Deeper problems with National Signing Day

Today is National Signing Day, when—to quote Sports Illustrated—“the country’s best coaches are trying to stock their rosters with elite high school talent.” SI offers “10 storylines” and asks, “Can Alabama secure another top class? What can we expect from Jim Harbaugh’s first haul at Michigan?” But the high school stars making commitments today should be asking themselves another question: “Since I’ll probably never make it to the NFL, where can I get a good education?”

Gregg Easterbrook, the ESPN sportswriter and thinker I interviewed recently, noted, “The odds of even a football factory player ever taking a snap in the NFL are 30-to-1.” We published some of his thoughts in the current issue of WORLD, but I left out of the magazine version my mention of a scandal at the University of Georgia in 2004, when basketball players enrolled in a course with quiz questions such as, “If you hit a 3-point shot, how many points do you get?” Easterbrook pointedly asked me, “What’s the answer, Marvin?” I had to respond, “I never hit a 3-point shot; how would I know?”

Here’s more from my interview, which took place at Patrick Henry College in northern Virginia:

Should college football players be paid? Money in college football started shooting up about 10 years ago. The more money there is in something, the more incentive there is to cheat, the more distortion of values there is, the greater the sense that it’s unfair that the big college football factories—Ohio State, Florida, Tennessee, you name one—clear from football $40 million to $45 million a year.

That’s their profit. Right. Most of them don’t even donate it back to the endowment or the academic mission of the school. Most of them just keep it in the athletic department. As recently as 15 years ago, the number was less than half that amount. So as the number goes up and the players aren’t paid, also what goes up is a sense that it’s unfair that they’re generating all this value and not getting anything in return. The big programs could pay $20,000 to $40,000 per player per year.

Now, colleges can pay $3,000? The Power Five conferences—a new phrase that we’re using for the Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, Atlantic Coast Conference, and Southeastern Conference—now can pay that stipend in addition to the cost of tuition and room and board, books. The schools below the football factory level lose money on football and are reluctant to lose even more.

But you really want players to get … A diploma. What if you’re a 19-year-old who feels like a muscled Greek god? You’re told, “Would you rather have $25,000 a year, or work hard in the library to get a diploma?” What are a lot of them going to choose? But they’ll be a lot better off working hard in the library to get a diploma. We should emphasize graduation.

Next year a team to be in a bowl game or in the playoffs has to have at least a 50 percent graduation rate, right? Yes—the NCAA, boy, they’re really cracking down—you can’t play in the postseason unless half of your players graduate. That’s like saying, “Oh, I’m going to crack down on this class unless you guys average a D-minus.” That’s what the NCAA considers academic reform, half of your players graduating. I mean, it’s hard to say it with a straight face, and yet they manage to.

Colleges use for self-protection the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Yeah, FERPA is the federal law from 1974 having to do with student privacy. Its intent was to prevent people from accessing data having to do with minors, but colleges use FERPA to hide behind privacy regulations, saying, “Oh, we can’t disclose anything about our football team’s academics because of FERPA.” They’re all adults! It’s just an excuse not to talk about academics.

So, establishments use for one purpose a government regulation initially passed for a different purpose. As you know, that’s a common theme in regulatory matters.

You’ve proposed six-year scholarships. Yes, so once players’ NCAA eligibility has been expired, they’ve got one more year at campus to fix their degrees, fix their credits, and actually graduate. Once that dream of “I’m going to the NFL” is gone, with the cold water finally poured on your head, because hardly anybody goes to the NFL, then you go back to college and earn your degree. Right now, it’s like saying, “I’m going to be a Supreme Court clerk. What? I didn’t become a Supreme Court clerk? What am I going to do now?”

The big football conference schools may be going in the direction you want. To my amazement, the Power Five schools have endorsed the five years of scholarship support, even after your eligibility is expired. I’d prefer six, but it’s a reform, so I’ll take it. On average, it’s going to mean that football factory players get one full semester at college after their athletic ability has been used up. And for a lot of them, that’s going to be the difference between finishing their credits and not finishing, and I think it’s a great reform. The Power Five schools have also agreed to give you five years of tuition and room and board over your lifetime, so that if you leave early, hoping you’re going to go to the pros, and you don’t—you spend a couple years wandering around, being on the practice squads of various teams, you never actually get a paycheck, three years later you give up—then you can go back to Ohio State and finish your degree. It’s a nice reform.

You’ve made a proposal about coaches and probation. Probation should follow the coach. When Lane Kiffin got in trouble at the University of Tennessee and knew that NCAA sanctions were coming, he just changed jobs. He went to the University of Southern California, so the sanctions that hit the school didn’t affect him personally. Sanctions should be imposed on coaches personally. Human beings respond to incentives. If the financial incentive is to behave in an unethical manner, then people will do that.

You say if the graduation rate of football players is below the average graduation rate for the college as a whole, then the football coach should be suspended for a year. Yes, suspend the coach for a year. A rule like that would only need to be in place for a short time and behavior would change dramatically.

Most people these days use the expression “student athletes” cynically, but you’re serious about it. Totally. I’ve been saying for years that graduation rates should be factored into college football rankings. What do coaches and athletic directors at the big schools obsess over more than anything else: “What’s our position in the rankings this week?” Well, if you factor in graduation rates, then it becomes part of their positional rankings. We’ve just started to do that at ESPN. If you Google the phrase, “ESPN grade,” it’ll take you directly to a ranking of the top 25 college football teams re-sorted by graduation rate. The ranking is one-third the media poll, Associated Press; one-third the coaches’ poll, USA Today; and one-third a sort of their graduation rates.

I understand you pushed hard to get ESPN to do this. ESPN is a broadcast partner with the NCAA and all those great college football games they show. College football itself, the sport, has never been better. The games are very high quality, great to watch. But when you hear those games broadcast, no one ever says the phrase, “graduation rate.” Now I’m twisting arms to get The New York Times, The Washington Post, any major print publication to notice this.

So there’s media complicity in a lot of this? Oh, absolutely.

Is it the executive push not to do anything that might hurt ratings, or the analyst/commentator/columnist fanboy push, or a combination? It’s a combination of both. The networks don’t want to hurt ratings, and here is an example: CBS has the contract to broadcast the Southeastern Conference, which in the last 10 years has been the best football conference—Alabama, LSU, all these SEC schools, they play phenomenal football. CBS broadcasts them. CBS is also the network of 60 Minutes. So what kind of coverage has 60 Minutes done with football in the last 10 years since CBS got the SEC contract? Puff piece after puff piece—and you haven’t heard the words “graduation rates” mentioned on CBS. You also haven’t seen other college football scandals covered.

Inherent conflict of interest? Inherent conflict, and probably irresolvable in economics. It’s worse for ESPN because ESPN is the main broadcaster for the NCAA and it has [the NFL’s] Monday Night Football, and yet is also trying to be a news organization. It’s an obvious conflict. Good reporting on the things going wrong in college sports comes from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic Monthly. Few sports columnists care about graduation. Most are highly cynical. They’re just boosting players and teams, and they think, “Oh, these players never go to class anyway, what do I care?”

That is true to a great extent, because of this odd system we have of college football teams as the minor leagues of football. Yep, they are.

If graduation rates became more important, wouldn’t there’d be even more pressure on professors to cheat and lie? Suppose the University of Alabama or Ohio State or any of those big schools say, “These guys have got to graduate, because we’re slipping in ESPN grade.” Would that just mean that professors started changing grades or accepting junk? The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scandal just gets worse and worse. It wasn’t just a handful of people, or something happening under the carpet. Thousands of students got A’s in classes that literally never met, didn’t exist, didn’t have a curriculum, didn’t have a final exam, students never met the professor. Maybe that stuff would increase under this regime that I advocate, but it’s a problem with higher education broadly. Students slide by and get diplomas without doing much work—it has nothing to do with athletics. So I think this a challenge for higher education. The “policing yourself” challenge is—higher education generally faces it.

Some football schools are better than others. My younger brother Neal is a professor at Texas Christian University. His teaching job before that was at the University of Southern Mississippi, which is Brett Favre’s school. When he was at Southern Mississippi, the football players who were registered for his classes never came. He contacted them. They didn’t show up. Once in a while he would get a call from a position coach, saying, “Oh, X player, he’s definitely planning to work in your class after football is over.” And he would flunk them. The registrar’s office would change their grades to B’s. He went to the registrar to complain about it, and the registrar said, “It’s football. Don’t talk about it.” That’s one reason he left. At TCU that does not happen. At TCU his football players are in class; they hand in their work—and if their work isn’t handed in, they don’t practice that day. TCU has an 82 percent graduation rate and a top 10 football ranking. So you can win a lot of big games and also graduate your players. It’s a matter of whether your program is structured in an ethical manner.

You do want to see some financial changes in big-time college football as a whole? Big football programs are really business enterprises, not educational enterprises. When they don’t pay taxes, either government debt has to increase or taxes on average people have to rise. If I make a donation to the University of Texas, I’m serving a public purpose and I expect a tax deduction for that. If I make a donation to the Texas athletic foundation, there’s no reason why that should be deductible.

Deductions are supposed to be of benefit to society generally. If I became a great donor to Patrick Henry College, it would be perfectly reasonable for my donation to be tax-deductible. If you guys started a top 10 football team, it would not be reasonable for my donation to the Patrick Henry football team to be deductible.

Your excellent book about football, The King of Sports, has specific detail such as this: North Carolina State sells naming rights to positions, so it has the Marek and Mabel Alapin Quarterback, the Longley Family Punter, and so on. Trend? Two Arizona State alums gave the school $700,000 to fund a scholarship for a linebacker that’s now named after their family. On a modern college campus every building is named, every bench is named, every latrine is named. Ivy League coaching positions are endowed. The head coach of the Stanford football team is not even the Stanford head coach; he’s the Bradley M. Freeman director of football. It’s fine if I want to give money to finance your new linebacker, but should I be able to claim a tax deduction for it and force people who do not like college athletics to make up the difference?