The University of Miami scandal is glaring proof of what’s wrong in major U.S. college sports.
Wow. Once you hear about what being a big time college football player at the University of Miami was (is?) like you have to wonder:
Why would anyone ever want to turn pro? Who can afford the pay cut? Why leave the BET video that is life at the 'U' to play for Jacksonville?
If you're a young man dreaming of rolling through South Beach while a certain deep-pocketed booster allegedly pays for everything -- right down to the abortion for the stripper he paid to have sex with you -- then hey, clearly you're in the right place.
Anything Goes. Caligula in pads.
It is open season on the kind of signature programs that fertilize the massive money tree that the so-called revenue generating sports represent in the U.S. college system.
Scandal sells and there are a lot of scandals driving a lot of eyes to those who can dig them up.
Oregon, Alabama, Auburn, North Carolina, USC. It's hard to keep them straight, and that was before the revelations Tuesday from a Yahoo Sports investigation that Nevin Shapiro -- a former booster serving 20 years for his part in a $930-million Ponzi scheme -- had used some (maybe a lot) of his ill-gotten gains to host a decade long party for UM athletes, some of whom are now leading lives doubtless more boring and quite possibly less lucrative in the NFL.
Pushing Ohio State out of the headlines (so the players were trading memorabilia for tattoos and the coach lied about knowing about whether he knew; pfft) and rending quaint allegations that Heisman Trophy winner Cam Newton's father was trying to extract six-figure sums for his son's services before he landed at Auburn are details of a decade-long bender that ended only when Shapiro went to jail a year ago.
Trips to strip clubs paid for by bricks of cash; sex parties with prostitutes at local hotels and later on his $1.6-million yacht and financial assistance for just about anything were all there for the taking.
The players weren't the only beneficiaries. Coaches and administrators benefited as he laid it on thick for recruits.
Why this is wrong? Well -- one of the reasons - is providing NCAA athletes with money and women and money for women violates the rules of amateurism, both by the spirit and letter of the rules the NCAA likes to hold so dear.
That's important because that spirit of amateurism -- the old college try, however thin the veneer -- is one of the things that has made college sports so incredibly valuable over time.
Like the Olympics; people are a sucker for innocence. And just as the Olympics have been shown over and over again to be less than innocent (though with enough heart-warming stories to make you a sucker over and over again) college sports trades in fuzzy feelings. Fall colours and cheerleaders. Tradition. Youth.
And for the majority of athletes playing most sports, it really is about pursuing athletic excellence alongside a college education: healthy body-healthy mind and all of that.
But in football and basketball and at schools and conferences where those sports generate millions and millions of dollars in television deals, ticket sales and merchandising, money has trumped all.
It very well may -- like Wall Street -- end up being a house of cards that collapses in on itself. It is fitting that perhaps the most incorrigible booster in recent memory made his 'fortune' stealing money from investors. Its sustainability seems questionable.
For now, like politics and businesses, in the United States major college sports is one more activity where rules are to be ignored and it's winner take all.
No wonder the players want to get some.
The problem is there is no higher moral authority; no agency who can say that they're in it for the right reasons. This past year U.S. college sports has been turned upside down with conference lineups being reshaped as schools jump from one to another in an icky dance for TV cash.
Texas Christian University, based in Fort Worth, is part of the Big East Conference and will face off against their old 'rival', the University of Connecticut. Why? A better TV deal. The University of Texas has started their own television network, bolstered by $300-million from ESPN. The Pacific 10 is now the Pacific 12, thanks to the arrival of Colorado and Utah, as being anywhere near the Pacific Ocean is no longer a requirement. The schools will split the proceeds of a $3-billion television contract.
The stories of coaches making more than the university presidents are cute. Of course they do!
There will predictably be call for reform, and assuredly, they won't work. The NCAA and its member schools stand to make billions of dollars from the spectacle that is major college football and basketball.
Short of having a draft for incoming freshman and allowing players to be free agents after their sophomore year, it won't matter. There is no stipend you can pay a 20-year-old that would make him decide not to get on a yacht for a sex cruise if that's what they think is the right thing to do. There will always be adults with means who want to exploit that.
But the NCAA needs the rules, because without the rules it's just pro sports, and that niche is well occupied right now.
I've always thought U.S. college sports as kind of a dividing line for most Canadian sports fans. The thing that is big down there that we just don't quite get.
The boosters and allegiance to schools and the tailgating parties that turn vast swathes of land outside football stadiums into drunken barbeques at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning?
It's something we watch from a distance that we know is American and we know makes Americans a little less like us.
Sometimes we envy it. It looks so fun! Maybe full scholarships and big television contracts are the answer here too. Maybe we should be more like them.
But the more you learn about it the more you are inclined to say: No thanks.
