In one of the many bracing annual rituals surrounding university football – a newspaper article recounting the most recent and most heinous player arrests around the country – Nick Saban offers this intriguing analogy: The big-time university football coach is like a professor who can do everything right but still experience cheaters in her classroom.
Let’s examine the analogy.
In the same article, reporters ask rape-ridden Vanderbilt’s coach if he is “recruiting more players of questionable character in an effort to win.” The guy draws himself up and puffs out his chest and gets way huffy about the question… They all do this when the question gets posed… All of the coaches who recruit criminals to win games employ the patented area woman offended for fourth time in one day method in response to this oft-posed question. Gentlemen, how dare you! The gall!
It’s the same thing for UD, a professor. UD searches high schools all over America in pursuit of evil geniuses, Leopolds and Loebs and Kaczynskis and infant hedge fund managers … all the most brilliant and original sociopaths, so that her school can win the annual Shanghai List Championship. Has she, in her zeal, recruited a few bad apples? No, because you can never know how a person is going to be in advance… And everyone deserves a chance… And you talked to their mothers and their mothers insisted they’d behave… How dare you insist that UD‘s desire to win a contest overrode any sense of morality?
August 21st, 2013 at 8:06AM
I do wonder if these guys are inherently criminals or if it’s the result of a lifetime of entitlement. Neither excuses the behaviors, of course. I just think it would be interesting to know.
August 21st, 2013 at 8:57AM
JND, if you’re asking do they think of themselves, act out of, a sense of being criminal/thugs or largely are the products of a lifetime of entitlement than my experience is that it is more a matter of entitlement but increasingly this line is getting blurry as many recruits come from backgrounds that celebrate thug-life (not snitching and all). Would be more interesting from my perspective to study how the actual coaching, not the after the fact justifications, around violence (and of course fan support of,vicarious-participation in)undercuts any rhetorical nonsense about “character” development, let’s get to the powers that be and who perpetuate these gladiatorial games.
August 22nd, 2013 at 11:30AM
A few months ago, the Southeast Conference, the athletic league to which Bama belongs, announced that they will be teaming with ESPN to broadcast games until 2034. Terms weren’t revealed, but in prior years, about $3 billion was paid for the broadcast rights for SEC games. It stands to reason the money paid was greater for this deal.
ESPN, which is the 2000 pound gorilla of sports networks, is not going to pay that kind of money so as to not televise the best teams in the SEC, which, coincidentally, are the finest in the US. That network is what dictates how unis administer and oversee their teams, or in the case of the SEC, don’t administer or oversee their teams. Saban can recruit whoever the hell he wants, just so long as those guys win games. He’s untouchable, as is most of the rest of the conference, because the money they garner for their product is so huge, it overrides university/NCAA oversight and regulation. This is why, despite the apparent pay for play schemes at Auburn, the abject criminality at Florida, where dozens of players have been arrested or investigated for things such as murder (when Aaron Rodriguez was playing for the Gators, he was a suspect in a murder, just saying), the apparent corruption at Bama, not one of these teams is on any serious 2A probation. Follow the money, not hard to see why Saban can say the idiocy which is referenced in the article, and it’s considered poetic by the Bama faithful…
August 22nd, 2013 at 1:02PM
Sorry, not Aaron Rodriguez, but Aaron Hernandez played at Florida. Aaron Rodriguez was a former student who is now in graduate school. He would be upset that I mistook him for an accused killer, rather than the scholar that he has become…
August 22nd, 2013 at 4:55PM
This is one of the best sentences I’ve ever seen UD write: “UD searches high schools all over America in pursuit of evil geniuses, Leopolds and Loebs and Kaczynskis and infant hedge fund managers … all the most brilliant and original sociopaths, so that her school can win the annual Shanghai List Championship…”
Shanghai List Championship! I’m going to use this phrase EVERY FUCKING DAY from now on. I’ve never heard anyone reference it except for my institution’s PR office.
August 22nd, 2013 at 5:19PM
tamade: Many thanks! UD
August 23rd, 2013 at 10:12PM
Charlie: the typical top 20 Ncaa football team’s revenue represents under 3% of total university revenue.
Time to stop letting the tail wag the dog.
August 23rd, 2013 at 10:41PM
@Gtwma, Yeah, but football, including college, represents one of the largest, if not the largest, revenue producer for networks. That’s why we’ve had this overwhelming number of bowl games, because the ad revenue is massive. And why the 2A does nothing with the largest and most powerful of conferences is because, one, they’re owned by the universities, they pay the 2A’s bills, and two, they do nothing to impair network revenue.
Interesting that you point out revenue. Very few D1 teams turn a profit on their athletic programs. It’s the academic side that needs to subsidize the costs of athletics. And the biggest problem with college sports is the massive athletic buildouts which universities engage in in order to maintain high caliber teams. E.G., University of Oregon built the most expensive bball arena in America. They won’t tell us the exact cost, but the public bonds that were used to finance the bulk of the monstrosity is upwards of $200 million. Upshot is that they can’t fill the place for men’s basketball, so they’re losing money. If we were to look at the balance sheet for Oregon, we would see just how much of burden the athletic program is for the university. And that’s true for growing numbers of universities.
Time, indeed, to stop letting the tail wag the dog….