There’s a beautiful honesty here. It’s not easy to write this stuff.
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The business of honoring – not a cheater, but an inept man with a vaguely reformist tendency who got taken over by the organization he was supposed to lead – is also rhetorically dicey.
UD wonders why, in this effort on behalf of Brand, his salary as head of the NCAA is not mentioned. Don’t you think a million dollar plus salary should at least be figured in a little bit in trying to explain why Brand capitulated rather rapidly to business as usual at the NCAA?
It’s like this, see.
Meaningful reform will happen in big-time college sports only when everyone involved – coaches, athletic directors, conferences, BCS, networks, advertisers (but not the athletes themselves, because they have no standing in the argument) – agree to take considerably less money than they do now.
Greed’s the big winner. It’s the Great Immovable. And now that the potential money – for coaches, schools, everybody except the players – has increased, as Art Thiel writes, “exponentially,” the cheating is rising accordingly. To police it, the NCAA would have to “increase [its] enforcement division to something on the order of the North Korean army.”
Solution? Go with the greed, baby. Live in the truth.
The likeliest solution, which is already on the drawing board in some form, is for the top 64 schools to break away from the NCAA and form their own professional association of four super-conferences, with limited connections to the universities and the old rulebook.
To take it a step beyond, the conferences should rent facilities from universities for the same amount they now provide to subsidize the non-revenue sports.
Limited connections to universities… There’s an enigmatic, pathetic psychology in a lot of people out there having to do with rooting until you’re bleeding from every pore for what you think of as your school. The people who write about big time university sports have been telling you for awhile that the players, coaches, tv execs, etc., on and around the field have little to nothing to do with your school…
But we can’t pursue that direction of thought in anything approaching a rational way, so shut up, UD… I’m just saying… Just thinking out loud here… That as long as many fans need the fantasy that they’re rooting for their school, Thiel’s purely capitalist solution – an excellent, excellent solution – will have trouble prevailing.
August 24th, 2011 at 5:15PM
The “limited connection” will be a license to use the name of the university for the football and basketball teams. This will preserve the “fantasy of rooting for their school” while allowing the university to disentangle itself from the big business of the major revenue sports. See the final paragraph of Expensive Icing at http://ptable.blogspot.com/2011/08/twin-city-federal-stadium-university-of.html#links.