And that is precisely the reason why college coaches who advocate these sorts of offensive schemes make terrible coaches at the professional level. Such schemes ultimately only work when you have vastly superior talent at your disposal in 90% of your games – which, in the NFL, is pretty much never the case. You never go into an NFL game with such dominating man-for-man advantages that you can simply gloss over the making of mistakes and sweep them under the rug. Recruiting is pretty much the only thing that matters in college athletics, which is why you shouldn’t take any of the bluster and bombast that surrounds high-profile college coaches with any sort of seriousness. That people do take them seriously, of course, is puzzling to anyone who objectively looks at a sport like football or basketball, since the overall quality of play is a giant step down. That college coaches wind up being revered and idolized is … well, we’ll get to that in a minute …
I’m not interested in college football on the whole, and not particularly interested in watching any sort of football at all, but I can’t help myself and I sneak a peak sometimes, since my love of bad football has been well documented, and this is In Play Lose, where everything worth doing is worth doing badly. And while I’m not interested in following the game very closely, I will certainly be on the lookout for some of the worst plays of the year.This was a nice effort on the part of the University of Nevada against Notre Dame, the classic case of forgetting where you are on the field – and doing so in front of a large national television audience to boot:
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| Umm, you’re doing it wrong ... |
But the two dumbest plays of the season so far have both involved Clemson special teams, one where yet another player dropped the ball before crossing the goal line (we’ve been over this already) last week, followed a week later by this doozy where a South Carolina State kick returner in the end zone tossed a live ball back to a referee, resulting in a Clemson touchdown when they fell on the loose ball. As I explained to someone on facebook, the only way this play could’ve been made any more absurd is if he’d actually tossed it forward to an official instead of backward, since the backward toss makes it a live ball, but the forward toss would be an illegal forward pass (this is how I know this rule), and since it occurred in the end zone it would be a safety. And more safeties are a good thing for the football absurdist, since conceding two points (like the Nevada Wolf Pack above) generally involves doing something incompetently. And we need more safety anyway, and it’s good to know that the NCAA and the NFL have been
Oh, wait, was that cynical of me? Was I being skeptical? What would make me so?
Oh, that’s right. It’s because Penn State exists.
Oh, yeah, and because Baylor exists as well.
Or more to the point, not only am I’m cynical about two institutions of higher learning, but I’m utterly disdainful of the sorts of people who put forth the kind of crap that I just posted in those two images above. And this Saturday in State College, Pennsylvania, we got to see one of the ugliest scandals in the history of college sport be glossed over and trivialized, as Penn State felt the need to go about trumpeting the achievements of former head football coach Joe Paterno on this, the 50th anniversary of his first game at Happy Valley:
Seriously, just listen to that crap.
And yes, I understand that when Penn St. alums throw out the line that “JoPa built Penn State,” it’s not entirely wrong. I understand that Penn St. was thought of as a lesser college in a shitty backwater town, and that over his nearly 50 years at the helm of the football team, the university piggybacked off of the football team’s success, and the accompanying prestige and notoriety that it brought, to grow, over time, into a major research university. And yeah, all the stuff in that video about his players’ academic achievement are certainly legitimate accomplishments.
But you know what? It’s all blood money.
Joe Paterno employed Jerry Sandusky for 33 years, and every court document filed in the string of lawsuits against Penn State has suggested that Paterno, and other Penn State higher-ups, knew far more about what Sandusky was doing than they led on in public. That people were aghast an appalled when, for once its history, the NCAA did the right thing and slammed the Penn State football program is disturbing. (Of course, the NCAA went all chicken shit and reversed its course, but we’ll deal with those cowards in a moment.) Quite honestly, the Sandusky incident begs the question as to whether Pennsylvania State University should exist as an institution at all, seeing as how the institution clearly had failed to live up to the absolute, single-most important principle of any academic institution, which is to provide a safe place for young people. This is what is appalling, people. You would think that people with ties to that institution would be aghast by this.
And, apparently, you would be wrong.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people? Are your precious memories of the Saturday’s of your youth spent going to football games on campus really that important? Is your pride so shallow that you can just overlook the sorts of crimes committed on the watch of guys like Joe Paterno? Because let’s get one thing straight here: Joe Paterno employed Jerry Sandusky all that time because Jerry Sandusky could help him win. His job was to win football games. Period. For him, and for his bosses at Penn State, it was win at all costs, even if it meant looking the other way while the most utterly unspeakable of crimes were being committed. All of that other stuff about academic achievement and fundraising and the like that came on the back of football success means absolutely, positively nothing if you sell your soul doing it. But what we’ve seen time and again in America is the willingness of supposedly smart and well-educated people to sell their souls and subjugate themselves to the Cult of the Coach.
People pay lip service to the need to reform college athletics in this country, but it will probably take court rulings in order to truly make that happen. Any sort of genuine reform, given the current set-up, is impossible. You’d like to think that scandals like we saw at Penn State, or with Art Briles at Baylor, or, hell, at Baylor the first time would do the trick, and people would get fed up with this kind of thing and start reassessing their priorities. But instead, we still have stooges and slavish devotees like the ones who took out those advertisements above, and so long as that attitude persists, no reform will ever occur. And that attitude originally emanates from the deified coach of a football or a basketball team.
You want to know what it will take to truly reform college athletics? Fire all the coaches. I’m serious. Fire them all. Fire every one of them. And then fire the athletics directors who hired them, and you may as well fire a few university presidents while you’re at it, since given the directions in which higher education has trended in recent years, it’s not entirely clear they have any real grasp of what their instutions’ educational mission should be, either. But on a day to day basis, coaches of college athletics are the worst. They’re the absolute worst. You won’t find a more selfish, self-serving, self-absorbed profession in the entirety of America, a group who cares about nothing save for their own success and only truly cares about a player so long as (s)he can help them win.
But you can understand the mechanics of how this occurs. After all, students – and student athletes – are transitory in nature. They come and they go, they spend four years or maybe five at a university and then they’re gone. The institution just continues on without them. A highly successful coach at an institution is in the spotlight for years, for decades, and the institution they represent is right there in the spotlight with them.
“Joe Paterno won 409 games at Penn State.” Well, if you want to get technical and semantic about it, Joe Paterno didn’t win any games. He stood on the sideline as a football team won 409 times. And if you just think I’m being a smartass, listen to the tone of any losing college football coach on any given Saturday, most of whom will find ways to blame the kids for the loss:
“The offensive team wanted to run the ball, wanted to run the ball in. I think if the players believe they can execute a play, isn’t that better than believing they can’t execute a play?”
– Connecticut football coach Bob Diaco, after his team’s horrible clock management in a loss to Navy
And I don’t want to hear anyone tell me how such-and-such-a-coach at such-an-such-a-school is different. Fundamentally, they aren’t. They care about the kids only if they help them win, and if they don’t, they jerk their scholarships, and if they want to be a real dick about it, they prevent the kids from being able to transfer to another school. The very fact alone that the NCAA is able to restrict freedom of movement on transfers (which is now also the source of litigation, like most everything else in the NCAA’s business) strikes me as being fundamentally incompatible with a good number of supposed American principles. Coaches are control freaks and want to control everything, and then they suddenly no nothing at all when reports of academic fraud or the presence of strippers on recruiting trips start popping up. Nope, they knew nothing about it! Nothing at all! Bullshit. In the end, it’s really not in their interest to care a whole lot about the kids who pass through their programs, since they’ll leave one way or another and more kids will pass through after that. And quite honestly, a lot of them are just jerks. They are jerks and they act like jerks to their players. What’s also astonishing is that we’ve so systematically brainwashed ourselves into thinking college coaches are somehow reputable that we permit our young people to essentially be abused by them, the attitude being that somehow the kid should “stick it out” despite the abuse. Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with people?
Fire all the coaches, and fire the ADs who employ them while you’re at it. Asking the NCAA to reform itself is sort of like asking the inmates running the asylum to go back into their cells and throw away the keys. That reform will never willingly happen, since everyone involved in the NCAA is, first-and-foremost, worried about protecting their own self-interests. Because in the end, none of those aging, graying administrators on the sidelines or in the suits really give a damn about the welfare of the student athletes beneath them, all of whom are essentially unpaid labor in the industrial complex. The only reform will come when a court eventually rules that athletes have to paid – which I suspect is a matter of when, and not if, at this point. And quite honestly, so long as you have people writing big cheques to the university like those people who put their name on the Baylor ad in a Texas newspaper pictured above, none of this will change, either, since about the only person a college coach feels beholden to is the person who finances their livelihood.
But don’t think I’m going to let the kids off the hook here. No, no, no, no, no. I’m not doing that at all. And I’m going to preface this by saying that I do think there is value in athletic scholarships, and that there are quite a few kids – most of them, actually – who make the most of the opportunity to get their higher education. But then you have the kids who behave like this (names of persons and institutions withheld, since these examples are anecdotal in nature, but told to me by people who have no reason to be dishonest about it):
• I know someone who was a psychology professor at an institution with a major college football team. Towards the end of a semester, a student comes to her office to talk about his grade – which is nothing new, of course, and college professors have been subjected to students lobbying about their grades for generations. This particular student is on the football team, and he earned a B in her psychology class. He questions the mark she has awarded him and asks if she can change it. She says no, that he’s done good work, B-level work and that she can’t give him an A. But that’s not what he’s after. He wants her to lower his grade. He wants her to give him a C.
What is this madness?
The reason for this is that, due to a quirk in the way the rules worked pertaining to an athletic scholarship, a student athlete would be eligible for a continuation of certain types of funding if they were on academic probation, and thus needing to go to summer school to make-up for this sort of deficiency – and going to summer school, of course, also made it possible to partake in the football team’s rigorous “voluntary” summer conditioning program. Like a good number of the kids on the football team, this one comes from a poor background and doesn’t have a whole lot of money, so trying to get himself placed on academic probation was the only way he could think to get the funds needed to hang around the campus all summer and work out. Points for creativity, I suppose, but the idea that a kid was actively attempting to make his academic standing look worse in order to find a way to further his football prospects for the fall is absolutely absurd. And if you think that he was the only kid who had figured out this loophole, you’d almost certainly be mistaken. And now for something less humorous …
• I know a woman who worked in the academic counseling center at a large university, and in her division, they were responsible for the tutoring and the academic counseling of members of the school’s football team. One particular player was notorious difficult to deal with – a guy who happened to be a star, an All-American and a potential top NFL draft pack. One of their counseling sessions got particularly contentious, as he refused to provide his classwork, and when she pressed him for it, he informed her that he didn’t have to answer to her, and that she was nothing to him, and that he could bash her head against the wall if he wanted, at which point he stormed out.
Charming.
And he was right, of course, because he was going to be an NFL millionaire in a matter of months. What did he care what some stupid tutor told him? Going to class didn’t matter. He was just going through the motions and killing time until he could turn pro.
Now, of course, guys like that aren’t all that bright. And she also had the ear of the head coach, since it’s her job to keep his prize possessions eligible so he can win football games, and after one phone call, the coach then told this knucklehead to get his ass back to the counseling center. So he did so the following week, albeit begrudgingly, and he walked into her office to find a pair of linebackers from the football team standing in her office, neither of whom he got along with – it seems that if you’re a knucklehead in one area of life, it’s likely you’re a knucklehead in many of them – both of whom informed him that he was going to turn in his paper to her, and continue turning in his papers to her in a timely or regular fashion, or he was going to have to deal with the two of them. She had decided to meet Mr. All-American on a level that he could understand: hired goons. But this was ultimately the lengths to which she had to go. It took both a stated and implied threat of retaliatory violence to get the guy to ultimately comply. And she was doing him a favor, for fucksake. Keeping him eligible means keeping him on the field, which gives him more opportunities to show off his skills for the scouts.
• Another woman I know attended a small, liberal arts university which happened to have a Division I basketball team. We were talking about campus life at this school and she mentioned a particular residence hall on campus.
“Incoming students make the classic mistake of living there,” she said with a roll of her eyes, “because it’s the vacation dorm, and the basketball players move in during the holidays, and then when kids come back from your vacation, they find out that all of their stuff has been stolen.”
And I remember her tone when she told me about this. There was no outrage in her voice. Instead, there was an intonation that this was just business as usual at this school, and that it was just one of those inconveniences that you just had to deal with – the implication being that once your stuff was gone, it was never be to seen again.
Now, what do all of those instances have in common? The kids figured out what they could get away with. Which is what kids do. Kids are smart, clever, and play every angle. Kids can also figure out which people do and don’t give a shit about what they do – and in the end, of course, coaches don’t give a shit about what they do, so long as they keep turning up on the field.
And you can take that attitude to the extreme, and far too many athletic programs have done so. There is no greater example of this – and no more galling an example – than the mess that has taken place in the football program at Baylor, as school administrators turned a blind eye to reports of football players committing sexual assaults against other students. Indeed, Ken Starr lost his presidency and Art Briles lost his job as a football coach because not only did they not take corrective steps when such allegations surfaced, but they were in fact hostile to those making the allegations. Former Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden has joked about the good old days, when all you had to do was call up the county sheriff when one of your football players got in trouble with the law and you could sort it all out, but there is far too much truth in that. You may not get paid to play when you’re a student athlete in America, but far too many of them have discovered a perk: being above reproach and above the law. College kids get in trouble with the law for lots of reasons, of course – mostly because they are young and dumb and do stupid things – and college athletes aren’t different in that regard, but one thing which has been shown far too often to be true is that college athletes get into trouble with the law because they know that they can. So long as they are the BMOCs on campus and treated as such, why let pesky things like the rule of law and civil society get in the way? And I feel pretty comfortable in saying that is not what institutions of higher learning should be teaching its students.
And there is a pretty good way to put a stop to that sort of nonsense. Pay the players. Make them employees of the marketing department, which is essentially what they are now apart from the ‘pay’ aspect. You’re an employee and you’re meant to carry yourself in a certain way. Fuck up and you’re fired. But, of course, that would have to be collectively bargained, and that would mean schools would also have to deal with things like long-term insurance benefits for their student athletes who broke their bodies in the name of the university during the course of their careers, and they would then open themselves up to state labor laws and tax laws and all of that sort of thing – all of which the NCAA desperately wants to avoid. Universities claim they don’t have this sort of money to pay all of their student athletes, which is curious, given that they seem to have millions on hand to pay the coaches:
Can you tell that I hate this damn system?
And for all the supposed good it does, in terms of profile and prestige, which is then theoretically supposed to translate into alumni donations, there are certainly countless examples where that isn’t the case. Hell, Washington State’s athletic department is crap, and has been crap for years, but it hasn’t prevented the university from raising enough money to build a new medical school and the most cutting-edge wine school in the world. (Although admittedly, having one of the school’s highest profile athletes of all time also become a budding vintner certainly helped on that last one.)
This system is screwed up. It’s preposterous and it needs to go. My guess is that won’t happen, at least not so long as middle-aged boosters keep propping the whole thing up with their dollars, university administrators continue masquerading their marginal universities as being major ones, and the self-perpertuating blowhard hype machine that is the NCAA media – ESPN being the worst of the lot – keep deifying grumpy, small-minded control freaks walking up and down the sidelines. It needs to go, but that is not happening any time soon. We appear to be stuck with this mess, so remember, kids, that Joe Paterno built Penn State, and also remember when you’re in Lincoln, Nebraska, that the N on the side of the helmets stands for ‘knowledge.’
