College athletics: Look beyond the complaints
by Edwin Dorn
Op ed, Austin American-Statesman, September 3, 2005
Another college football season has started. With it will come the pageantry of marching bands and a plethora of polls predicting the end-of-season rankings. Another predictable component will be a flood of polemics opining about how big-time college sports are corrupting higher education.
The most common complaints are that the salaries of college football coaches are excessively high, that the academic achievements of the players are intolerably low, and that universities divert scarce dollars from academics to athletics. Each of these concerns deserves attention.
First, it is true that football coaches at big-time programs are paid handsomely. University of Texas Coach Mack Brown, for example, earns about $2 million a year — about 20 times the salary of the average full professor. But unlike college professors, Brown doesn't have tenure. His job security depends on the performance of several dozen young men just barely old enough to vote. Coaches earn big salaries because their teams attract hundreds of thousands of paying fans. College professors whose books sell widely also can earn huge amounts of money.
Second, what about those "jocks" who, according to stereotype, drift into class late, slouch at the back of the room and seem indifferent to learning? After watching UT's football players for several years, I have come to believe that they're a lot smarter than many of us think they are.
It takes more than athletic ability to thrive in big-time college sports. Consider the mental demands on a middle linebacker. During football season, he spends five days studying next Saturday's opponent. He learns to group that team's hundred-odd offensive plays into categories based on the dozen formations and "packages" (the mix of running and receiving talent on the field) that it commonly uses.
During the game, the defensive coach will signal which of 70 to 80 defensive schemes his players are to use in a particular down-and-distance situation. As the offense comes to the line, the linebacker works through a decision tree that includes the formation and the package, and narrows the play options to three or four. When the ball is snapped, he has a split second to react. A linebacker's use of facts and logic is similar to the mental process that students use in the classroom, but with one big difference: if the linebacker gets the wrong answer, 80,000 screaming fans instantly know it.
The third concern, about the diversion of resources, is completely legitimate at most schools. Of the 1,250 institutions in the NCAA, only a few dozen have self-supporting athletics programs. Budget tensions increase when influential alumni convince college presidents that a big investment in athletics — enlarging the stadium, for example — will attract more fans and generate more alumni contributions. Unfortunately, the hoped-for returns seldom materialize.
In recent years, the NCAA has undertaken several reforms to enhance the academic performance of student-athletes and to ensure greater institutional control of athletics programs. But the NCAA and its member institutions need to go further. Three changes are needed.
First, colleges should be discouraged from putting freshmen on varsity teams. College can be a tough adjustment, even for academically gifted students who have no other significant obligations. We should not require first-year student-athletes to adjust simultaneously to completely new academic and athletic demands.
Second, the NCAA should shorten the season for two-semester sports. Football is a one-semester sport. In the fall, football players can take relatively light academic loads and make up credit deficiencies during the spring and summer. However, with two-semester sports such as basketball, players have no time to catch up if they fall behind. This might be one of the reasons basketball players tend to have relatively low graduation rates.
Third, presidents and faculty governance bodies should treat athletics as an integral part of the university, not as a stand-alone business enterprise. For sound financial reasons, intercollegiate athletics programs (like college dormitories and eating facilities) are accounted for as if they were separate businesses.
However, as Professor Michael Granof of UT's McCombs School of Business has argued, "There are no accounting principles that suggest that the revenues generated by the football program cannot be used to patch the roofs of leaky academic buildings rather than to pay for opulent athletic facilities."
During his tenure as president of UT, Larry Faulkner has been a leader in strengthening academic requirements for student-athletes, and he has resisted calls to add playoff games to the football season. His successor should consider tackling another tough issue: Should income from UT's highly successful athletics program be shared with the rest of the university?
