ML: All these [big sports] schools have the smooth [academic] track for the football players–

OS: Sociology at Auburn, Criminal Justice…

ML: It’s funny. You watch the Saturday football games, and if it’s West Virginia playing, all the football players are “sports management” majors, but if it’s Ole Miss playing, all the football players are “criminal justice” majors. So you get the sense that every school has its major for the football team, and it’s different from school to school. All the Ole Miss football players aren’t majoring in criminal justice because they have a deep and sincere interest in criminal justice. It’s that that’s where you go to get the grades.



... It’s not an amateur sport. College football is a professional sport for everyone except the people who play it. The coaches make lots of money. The colleges make pots of money. They charge lots of money for their tickets and fancy skyboxes and they can’t get money for their school but for their football team in a lot of these places. And yet the players are by rule–by fiat–amateurs who can’t accept a nickel except for the college scholarships most don’t place any real value on anyway.

If the NCAA really wants college football to be an amateur sport, let’s make admission to the games free. Let’s say that coaches shouldn’t be paid more than the average teacher at the school. Lets cleanse this of money and let the television networks run the games for free. No ones going to do that, of course they’re not going to do that.

They should acknowledge that they have a huge commercial success on their hands, and as a result this is a professional enterprise, and that these kids who have big economic value to these schools should be paid. In addition to being paid, they should be allowed/encouraged as a matter of social policy to form meaningful relationships with people outside the football field.

OS: Okay, so while we’re getting you to talk crazy by telling the truth, let me go ahead and ask you…a central issue for the NCAA this year has been the lingering fear that they are going to have their tax-exempt status revoked by Congress.

ML: HA!

OS: It was mentioned by the outgoing vice-chair of the House Ways and Means Committee that he saw no reason for the NCAA to be a tax-exempt organization because their mission is unclear–and if you read Myles Brand’s answer to our email on this, his answer is elliptical, to say the least–what’s your take on the NCAA, whatever it does, being a tax-exempt organization?

ML: I don’t see why it should be. I agree: why should it be a tax-exempt organization? I think that what’s happened is that universities cleverly use the quarry anti-market status of universities to cloak essentially a big business. I think it all needs to be demythologized.

I think the players remind me of where baseball players were in the 40s, 50s, and 60s where people said, They shouldn’t be paid for playing a game anyway, and that they should be paid a market wage for their labor is crazy. The fact that the university is an institution that has existed outside of the market for so long enables really a corrupt arrangement. And they are–the NCAA–a big business. I don’t know why they aren’t treated as a big business.

OS: Okay. Good. (laughs.) It’s just music to my ears.

ML: I wouldn’t be so upset about it if it was just hypocrisy. But lives are at stake here. The NCAA, in their sweaty desire to preserve the illusion that this is amateur athletics, and that it’s not only amateur but also related to scholarly endeavor, they keep these kids who are going to school to play for their football team out of school altogether.

There’s a little two-line bit toward the end of [my] book that mentions that Memphis high school coaches had done a little study showing that out of every six high schoolers talented enough to earn a D-1 scholarship, only one had made the grades required by the NCAA. I think that if there is a market for these kids' services and getting them out of the inner city, the NCAA should not be in the business of sending them back into it. And we already know that the academic experience of most big-time football players is a sham–not all of them, but…

Why not just say it? That the criminal justice major at Ole Miss or the sports management major at West Virginia is a front for the football program.

OS: Oh, now, you know that “Growing Fruit for Fun and Profit” was a rigorous class at the University of Florida when I was there.

ML: (laughs) It comes at a huge cost, though; not only are kids prevented from getting out and getting to a better life, but what really should be going on is an open acknowlegement that many of these kids are coming in not only unprepared for college, but unprepared for the sixth grade. What they should be getting is the medicine along with their football experience. They should be taught to read and write. They should be taught the things that public schools fail to teach them how to do, so that they actually get something out of the experience rather than this sort of sham education that they get.

It would be reeeeeeal interesting–you’re never going to get to do this–to go around to big-time college football programs, strip out the seniors, take them individually into rooms and test their reading comprehension, test their ability to do simple mathematics, test them on the things a twelve-year old in a good school system would know how to do. Test them and see how many of them pass. I bet it would be shocking how few of them would.

The whole point of sports management or criminal justice is that you really don’t have to be able to read to do it. And so the NCAA fighting to preserve hypocrisy creates a lot of bad, a lot of evil. It is a dark institution.