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For many generations, the lives of college athletes in big-time programs had resembled those of regular vocational students. In the 1970s and 1980s, when many other students edged out of their “dominant subcultures,” most athletes withdrew further into their vocational mode, to the
point where even the proponents of intercollegiate athletics worried about the intense daily pressure placed upon the jocks. In 1991, a nationally published guidebook for college athletes and their parents began chapter one with:
The label of student-athlete says it all. A college student who is also an athlete is asked to live two roles and be two people in one. No other college students are identified in this hyphenated wayâno others are pulled in two completely different directions. No other students are asked to be one person for half the day and someone else the other half.
Without realizing it, authors Stephen K. Figler and Howard E. Figler placed student-athletes in the traditional vocational category. However, contrary to their assertion, many other students “are pulled in two completely different directions,” and endure split livesâall those men and women who work at full-time jobs and also attend college full-time, as well as all those who are parents and must divide their lives among family, school, and job obligations. (By the early 1990s, vocational students comprised over 50 percent of the national undergraduate population, but, ironically, demographers excluded student-athletes from that pool; the demographers, not recognizing that athletic scholarships were payments-in-kind for full-time sports jobs, counted athletes as regular students.)
The Figlers, even if they never used the term
vocational,
expressed the athletes' dilemma in the same way that university counselors described the lives of stressed-out vocational students: instead of the full-time job or family, “The team demands so much of your time that you cannot perform ⦠in courses that you want or need for your future.” In addition, the outside pressure constricts your daily life, and narrows your college experience; for athletes this occurs because “coaches arrange aspects of your life (such as meals, housing, [etc.] ⦠) so that you will interact primarily with other athletes, and thus be more completely under the control of the coaching staff.”
Similar to highly stressed vocationals, intercollegiate athletes tended to remain within their own group, directed by their coaches' extreme emphasis on sports and frequent neglect of everything else, including academics. Coaches phrased their priorities more positively, usually invoking the word
commitment
, as in demanding an athlete's
commitment to the program
.
The Figlers explained “commitment” in a section titled, “Winning versus Your [Athletes's] Welfare: Coaches feel that the time commitment they
demand of athletes is necessary in order to have a winning team.” Yet, these writers never discussed the benefits to coaches in high-profile sports who win consistently: annual incomes that in 1991 averaged $300,000 (and today average closer to $600,000, with an increasing number of coaches topping $1 million annually). Winning coaches receive among the highest salaries at their universities, but their supplementary earningsâendorsements of sneakers and other products, lucrative summer camps, public-speaking engagements, et ceteraâgenerate an even larger proportion of their annual incomes. All aspects of their jobs depend on winning; for example, no trade association ever paid a losing coach $20,000 to speak at its convention.
Fred Akers, a NCAA Division I-A head football coach from the 1970s to the early 1990s explained the process: “The more you win, the bigger the bucks. But you can never win enoughâI won at UT [University of Texas at Austin] but got fired for not winning more.” Akers then went to Purdue, but had some losing seasons there and was fired again. He commented: “I was out of step. Most coaches believe that the best way to win is to put their players in the most intense training possible. Keep at 'em from dawn to dusk and into the night. I never did that, I didn't feel it was fair to my guys, I wanted them to go to class and have time to study. But I'm not in college coaching anymore.”
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Nevertheless, college athletes are not entirely the victims of obsessed coaches; the jocks have long participated in their fates. If they possess the talent to win an athletic scholarship, they enter university hoping to star at the college level and then move up to the professionals. As a result, many college athletes regard their university years primarily as minor league training for the pros and secondarily as an opportunity for an education. That only a small percentage of collegiate athletes ever achieve their pro sports dream is irrelevant to its power over them and its role in shaping their lives at school, especially their willingness to devote so many hours a day to athletics.
In 1991, the NCAA instituted a rule that provided a basic test of the athletes' and the coaches' commitment to their sports, as well as the NCAA's commitment to reform. Under pressure from the critics of college sports, including such members of Congress as Bill Bradley and Tom McMillen (authentic student-athletes in their college days), the NCAA moved to control the excessive number of hours that intercollegiate athletes spent in their sports and, by implication, not in their studies. The association passed a rule limiting “a student-athletes's participation” in his or her sport “to a maximum of four hours per day and twenty hours per
week.” The NCAA hailed the rule as one of the most important pieces of legislation in its history, and even some critics were impressed.
Unfortunately, the rule contained an immense loophole: the NCAA defined the four daily/twenty weekly hours as “mandatory time” required by coaches; however, the rule allowed athletes to spend as many hours per week as they wanted in “voluntary” sports activities, for example, informal practices, weight-training, conditioning, et cetera. Even the NCAA's PR director admitted that “under the new rules, athletes can practice more than twenty hours a week. One hundred hours a week if they want, if it's
voluntary.”
Immediately, the line between mandatory and voluntary blurred. The coaches kept time sheets on the hours that they required their players to be on the practice field or courtâand the totals never exceeded four daily or twenty weekly. But the coaches also
encouraged
their athletes to
volunteer
to do all the other activities related to sports success. During the first year of the rule, Jerry Eaves, an assistant basketball coach at Howard University, admitted that in his and other sports the athletes “are still doing everything that takes up the same amount of time” as before; “they're still running” the same training distances, “they're still doing maximum physical conditioning,” and also “they're playing” so-called pickup games to supplement official practices.
Many athletes also regarded the four-and-twenty-hour rule as a sham, and they felt that voluntary/mandatory merged into one time unit. A Division I men's volleyball player remarked that, beyond the mandatory hours in afternoon practices, the other functions are voluntary, “but it's not like you don't have to show up if you don't want to. We work out as much or even longer now than we did before the rule ⦠. Also each of us wants playing time and needs to keep ahead of everyone else. We know that the coaches totally monitor who is doing the voluntary work. Guess which players the coaches put in the starting lineup?”
The NCAA four-and-twenty-hour rule continued through the 1990s, obeyed so little that in the fall of 1999,
USA Today
published a routine item on USC football player R. Jay Soward, in his team's doghouse because he “was a no-show at workouts that officially were voluntary but were attended by nearly every player on the team.” Soward's absence “didn't sit well with Trojans coach Paul Hackett,” and resulted in people “in the program questioning his [Soward's] work ethic and commitment.” Apparently, no one told USC that they were supposed to pretend to obey the NCAA rule, not openly discuss their flaunting of it with a reporter on a national newspaper.
But from its inception, with the inclusion of the “voluntary” loophole,
the four-and-twenty-hour rule was never a serious reform, and mainly revealed the hypocrisy of the NCAA, as well as its bureaucratic impulseâcoaches rightly complain about the burdensome time sheets that they must fill out for the NCAA, serving no “real world” purpose whatsoever.
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Yet, in a symbolic sense, the four-and-twenty-hour rule captures the essence of the modern NCAA: its PR pretense of guarding the welfare of student-athletes, versus the reality of its high-powered promotion of a billion-dollar-a-year college sports business, and its lack of concern for the workers in that industry. Joe Abunasser, a former NCAA Division I assistant basketball coach, commented: “The irony of the entire organization [the NCAA] is that its proclaimed intention is to regulate and reform college athletics, when in reality it is the cause of the corruption.”
Propelling the NCAA's corruption is the almighty dollar. From a wealthy organization in the 1970s and 1980s, the association, thanks to television's insatiable appetite for college sports programming, moved into the billionaire range in the 1990s. As a result, the NCAA became an essential part of sports media programming, with the total revenue from college football and basketball games exceeding that of the richest professional leagues in the world.
THE NCAA, THE TUBE, AND THE FANS
I
n the 1970s and 1980s, big-time athletic departments became franchises in College Sports Inc., a huge commercial entertainment enterprise with operating methods and objectives frequently opposed to the educational missions of the host universities. Feeding the growth was the increased revenue from the television networks for the rights to broadcast college sports events, notably the NCAA's men's basketball tournament. During this period, an athletic director at a small Ohio college defined the motivation of the men directing big-time intercollegiate athletics: “There are three definitions ⦠. Greed, greed, and greed.”
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At one time, coaches and ADs openly ran the NCAA, now they have to pretend that their [schools'] presidents are involved in the association's decision making. But if you look at who is making the real decisions, from the Executive Director on down, you will find men and women who come out of college coaching and AD positions. They shape the thinking of the NCAA and probably always will shape itâfor them, it's the present and future of the coaching and AD professions, the jobs of their close friends, that's at stake.
âWilliam Atchley, former president of Clemson
University, and of the University of the Pacific
One of the most pernicious myths about the NCAA is that the association represents the will of its member colleges and universities, and that it tries to keep intercollegiate athletics in line with its members' educational
objectives. In fact, as President Atchley and other critics of the NCAA have argued, the NCAA functions mainly as a trade association for coaches and athletic directors, implementing their wishes regardless of whether these are in the best interests of the member schools, or the multitude of athletes engaged in intercollegiate athletics. Coaches and ADs changed the basic rules on athletic scholarships, and no amount of pressure by university presidents or anyone else has ever returned the grants to guaranteed four-year deals or, as the American Council on Education has advocated, “need based only” scholarships, removing control from the coaches and giving it to the university's Financial Aid Office. Similarly, even though congressional pressure and the desire for positive PR forced the NCAA into the four-and-twenty-hour regulation, the coaches and ADs immediately subverted it with the “voluntary” loophole.
Basic to the NCAA's growth and power, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, was its empire-building, its rules that forced schools into enlarging their college sports programs and facilities whether they could afford to expand them or not. On the local level, athletic directors and coaches benefited most from the NCAA's expansion mandatesâmore teams and bigger facilities enhanced their own jobs and their mini-empires. For example, in the early 1980s, the NCAA required many schools, if they wanted to remain in Division I-A football, to increase the size of their stadiums. When six of ten members of the Mid-America Conference failed to comply with the new stadium regulations, the NCAA threatened to exclude them from I-A football. This forced these institutions to undertake costly construction projects; for Mid-America Conference universities, football has always been a red-ink proposition, but never more so than after obeying NCAA expansion rules. (Of course, schools can always leave big-time college football and basketball, and some have over the years. However, ADs and coaches know how to pressure presidents and other administrators contemplating “dropping out” into reconsidering, and, as occurred in the MAC, most schools swallow hard and pay the NCAA price.)
In the 1970s and 1980s, the NCAA, despite losing its monopoly over college football telecasts, continued to dominate the sport through its power to dictate the structure of football programs, including the numbers of assistant coaches and players, as well as the rules on recruiting and athletic scholarships. In addition, the NCAA regulated bowl games and their payouts to participating schools; in this area, it encouraged the bowls, as well as individual athletic departments across the country, to seek corporate sponsorships. In the early 1980s, the Tangerine Bowl became the Florida Citrus Bowl, and soon the John Hancock Sun Bowl appeared, and even the venerable Sugar Bowl became the hard-to-remember USF&G
Sugar Bowl (now the Nokia Sugar Bowl). Meanwhile, local athletic departments sold their scoreboards, the backs of their tickets, and all other available spaces to whoever was willing to pay the going rate. By the end of the century, only the Rose Bowl refused a corporate name, although it enlisted various corporate sponsors, and almost every athletic department had multiple business tie-ins for its football program. However, all of the corporate dollars and increased bowl game payouts did not translate into black ink for most college football programs, and, ironically, many bowl game participants lost money on their postseason trips (see Chapter 18).
From the 1970s on, NCAA football costs outpaced revenue, and, even when some schools reconfigured their conference memberships and schedules to capture more TV dollars, they could not change the economic reality. An ESPN executive remarked, “The bottom line is money. College football has become a very big business, just like IBM and General Motors. As expenses increase, they [athletic departments] have to find a way to pay the bills. And getting more television money from football is one way to do that.” But it never turned out to be enough money.
Fortunately for the NCAA, although college football was a “mature business” in the final decades of the century, college basketball exploded, most notably the association's annual Division I men's basketball tournament. Yet, even though March Madness revenue went from the million-dollar to the billion-dollar range in ten years, it failed to alter the amazing economics of college sports: most schools continued to lose money on their intercollegiate athletics programs. Nevertheless, the infusion of March Madness dollars, along with the money from football, fundamentally changed college sports, moving them ever closer to corporate professional sports and transforming their role in college life. Driving this transformation was the NCAA.
The Michigan State-Indiana State [final game in the 1979 NCAA men's basketball tournament] was different because it changed the face of the sport at two levels, ushering in an era of prosperity for the NCAA and the NBA. When Larry [Bird] met Magic [Johnson], it brought people to their television sets in record numbers. The 24.1 rating and the 38 share for that game remain the highest for a college basketball telecast. It was the sporting equivalent of Neil Armstrong's setting foot on the moon.
âJ. A. Adande,
Los Angeles Times
sportswriter
The NCAA created the Division I men's basketball tournament in the late 1930s, but, during the next four decades, the association failed to
generate national interest in the event. Even when the great UCLA teams of the 1960s won consecutive championships, the NCAA could arrange national telecasts only for final round games, sometimes even accepting Saturday afternoon time slots for the title contest. During the 1970s, the association kept trying to sell more tournament games to a major television network and gradually made progress, although the TV payouts remained low. Similarly, before 1976, no major network broadcast a regular-season game of the week, and finally, when one did, it paid a very low rights fee. In the 1970s, only fans who lived in basketball-crazy states like Indiana and North Carolina could see a number of college games per week, mainly thanks to local and regional stations.
The 1978-79 college basketball season changed everything, taking the sport from its twenty-mile-per-hour national popularity to over seventy miles per hour. The superb play and star power of Larry Bird, the rural white kid at obscure Indiana State University in Terre Haute, and the equally great play and wattage of Ervin “Magic” Johnson, the urban black athlete at Big Ten powerhouse Michigan State, became a season-long media drama, culminating in their big game against each otherâthe final of the 1979 NCAA men's basketball tournament. The NCAA entered the tournament still at twenty miles per hoursâit scheduled the final round in a fifteen-thousand-seat arena on the University of Utah campusâbut it exited ready to capitalize on the phenomenal TV ratings for the Bird-Magic matchup.
After that game, the NCAA sold the TV rights for future tournaments for much larger fees than ever before, and, as important, the association made a special “side deal” with a cable TV network that began operations in the summer of 1979âESPN. The sports channel agreed to televise all the tournament games that the major network broadcaster, CBS-TV, did not pick up. In addition, ESPN arranged to telecast hundreds of regular season games; this increased the fan base for college teams from local and regional followings to national ones, and multiplied the audience for the March tournament. Conferences like the Big East soon became ESPN favorites, and their basketball programs moved from relative obscurity to national prominence, the TV exposure crucial to their coaches' recruiting efforts and improving won-loss records.
From this synergy with television came the NCAA's major money machine, March Madness. The Division I men's basketball tournament, before 1979 an interesting competition for regional audiences, became one of America's premiere annual sporting events, rivaling major league baseball's playoffs and World Series, and aiming at the NFL playoffs and the Super
Bowl. By the mid-1980s, the NCAA received $32 million a year from CBS-TV to televise the tournament (the network concentrated on final regional games and final-round contests), and a few million from ESPN, still doing every game not carried by CBS. However, in 1986, CBS doubled the annual payout and agreed to broadcast many more games, including some early-round contests in prime time. Then, in 1989, CBS stunned the television industry by buying the next seven years of the tourney for $1 billion dollars, and demanding all games, thus ending ESPN's coverage. (In 1994, the NCAA and CBS renegotiated the fee to $1.7 billion for all tourney games until 2002, and, in 1999, they renegotiated again, upping the fee to almost $6 billion through 2013.)
In addition to the TV revenue, from the mid-1980s on, the NCAA earned millions in ticket sales by moving the Final Four round to huge domed stadiums. In fact, the association passed a rule that required a thirty-thousand-seat or larger facility for all Final Fours, thus turning a small-sized court game into a circus event. Basketball aficionados protested, legendary UCLA coach John Wooden commenting that “domes are not a good place to play basketball,” but he acknowledged that NCAA “decisions of this sort are made because of money.”
Also in the mid-1980s, the NCAA increased the entry field to sixty-four teams, generating more tourney games and more entrants with mediocre season records. Jerry Tarkanian, the coach of strong UNLV teams during this period, remarked, “I think the tournament should be a reward for teams, and I'm opposed to a team that wins only 50 percent of its league games getting into the tournament.”
For all of the money streaming into the NCAA from March Madness, a surprisingly small percentage continued on to the schools participating in the tournament, and even less flowed directly to other members of the association. In the 1990s, 25 percent of the revenue went to the participants and their conferences, with some first-round losers failing to cover their traveling expenses. Most of the money stayed in the NCAA, much of it for the association's gargantuan “administrative services” budget and payroll. The NCAA also spent millions on “public affairs,” a.k.a. publicity and promotion, including all those halftime TV spots to convince viewers that only authentic student-athletes played big-time college sports, young men and women so devoted to their studies and their sports that they should never be sullied by any of the money that they generated for the NCAA.
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Therefore, who benefited from the tremendous surge in college basketball popularity after 1979? Obviously, the NCAA made out wonderfully;
however, member schools, including many of the perennial basketball powerhouses, never managed to staunch the annual flow of red ink in their athletic department finances. On the other hand, any coach with a team in the tournament field could request a raise and a contract extension, and if his squad reached the Final Four, he could generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional personal income. Moreover, winning the tournament placed him in the $1 million annual range for the rest of his coaching career. (Similarly, the increasingly popular Women's Division I basketball tournament lost money for participating schools but aided the careers and bank balances of coaches with successful teams.)
Do the athletes benefit from March Madness? Most players, particularly those intent on pro careers, love the TV exposure during the tourney, but few make any pretense about keeping up their schoolwork during the many weeks of the tourney. Longtime college basketball reporter Rick Bozich commented, “Put a kid on the road to the NCAA Finals, and the road will take many twists ⦠. Few of the twists will include a pit stop in the classroom.” Football players involved in bowl gamesâalso NCAA approved eventsâhave similar problems, especially acute for them because practices for their bowl game often begin during their school's final exam period.
Unlike the athletes, many regular students of schools in the NCAA men's basketball tournament claim to benefit in all possible ways and see no downside to March Madness. In a poll of college student attitudes begun in the 1980s, to the questionâ“After you graduate from and/or leave your university, what do you think you will remember most vividly about your time here?”âstudents at universities whose men's basketball teams reached the Final Four during their undergraduate years often mentioned that event as one of their most vivid college memories, particularly if they took a “road trip” to the site of the Final Four. Frequently they did not obtain tickets to the gamesâthe domed stadiums were sold outâbut milling around outside the arena provided them with sufficient pleasure. Most of all, by wearing their school's paraphernalia and being identified as students from that university, they achieved what some termed “a personal victory.”