Movin' Out

Maurice Clarett, Rick Neuhisel, Mike Price, Miami & Virginia Tech, Rashidi Wheeler, and the University of Nebraska. All of these are reasons I won't be watching college football this fall. I probably won't watch the NFL, either. The whole mess makes me sick. Close to my revulsion for W. The worst is the University of Nebraska. The budget crisis in Nebraska has cost 15 tenured professors their jobs. Yet, the University of Nebraska paid more than $200K in performance bonuses to its football coaches this year. The achievement of Coach Frank Solich's staff? Finishing 7-7 in 2002. The worst record in Nebraska football in more than 30 years! We are living in a funhouse world where up is down, stupid is smart, and greed is good. If somebody out there wants to watch Maurice Clarett, power to 'em. If someone out there wants to watch Kobe Bryant, power to 'em. If someone wants to read O. J. Simpson's interview in Playboy, power to 'em. If someone wants to watch steroid-raging animals tear someone's leg off, power to 'em. As Billy Joel sings, "If that's movin' up, then I'm movin' out!" If this be (fair & balanced) revulsion, so be it.

[NYTimes]

August 29, 2003

Old Issues and New Voices

By JOE DRAPE

EVANSTON, Ill. - Mark Murphy earned All-Pro honors and a Super Bowl ring as member of the Washington Redskins. He acknowledges that most of his teammates neither graduated from college nor really cared about doing so.

After retiring from the N.F.L. in 1985, Murphy worked for the players' union, where he tried to help former players go back to school and make a new life away from the locker room.

In May, he took on a new challenge, becoming athletic director at Northwestern University. One of the country's elite academic institutions, Northwestern also plays intercollegiate sports in the Big Ten, a conference rich with influence and power.

It is here, along the shores of Lake Michigan, that Murphy will try to do something that many believe is becoming impossible: attract talented athletes who can consistently win on the field, excel in the classroom and become leaders beyond football.

"What I'd like nothing better than to do is for Northwestern to do everything the right way and consistently win," Murphy said. "What are our chances of that happening? I'd say 50-50."

Indeed, as a new season begins, college football is at a crossroads, brought there by a series of scandals involving players and coaches, an increasingly vocal reform movement and an internal struggle between the haves and have-nots. Many of the issues are not new, but fresh voices like Murphy's are sparking renewed activism.

Questions are being raised: Who controls the National Collegiate Athletic Association? Should institutions be rewarded for demonstrating that they are actually educating their athletes? Should athletes be paid? Should coaches be disciplined more vigorously?

"I think in terms of the behavioral aspect it's good news/bad news," said Myles Brand, the N.C.A.A. president. "There is trouble in paradise. The good news is that presidents and trustees are standing up and taking strong stands against students and coaches. It used to be this kind of stuff was pushed under the table."

Among the issues on display are these:

¶Ohio State suspended running back Maurice Clarett for an indefinite number of games while the N.C.A.A. investigates his role in an exaggerated car theft report.

¶Washington fired Rick Neuheisel as coach in June for gambling in an N.C.A.A. basketball pool and then lying about it. Now Neuheisel is suing the university and the N.C.A.A., alleging he was wrongfully fired because Washington wanted to avoid an N.C.A.A. investigation. Washington begins the season with Keith Gilbertson as coach.

¶Alabama also dismissed a coach, Mike Price, and begins a second season on probation for recruiting violations. Price was hired away from Washington State, but before he coached a game for the Crimson Tide he was dismissed for his behavior at a Florida strip club. Mike Shula was hired in May to replace him.

¶The Big East and the Atlantic Coast Conference begin their last seasons with their current structures after a summer marred by allegations of tampering, back-room deals, broken promises and bait-and-switch tactics. Miami and Virginia Tech ultimately jumped from the Big East to the A.C.C.

For Brand, the misconduct of coaches is at once the most vexing problem to solve and the easiest. Noting that nearly 20 Division I-A coaches make more than $1 million annually, Brand said it was time they be held accountable.

"We seem to be giving higher and higher salaries to coaches and the expectations have become higher and higher and they are not paying attention," Brand said. "We have to ferret out these instances of bad behavior and get the bad actors out of there."

But money is as much a part of the reform movement as is a desire to maintain academic or institutional integrity. Forty-four presidents from colleges in the smaller conferences have banded together as the Presidential Coalition for Athletics Reform and have starkly drawn their differences with their counterparts at major football colleges.

The coalition says the big colleges not only get the money, but also have hijacked the N.C.A.A.'s governance structure and make all the rules. While the Southeastern Conference, the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big East, the Pacific-10, the Big 12, the Big Ten and Notre Dame will split $900 million over the eight years of the Bowl Championship Series contract, which runs through 2005, the coalition schools will split just $42 million over that period.

"It is true that many of us have been distressed that there are schools that are participating in postseason play, whether it be football or basketball, who have really embarrassing graduation rates of their student-athletes," said Scott S. Cowen, the president of Tulane, a coalition member. "Yet they are allowed to participate in high-visibility, high-revenue-sharing events."

Last year, for example, at 25 of 55 universities competing in bowl games, the graduation rate of football players was 10 to 20 percentage points lower than the university's overall graduation rate for student-athletes, says a study by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. (Air Force was the 56th team and, like all service academies, does not release graduation statistics.)

While six of the eight teams that competed in the four B.C.S. bowls - worth about $13.5 million per team - had a graduation rate of more than 45 percent, the B.C.S. champion, Ohio State, had a graduation rate of 36 percent, and the Rose Bowl victor, Oklahoma, only 26 percent, according to the study, which was based on N.C.A.A. data. (The full report is on the institute's Web site, www.bus.ucf.edu/sport/ides/.)

Even before Murphy's arrival at Northwestern, he practiced what he preached. While playing pro football he attended night classes at American University, earning a Master of Business Administration degree, and later he received a law degree from Georgetown University. He worked as a prosecutor for the Department of Justice and then as athletic director for 11 years at Colgate, his alma mater.

Northwestern had already demonstrated that high graduation rates and football standings can coexist: the Wildcats have won or shared three Big Ten titles in the last 10 years and have maintained a graduation rate that has exceeded 85 percent, reaching 100 percent in some years.

But Northwestern has not been untouched by scandal. Over that same period, six former football and basketball players pleaded guilty to charges related to an investigation into sports betting at the university. The family of Rashidi Wheeler, a football player who collapsed and died in a voluntary conditioning program in summer 2001, filed a wrongful-death suit. And Northwestern acknowledged in response to the suit that more than eight football players had used supplements banned by the N.C.A.A.

Murphy believes that Northwestern is committed to honoring the highest academic and ethical standards. But he wonders if enough coaches and administrators at other Division I-A colleges are.

"Money has blurred the line, and it makes some schools ignore things when the revenues are going up," Murphy said. "Schools are not insisting that their athletes get an education."

The N.C.A.A.'s so-called incentive/disincentive plan, to be put into effect incrementally from 2005 to 2008, is intended to change that. Teams that don't perform well academically could lose scholarships and be banned from postseason play, potentially losing millions in revenue. Teams that perform well in the classroom, on the other hand, may be entitled to additional revenue through the N.C.A.A.'s distribution formula, pick up more scholarships and receive other benefits like more graduate assistant coaches.

"The goal here is to hold the coaches and the athletic department and the universities accountable," Brand said. "We want them to give student-athletes every opportunity to graduate, and if you're not, we're going to sanction you."

But some critics say the N.C.A.A. needs less bureaucracy to transform college football. These critics want to begin by taking the shackles off those they see as responsible for the increased revenue: the student-athletes.

Last spring in the Nebraska Legislature, State Senator Ernie Chambers sponsored a successful bill that would allow the University of Nebraska to pay some athletes if four other states with Big 12 programs passed similar laws. He said his intention was never to have players actually paid, but to pressure the N.C.A.A. to increase scholarships and other aid and to offer greater opportunities to earn money through outside work.

"The maximum amount of aid is less than the cost of attending college, when you account for clothes and food," Senator Chambers said. "Yet needy players are attending college and are getting money from someplace. And what they learn is to ignore the rules - look the other way and keep your mouth shut."

There is a growing constituency of coaches and even university presidents who believe that players deserve a bigger piece of the pie.

"It's a point of frustration for the student-athlete, especially the football and basketball players," said Mack Brown, the football coach at Texas. "With the state of college sports and the professionalism involved in it right now, with television and revenue production, I'd like to see some of it going back to the student-athletes."

Brand said he was firmly against the notion.

For Murphy at Northwestern, educating players, not paying them, is the key to restoring order in college football. As a player who defied the staggering odds of making the N.F.L., he witnessed career-ending injuries and the sad spectacle of a former Redskins teammate, Dexter Manley, tearfully telling a Senate committee that he did not learn to read until the age of 29 despite playing football at Oklahoma State for four years.

As a member of the N.F.L. players' union, he also saw how dim the prospects after football could be for players without degrees. At Colgate, Murphy watched the football team make three consecutive appearances in the N.C.A.A.'s Division I-AA playoffs and the men's basketball team make two appearances in the N.C.A.A. tournament. He also saw 87 percent of Colgate's student-athletes graduate. Now, with an athletic department budget at Northwestern that is $33 million - or three times that of Colgate's - he sees an opportunity to be a role model for what intercollegiate athletics should be.

"One of the things that frustrated me at Colgate over the years is that faculty members would take student-athletes aside and say, 'You have to make a choice - you can't excel both academically and athletically,' " Murphy said. "I think you can."

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company