Editor’s Note: This article was written by UNC Professor Emeritus John Shelton Reed when he was a member of the UNC Faculty in 1989.  And, in light of the current controversies surrounding these topics, we find it interesting to see that these same things were being discussed at UNC then as today.  And John Shelton Reed writes anything so well that it’s worth reading.  Have the issues changed in the past quarter century?

Bad Sports

John Shelton Reed

[This was originally published in October 1989 in the magazine Chronicles. Not much would need changing today except the price of buying out a losing coach’s contract.]

Football season is a depressing time of year, at least for me. Autumn Sundays are all right: football’s an interesting game and the NFL plays it superbly. But Saturday afternoon always makes me blue. I try to be a good citizen, so I cheer for my university’s team, but we really have no business trying to beat Clemson.

Look, I hate to be a walking cliché. Few things are more banal than professors wringing their hands about the scandal of college athletics. Especially in the South, there’s not even much point in it. Down here, most folks seem to care more about sports than about anything else that goes on in our colleges. Few Southerners would agree with the Columbia history professor who said that he found his university’s record football losing streak reassuring because it suggested to the world that Columbia’s priorities were in order. We like winners down here, maybe because we got a bellyful of losing in 1865.

But we really have lost our sense of proportion, so much so that I teeter on the edge of being embarrassed for the South. I mean no disrespect for Southern higher education, but few lists of top colleges and universities overrepresent our region; one that does, though, is the list of schools that raise the most money for athletics, where half the entries are Southern. Nor has publishing ever been a Southern specialty, but 19 of the 24 universities that published sports magazines in 1982 were in the South. There was an outcry awhile back when the attorney general of Georgia removed the state troopers who had traditionally escorted Coach Vince Dooley on and off the field, and when the president of the University of Alabama hired a football coach with an unimpressive win-loss record he got death threats.

All this may sound like good clean fun, but I don’t think it’s accidental that 12 out of 22 colleges under NCAA sanctions in the fall of 1987 were in the South;  for violations having to do with football, it was 8 out of 11. The truth is that to field nationally ranked teams in the “money sports” (football and men’s basketball) requires highly skilled, highly recruited, highly paid mercenaries, both athletes and coaches. To enlist them and to keep them happy and working seems often to require a measure of corruption.

Stories are legion, and there are new ones each year. One of my favorites involves the avid booster at Texas (get this) Christian University who sequestered a recruit in a motel room to keep him away from the competition until signing time, and arranged for prostitutes to entertain him. A friend who knows about these things says Texas Christian is unusual only in using professionals. Perhaps that’s why TCU, when nailed on this and several other counts, had the shameless audacity to complain that the penalties imposed by the NCAA were too severe. (TCU, by  the way, is the alma mater of Shake Tiller and Billy Clyde Puckett in Dan Jenkins’s novels Semi-Tough and Life Its Ownself. I once thought Jenkins was writing satire.)

Another, less colorful example comes from the University of Virginia. Recruiters there, being smarter than your average TCU booster, did an end run around NCAA regulations. Finding that the athletic department had used its full quota of basketball scholarships, they offered a hot young blue-chipper a football scholarship instead, with the understanding that he would be allowed to “change his mind” about what sport he wished to play once he was enrolled at Charlottesville.*   Now I ask you: Is this honorable?  Is this gentlemanly?  Is this building character?  Is this what Mr. Jefferson had in mind? [Note: When this was first published, I had a courteous letter from Mr. Terry Holland, Virginia’s basketball coach, pointing out that the player in question was actually a second-string football player as well as a starter for the basketball team. If that’s good enough to have earned him a football scholarship legitimately, I apologize for my error, but taking out this paragraph would have messed up my transition.]

I pick on Virginia not because it’s the worst but because it’s one of the best, one of the few major state universities for which there ever was much hope. Most schools that seem to have things in perspective are either poor or private. (Rice is one example, and Emory is another.)  But even some private universities with aspirations to academic respectability bend to the cultural wind. Tulane, for example, after its most recent scandal, had a chance to do the right thing. A committee set up to look at the athletic program could have called for the school to put sport in its proper place as an extracurricular activity slightly less important than debate. The trustees would have been unhappy, though, and no aggregation known to man is more pusillanimous than a faculty committee, so of course they blew it. Tulane is still going head to head with LSU.

Wake Forest also competes with much larger and less selective colleges. (People used to alter the road signs around here to read things like “Interstate 85 / Wake Forest 0.”)  Wake could have taken pride in fielding teams where every player could count to eleven with his shoes on. But, no, the Deacons recently hired a coach who used to work at my university, where he holds a record for recruiting a player (subsequently in the NFL) with the lowest SAT scores ever recorded for an entering freshman.

But this is football, I hear you say. To get within a hundred yards of the drug-crazed animals some colleges put on the field, maybe you need an IQ about par for eighteen holes. Well, basketball seems to be about  as bad. There’s a land-grant institution near here (which shall remain nameless, since it has enough ongoing troubles without being reminded of past ones). When one of its star players was arrested for theft, an enterprising reporter discovered that the lad’s SAT scores totaled 470 points, out of a possible 1600. Three of him, in other words, might add up to one MIT freshman (which raises the question of how many MIT freshmen it would take to handle him on the court, but never mind). This “student-athlete” was in fact illiterate, but that didn’t matter to the schools that recruited him. Duke has gotten uppity since the New York Times called it a “hot school,” but it was one of them;  Sports Illustrated published a passionate mash note from their coach to this talented juvenile delinquent.

Some schools, including mine, point to graduation rates for athletes that equal or exceed those for run-of-the-mill students, but that’s a two-edged sword. Even allowing for tutors, mandatory study halls, and guidance to easy courses and faculty groupies, if young men without much in the way of scholastic aptitude can hold down what amount to full-time jobs and still get through, maybe the curriculum is too easy.

Moreover, lack of intellect isn’t the only problem. Most college athletes I know are self-respecting and/or God-fearing young men and women, but apparently it’s hard to win ball games consistently these days without at least a few specimens of low-grade human material, young men who tear up parking tickets, beat people up in bars, steal bicycles (these are all cases I know first-hand) — and who expect, correctly as a rule, to get away with only slaps on the wrist, if that. Consider Mr. Jeff Burger, starting quarterback for Auburn in 1987. In a little over two months Burger was suspended once for plagiarism, once for accepting a free plane ride from a booster to go dove hunting, and once for taking money from an assistant coach to post bail on a concealed-weapon charge. Each time he was unsuspended on appeal in time for the next game. Auburn’s vice president for “academic affairs” let him off on the plagiarism charge;  the ever-obliging NCAA winked at the others.

Now, it’s not athletes’ fault that the system works the way it does. Given how it does work, though, it’s almost surprising that so many are decent, earnest, and hard working. It may even be that thugs, liars, petty thieves, vandals, and unwed fathers are no more common among football and basketball players than among late-adolescent American males in general. But, frankly, I don’t believe that. The adulation and special treatment — not to mention the steroids — meted out to big-time college athletes don’t exactly breed humility and self-restraint. Consider the football player (also at the nameless nearby university) who was charged with rape: part of his defense was that a star like him wasn’t used to girls who said no, and he didn’t think this one really meant it.

I could go on and on. Memphis State, Oklahoma, Maryland, Georgia, Kentucky, SMU, Florida — I get them confused. Not long ago some Arkansas alumni lobbied to pull their state university out of the Southwest Conference, pointing out that it was one of only three schools in the conference not in trouble with the NCAA. Coach Broyles reportedly vetoed that move. College presidents come and go — sometimes for countenancing abuses, sometimes for opposing them — but athletic departments seem to go on forever. At Clemson a few years ago the president gave the trustees an ultimatum to the effect that it was either him or the athletic director, whereupon he was wished the best of luck in his new job, whatever that might turn out to be.

I can’t be smug about that. In 1937 my university’s sainted president, a man remembered in these parts as a sort of male Eleanor Roosevelt, proposed to do away with athletic scholarships. When it was made plain to him that he was going to be president of a university with big-time athletics or he wasn’t going to be president at all, he had a change of heart. One consequence, if you want to look at it that way, came fifty years later when we fired our football coach; or, rather, when he was allowed to resign with a $900,000 settlement to make up for the years on his contract that, we were told, he had freely chosen not to work. (I know it doesn’t make sense, but that’s how they said it happened.)  There had been an “erosion of confidence” among some “elements of the community”: this is what a modern university administrator says when members of a booster club are unhappy.

Now, I’ve served on the committee that considers the admission of students with “special talents,” and it certainly seems that our team should have won more games than it did. I won’t get into specifics;  let’s just say that committee admitted a few large students whose special talents apparently didn’t include schoolwork. If our coach couldn’t win with that material, maybe there was something wrong with his coaching. I don’t feel sorry for him — for $900,000 I’d leave, too — but I am sorry he lost his job, because it makes it too plain for comfort what the conditions of his employment were. It’s hard to mouth the old platitudes about why we have an athletic program when losing coaches are let go without reference to how much character they’ve built.

Enough. I’m starting to rant. Foaming at the mouth is the next stage.

Can anything be done?  Well, probably not. The NCAA continues to tinker with its pathetic regulations, trying to palliate what even a few coaches and college presidents have come to recognize is a smelly situation. But rule changes won’t help.  For a college or university, assimilating semiprofessional athletics is like building a perpetual motion machine: some do better than others, but the undertaking is impossible in the first place.

Ideally, professional football and basketball would have farm clubs, like baseball’s. If it were up to the athletes, I’m sure they would. There’s no reason novice professionals shouldn’t be paid for their labors, and no reason they should have to struggle with Western Civ as a precondition for plying their craft. But of course there’s also no reason for the NFL and NBA to have their own minor leagues so long as colleges are willing to provide them.

The Ivy League with its characteristic, superb arrogance has chosen in effect not to play that game. Its attitude seems to be: let the North Carolinas, the Dukes, the Texases, Nebraskas, Michigans, and UCLAs — all the academic no-hopers of the world, the intellectual Siberias — let them train players for the professional teams;  we’ll just play with real universities. Down here, though, folks won’t buy that approach. We want our colleges, by God, to compete with Valley State and Nevada-Las Vegas.

Well, call me an effete snob, but I like the Ivies’ attitude. The Harvard-Yale game seems to be no less hotly contested just because all the players have SATs higher than their body weights.

As someone once said, athletics are to education what bullfighting is to agriculture. (That’s an analogy, son – like on the SAT, you know?  Don’t worry if you don’t understand it. What was that bench-press weight again?)