College Sports on the Brink of Disaster

The Rise of Pay-for-Play and the Fall of the Scholar-Athlete

John LeBar, Allen Paul

• Publisher: Sports Publishing
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781683584490
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sport & Exercise Science
• Index: Business

Impelled by runaway spending and rampant corruption, America's much-beloved games of college basketball and football are being threatened. The specter of billion-dollar sums being showered on coaches, voracious athletic directors, hordes of support staff and lavish comforts for fans has led to a near-deafening roar to pay the players. The injustice of such sums being amassed, in the main, from the labor of young men of color many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot be justified; and yet, American society has allowed this intractable problem to fester for more than half a century. Lured by the glitter of untold riches, naive young players enroll year after year in colleges and universities expecting the ultimate reward of a highly paid career as a pro. Only a minuscule few will advance that far; even fewer will reap significant financial rewards. Instead of educating them, colleges and universities force them into full-time athletic jobs in which their labor is shamelessly exploited. Small wonder that outraged critics demand compensation for the players, but these same critics only present vague answers when asked how such a radical change would work. College Sports on the Brink of Disaster, first published as Marching Toward Madness and now newly updated, cites twenty-one reasons why the pro-pay position is wrong, among them the prospect that the player talent pool will be concentrated to even fewer rich schools; recruiting wars will lead to more frequent scandals; and the regulatory powers of the NCAA will exponentially increase. Worst of all, pay-for-play will encourage schools to shirk even further the imperative to educate the young athletes. College Sports on the Brink of Disaster presents comprehensive reforms to end cheating and corruption in college sports, to put academics first, and to end the peonage of non-white athletes once and for all.

Part I

How We Got Where We Are

CHAPTER ONE

A Brief History of College Sports

The American sporting scene has always produced bona fide heroes who set standards we all can admire and aspire to. Separating the acceptable from the unacceptable in the full panoply of collegiate sports is an indispensable part of understanding how we lost our birthright and how it might be regained. The ideal of the scholar-athlete was enshrined early at Yale, where the best-known exemplar was Nathan Hale, an early hero of the Revolutionary War. Words he spoke moments before the British hanged him on September 26, 1776 — “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country” — enshrined Hale in immortality.¹ At 21, he’d been caught spying for the Continental Army. A handsome, muscular young man with blue eyes and reddish brown hair, Hale had graduated from Yale with first class honors in 1773 and went on to teach in two Connecticut secondary schools. A diary he wrote in the early months of 1776 notes his avid interest in wrestling, checkers and football. He’d played football (then more a version of rugby) at Yale and is said to have performed the extraordinary feat of jumping from one waist-high hogshead cask into an adjacent one.² A statue of Hale stands today near City Hall in New York.

In his inaugural address on October 19, 1869, Harvard President Charles W. Eliot gave an early definition of the scholar-athlete when he called the sons of Harvard an “. . . aristocracy which excels in manly sports, carries off the honors and prizes of the learned professions, and bears itself with distinction in all fields of intellectual labor and combat;. . .”³

Eliot’s reference to manly sports reflected a Victorian obsession with muscular Christianity, which originated in mid-century England to keep public school boys from becoming too effeminate and to keep religion from being overly feminized. It soon became a rage in an America plagued by anxieties that closing of the frontier, the rise of Social Darwinism and the industrial revolution would expunge ruggedness and toughness from the male character. By the time Teddy Roosevelt embraced manly ideals in the 1890s, popular magazines — the main arbiters of taste and cultural mores — featured story after story on an authentic American hero: the manly ideal of the scholar-athlete.⁴ A good example is the cover of the Saturday Evening Post for October 28, 1899, cited in Daniel A. Clark’s Creating the College Man. It depicts two college men clasping each other’s shoulder in a fraternal way, one in cap and gown with an arm full of books, the other in a football uniform cradling a pigskin.

The dual ideal of the scholar-athlete was firmly fixed in the public mind by illustrations such as this one from 1899.

“The cover graphically illustrates,” Clark writes, “how the ideal college man now united two heretofore antagonistic ideals of American manhood — the cultured, genteel scholar and the resolute, courageous, and vigorous man.”⁵

Ideals notwithstanding, by the time that cover appeared, college football was a gory mess but fast becoming the country’s most popular sport. In 1878, a Yale player prepped for the Harvard game by dipping his canvas uniform jacket in slaughterhouse blood — to “make it look more businesslike,” explained Frederic Remington, whose future paintings, illustrations and sculptures of the American West would make him famous.⁶ Five years later, at President Eliot’s urging, the Harvard faculty voted to ban football because, by rule, a player could strike an opponent with a closed fist three times before being ejected.⁷ Punching, scratching, clawing, gouging and other forms of mayhem were all part of the game. Over and over university athletic committees and college presidents, citing egregious abuses — even clever coaching tricks to injure opposing players — called for bans; but each such plea failed as alumni, students and an adoring public adamantly insisted that the games go on.

That same streak of violence ran back through American sport to earliest times. In the Colonial Era, taverns on village greens were often the scene of rough and tumble sports with bloody outcomes — worsened, nearly always, by heavy drinking. Wrestling, cudgeling and various ball and bat games with violent twists were most popular among the common folk. In the South, horse racing was greatly favored by the gentry. Early on, the Church of England, the South’s dominant denomination, took a laissez faire attitude toward sports. But by the 1730s and 1740s, evangelicals of the Great Awakening were urging suppression of sporting ways, though with scant success. In the North, generations before, Puritans and Quakers had tried the same to little effect. Americans were so imbued with love of sports that attempts at suppression only increased their ardor, which in time would grow exponentially.

By the early 19th century, the focal point of sporting attention had shifted from the village green to the college campus, where baseball and early forms of football based on rugby and soccer were being played. Intercollegiate competition of any kind had not yet occurred. The first took place in 1852: a rowing match between Harvard and Yale on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire.⁸ At the time, rowing — driven by its practicality and a plethora of sporting clubs — was second only to horse racing as America’s favorite sport. As a harbinger of the future influence of money on sports, the New Hampshire boat race was proposed by the superintendent of the Boston, Concord and Montreal Railroad, who offered to pay all expenses for a two-week vacation for both crews. On race day, a thousand spectators watched as the Harvard boat, Oneida, quickly took a one-length lead over Yale’s Shawmut and won going away.⁹ The winners were presented a prize of silver-tipped walnut oars by General Franklin Pierce, who would win the presidency that November. Lake officials offered a return match in 1853, but it failed to materialize due, most likely, to mediocre financial results for the railroad. Even so, a spate of rowing matches in the decade that followed pitted colleges and universities throughout New England and the Middle Atlantic states.

Long-simmering relations between Great Britain and the United States over British actions on behalf of the Confederacy during the Civil War prompted perhaps the greatest boat race ever held in 1869. By providing naval vessels to the Confederacy — in particular, the havoc-wreaking Alabama, a sail- and steam-powered commerce raider — it was said the British had lengthened the war by two years and caused incalculable damage. Some members of Congress were demanding $2 billion in reparations, which the British roundly rejected amid reckless talk of war on the American side.

Against this backdrop of friction and national pride, in April 1869, Harvard issued a challenge to Oxford for a four-oared race in August over a four- and- a-quarter-mile course on the Thames. On race day, the banks of the famous river were jammed with crowds estimated at upwards of one million, perhaps the largest ever to witness a sporting event. A coterie of British elite, including the Prince of Wales, Prime Minister William Gladstone, Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill, watched while the usual gamblers and fast buck artists worked the crowd. It was a highly competitive race won by Oxford by a mere six seconds. Results were quickly flashed back to America via transatlantic cable laid only three years earlier. Both sides cited the results as evidence of their superiority in manliness and other virtues.¹⁰

Mother country norms and practices had always exerted strong influence in America, where the rich inheritance of British games was undeniable. But one source of conflict appeared in the late 19th century: It centered on who was eligible to play — a question that turned on the definition of an amateur at a time when professional sports were in their infancy. The British aristocracy and leisure class went to great lengths to shape an iron-clad answer that forbade participation by anyone who worked with their hands. The true amateur, the aristocrats held, played purely for the love of sport. To cement the concept in place, the British Amateur Athletic Club approved a so-called “Mechanic’s Clause” in 1866–67, which barred from play all who were “born and bred below the salt” — i.e., anyone who earned wages by manual labor of any kind. In 1871, the club invoked the clause in a biking championship it was sponsoring by eliminating 17 of 20 entries. Much later, an American bricklayer was banned from the elite Henley Regatta under the Mechanic’s Clause. In egalitarian America, such strictures seemed effete, unmanly and decidedly undemocratic. On the frontier, each man stood on his own merits and aristocrats did not dictate the rules.

The first intercollegiate baseball games were played in the 1850s, but the game’s rise to America’s favorite pastime took place mainly on professional diamonds. Intercollegiate football got its start on November 6, 1869, when Rutgers and Princeton, using rugby rules, fought to a 6–4 Rutgers win. Harvard beat Tufts 1–0 on June 4, 1875, to become the first game to follow modern football rules (though modern scoring came even later). Over the last quarter of the 19th century, the game gained enormous popularity, spreading quickly from its New England and Middle Atlantic origins to colleges and universities throughout the land. All through this period, Walter Camp, who captained Yale’s 1879 team, and others tinkered with rules, mainly adapting rugby to systematize the game and give it a rational order.¹¹ Camp’s innovations as head coach and later master strategist at Yale included the line of scrimmage, the system of downs, the center snap, the seven-man line and four-man backfield, including the new position of quarterback and the yardage markers on the gridiron itself.¹² Small wonder that by age 33, Camp was widely acknowledged as the father of American football.

By the 1890s, Thanksgiving Day games in New York were receiving saturation news coverage and drawing crowds in the 40,000 range.¹³ Gradually, the sport became a national ritual. The historian Ronald A. Smith writes, “The Thanksgiving Day game had combined the educationally elite colleges on the athletic field with the social elite in the stands. The ‘Gilded Age’ in American history was seen no more clearly than at the football stadium. . . . Many of the prominent attended the games, from multimillionaires, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, and state governors, to playwrights and social celebrities such as Mrs. William Whitney.”

By this time, the United States was well on its way toward joining its educational system and popular sports at the hip, a trend that would accelerate dramatically in the century to follow. In contrast, other countries made sports the province of amateur and professional clubs that often played before huge throngs. A major influence in shaping the American system was a new craze for fitness and athleticism advocated as the true path to manliness by such popular figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Walter Camp. The trend took root toward the end of the 19th century, as training in physical education and sports found their way into the curricula of colleges and universities and even secondary schools.¹⁴

In 1903, Harvard built the first large stadium using reinforced concrete, and a nationwide boom in stadium construction followed. But now, the game found itself in the grip of its first great scandal over violent extremes on the playing field. In 1905 alone, there were 18 football-related deaths and 159 serious injuries, including concussions, punctured lungs, snapped spinal cords and broken necks.¹⁵ In all, 45 players had died since 1900. In 1893, President Grover Cleveland had abolished the annual Army-Navy game after learning that 24 Navy players had been admitted that year to the hospital and that the team had experienced 82 sick days.¹⁶ By then, several colleges and universities were threatening to abolish the game. The level of violence in 1905 turned out to be the breaking point; the game’s existence hung by a thread.

At that point, one of football’s greatest enthusiasts intervened to help save the game. That October, President Teddy Roosevelt called representatives of Harvard, Yale and Princeton — the so-called “Big Three” — to a White House luncheon to discuss how to make play safer, “especially by reducing the element of brutality in play,” the Washington Post reported on October 10, 1905.

“Nearly every death may be traced to ‘unnecessary roughness,’” the Post reported. “Most victims had been found unconscious beneath a mass of other players, often kicked in the head or stomach, so as to cause internal injuries or concussion of the brain. . . .” Even so, per the Post account, “Roosevelt liked football and apparently thought being roughed up wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. ‘I believe in outdoor games, and I do not mind in the least that they are rough games, or that those who take part in them are occasionally injured.’” Roosevelt’s view that the football field was a proving ground for the battlefield was validated by the performance of his Rough Riders, many of whom were former football standouts.¹⁷ “In life, as in a football game,” he wrote, “the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!”

As the historian Benjamin G. Radar writes, “Through much of the nineteenth century, the popular media took delight in depicting the typical undergraduate male in effeminate terms — as a dyspeptic, shriveled up, and cowering scholar. . . . Football, on the other hand, projected the typical college man as rugged and fearless, as one who could hold his own in the world outside the walls of academe.”¹⁸

After the White House luncheon, on the train ride back north, the Big Three representatives discussed the President’s request and agreed to send him a joint telegram pledging their willingness to cooperate on reforms. Fundamental reforms were soon adopted that legalized the forward pass, abolish...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword By Scott Hirko, PhD
• Introduction See the Pyramids along the Nile
• Part I How We Got Where We Are
• Part II Why College Sports Matter
• Part III A Successful Season in Microcosm
• Part IV Changing a Broken System
• Appendix 1 ¤ Notable Scholar-Athletes
• Appendix 2 ¤ U.S. Presidents Who Were Scholar-Athletes
• Appendix 3 ¤ 21 Reasons Why Pay for Play Is a Bad Idea
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Authors