve learned a thousand things about ourselves through this pandemic, and so many others have come into focus, but this is for sure: Sports has never just been about observing the things on the field or court or ice. It’s about the rituals that give us cause to gather.

So when sports came back, even in their constrained form, it activated our natural desire to commune. To do the thing that we should not do when a deadly virus, which exists purely to jump from body to body, is still spreading unhindered.

Now college basketball has begun, igniting a different network of fans — some who’ve been tuned in to football and others who have not. And on a Thanksgiving when the best NFL game was postponed by COVID-19, there was something sort of nice about that. Who among us is not interested in knowing if Gonzaga will actually be good again, or if it’s just going to be another winter of hearing, Yes, They’ve Made The Jump only to watch them lose on the first weekend?

Yet it’s already become dizzying trying to follow the sport. While I typed this, Butler revealed that a person in the program tested positive after the team’s opener. So who knows when the Bulldogs will be able to get back to the court (it won’t be Sunday, when their next game was scheduled). Right before publishing, reports dropped that said two players on Gonzaga’s men’s basketball team will sit due to COVID-19 protocols.

Meanwhile, game previews no longer focus as much on interesting matchups or trends for either team; instead there’s intense discussion of when test were administered and at what time the visiting team is scheduled to depart.

Here’s Georgia coach Tom Crean admitting, after his team’s first game could not be played, that … it’s just going to be that way this year.

While he’s absolutely right, that’s a startling admission in so many ways. It’s been easier, for me, to watch pro sports: the athletes there have leverage to negotiate the standards for their return to play. College athletes, as has been the case for the entirety of the endeavor, have no such power. Sure, they’re allowed to opt-out. Just as they have a “choice” about attending “voluntary” workouts.

Now it’s been well-documented that those college kids want to play; that they’re chasing a dream. But, as Thomas points out, the rest of us want to do things, too: send our kids off to school, host or attend weddings, gather to remember those we’ve lost.

Jim Borchers, an Ohio State team physician who worked on the Big Ten’s return-to-play committee, told Thomas, “I don’t know that the student athletes should be punished for the inability of the general public to get their minds around how to prevent this.” Which is fair enough.

But college athletic departments have built these collective experiences as a way to generate pride and fun — and, mostly, money (from TV contracts and apparel and tickets). Universities use the experience of college sports to fundraise and attract new students. Running the foremost minor league in the country’s two most popular sports is mostly a marketing spend; it’s a nice coincidence that some “student-athletes” also get to chase their dreams.

Which is why, when balanced against issues like our stressed out and endangered nurses and doctors or the inability of so many school districts to safely re-open and educate children in person, it’s absurd to continue playing college sports. We’ve opted to fulfill TV contracts instead of stepping back and prioritizing more pressing societal needs.

At least we had Gonzaga-Kansas, though. At least there was that.

Gregg Marshall getting paid to go away reminds us college sports keeps getting worse

Gregg Marshall getting paid to go away reminds us college sports keeps getting worse

The system is so broken.

Gregg Marshall, the men’s basketball coach at Wichita State, is resigning his position while the university investigates allegations he physically and verbally abused some of his players.

He’s getting $7.75 million over the next six years, as part of a “contract settlement,” to walk away.

I’m neither qualified nor inclined to delve into the complexities of contract law here, but what’s clear is that Marshall felt there was compelling enough evidence against him to leave and yet still extracted a large sum of money from the school on his way out.

Late in 2020 — in the midst of a global pandemic and in the wake of a gripping presidential election that followed a monumental push for racial and social justice — this all feels utterly disgusting.

There’s more to be said about Marshall and what happened at Wichita State — which pretty clearly traded its institutional integrity to continue to employ a guy who won on the court while acting like a monster off of it. But that happens all the time in college sports. So let’s step back.

USA TODAY dropped a harrowing piece of investigative journalism on Monday showing a disturbing penchant by the people who oversee LSU football, the defending national champion, for ignoring allegations of rape and other sexual misconduct by its players.

That comes with the backdrop of college football’s major conferences pushing through to play a season in the middle of the pandemic, which is now spiking — just as many experts predicted it would. So college football players — but not athletes in other sports — are expected to be on campus and working in proximity to each other while much of their campus remains closed or severely restricted for the safety of general students.

At the same time all of that is happening the NCAA has aggressively moved in to try to neuter the widespread and bipartisan efforts made earlier this year to give “student-athletes” the rights to their own name, image and likeness.

Meanwhile, many schools, such as Clemson, which pays its head football coach over $8 million per year and spends another $7.5 million on assistants, are using the pandemic to justify cutting sports like men’s track and field and cross country — which at Clemson will supposedly lead to a savings of $2 million per year (for a department that had a pre-Covid budget of more than $120 million.)

What a system! When tough decisions about saving money need to be made, it always seems like the sports that don’t generate revenue are hit hardest. But if you dare point out that the kids generating so much of the revenue might deserve more of it, you’re told that it’s impossible because that money is needed for other sports. It’s almost as if the decision-makers are naturally inclined to protect their money first and foremost.

It’s all a sham and any serious person who has paid even the slightest bit of attention knows as much. I began to the question the system 20 years ago, as a freshman in college, when I read two books:  Beer and Circus, published earlier that year by an Indiana University professor named Murray Sperber, and The Hundred Yard Lie, by former Northwestern defensive back and then-Sports Illustrated writer Rick Telander. The latter book had been published in 1989; Sperber’s book, influenced by his proximity to a toxic basketball coach named Bobby Knight, built on his work in College Sports Inc., published a decade earlier.

Which is to say: none of these observations are new. But it should be getting harder to ignore them.

This is probably the part where I need to shame college football fans for indulging in the charade. But I get it. I went on to cover Indiana football for a four-year period that saw rising hope fostered by an enthusiastic coach named Terry Hoeppner dashed when “Hep,” as he was known, died of brain cancer. And now the Hoosiers are *actually* good, ranked in the Top 10 and getting ready to face Ohio State. And I’m thrilled for the friends I made in Bloomington, some of whom kept the faith for decades. On Saturday mornings I can’t help but think about what it would feel like to walk through the tailgating fields, where previously the scent of near-certain defeat commingled with that of brats sizzling on the grill. Having hope turn into reality after years of frustration … that’s got to be part of the reason we bother to care about sports, right?

Still. It’s not worth it. What the system extracts from athletes is too much compared to what it gives back. The push for more wins and better facilities and larger TV contracts encourages schools to consistently contradict the morals that should be their foundation.

Our collective response — or, in some cases, lack thereof — to the pandemic has laid bare so many of the issues we face as a society. It’s also changed the rhythms of our sports seasons and knocked us from the routines we generally sink into. And maybe that allows us to finally be too sick of it to go on, to say that Gregg Marshall punching a kid and getting nearly $8 million is too much to bear, or that the thought of LSU opting to ignore women to protect star players goes too far.

It’s time for that. It’s long, long, long past time for that.