"Pay the Players" Misses it All

NCAA President Mark Emmert made emphatically clear that he categorically rejects the claim that college athletes should be "paid." "Student athletes will never be paid as long as I am President of the NCAA." He is absolutely right.

Football announcers and sports commentators often  complain that college athletes should be paid to play. Usually this is done in the context of watching some full stadium of D1A elite schools and muttering about all the "profit" from the games. The idea might come up expressed as an the illusory wish that somehow paying players would eliminate the scandals surrounding agents. The idea possesses a sort of populist sense and makes good press, but it makes no sense.

This idea is based upon profound misunderstanding of the nature of college sports and the nature of college economic realities. I think we would all be better off if we realize that college athletics is about investment in people, not paying players.

You have to start from a baseline. Where would the young players be if college sport did not exist. The vast vast majority of them, 95 percent, would not be playing sport, and many of them would not be in college. In fact women's athletics would not exist at all since it involves almost universal structural deficits of between 4-10 million dollars. So athletes in all sports but a few basketball and football programs play on money losing teams--the revenue generated does not cover the costs.

In a true life baseline, a trace element of teenage athletes might be playing pro sports or participating in professional tracks like in Europe. So none of the arguments make any sense until you calibrate the baseline. Without college sport, the players would not be playing, would not be in college, would not be getting an education. This is the default for the vast majority of the 400,000 NCAA athletes.

Now we can think about what it might mean to "pay the players."

The "profits" don't exist. Only two college sport categories ever make any money--men's basketball and football. The money comes from TV exposures and not the revenue generated by seats. The rest of college sport teams lose money at tremendous rates. In fact, 98 percent of college football teams lose money and do not cover the basic expenses. Well over 94 percent of college men's basketball teams also lose money. With the rare exception of about maybe 20 programs, the revenue generated by by college football and basketball games never cover costs. What money is left over almost always goes to funding other money losing sports like soccer, swimming, volleyball, water polo, lacrosse, the list goes on. They all are subsidized by either football revenue (rarely) but mainly by fundraising and internal transfers or student fees.


Second, the commentators pontificate  as if the athletes are not receiving anything in return for playing. This is rubbish. At the moral core of college athletics, the athletes  are playing a sport they enjoy and love. Unlike the vast majority of the young men and women around the world who must give up the sports at age 15, college student athletes still play and pursue their passions. A microscopic few might have brief careers in the pros, but for the 1400 schools in the NCAA and the approximately 140 D1A football schools, this is the last time the young men and women will play in a supported organized way. Most of them play from passion and love.  Playing on an supported team provides the students with community of fellow team members who create a support group that so many young college students do not possess in the mega-universities of today. The cultural critics and media commentators miss all this because they don't know the students.


Along with pursuing their passion, the young men and women gain a college education. Here is the crux of the whole issue. Education matters. They provide a huge benefit; the scholarships cover the cost of education or enable a student to get into a school he or she may not have been able to attend without athletics. This investment can range from 12,000 to 50,000 per year upfront. Being in college and afterwards  college education can improve the quality of a person's life.

This means that colleges must make sure student athletes get educated, not just eligible. But a college education can furnish immense economic, personal and social value. It's tells you alot about those who make money off and comment on college sport that they forget that the athletes are actually going to class, or they have grown so cynical that they believe the schools are pretending to educate the athletes stuffing them in remedial classes and useless majors. This group of commentators  fixates on following ultra elite  football or basketball and ignore all the other sports where most athletes live and play----an average college degree increases lifetime earnings by a million dollars right now.

Along with the satisfaction of continuing their passion and getting an education for the future, student athletes receive immense support while  in school. The university provides trainers, medical care, conditioning and facilities to support their growth. The student athletes often have academic support that  helps ensure that the education has real value given their immense workloads.

These support systems do not come cheap. Infrastructure costs for facilities, people and the ancillary media, marketing and support groups as well as fund raisers create a high but not absurd overhead for the units.  Despite their absurd levels in football, coaching costs have remained constant at around 18 percent of costs as have administrative costs. Since the programs are all nonprofit and associated with education, what "profits" exist must be reinvested, even if too often in football salaries.

Aside from the glamorous few in the top very rich programs, 98 percent of schools lose money on football but provide an arena for athletes to pursue excellence and passion past a time when most of them would have that opportunity. They make available an education that has immense personal and economic values for those students to take advantage of.

The gut reality is that the average cost invested in any student athlete at a major college is over 78,000 dollars per year. With the exception of maybe 14 teams, all college sports lose money. Providing women's teams involves structural deficits of 4  to 10 million per year. All men's teams with rare exceptions in football and basketball lose money. Most football programs and basketball programs lose money. So the "profit" or "surplus" does not exist except for a very few ultra elite programs.

The one area where the athletic issue of being paid makes strong sense, as Emmert mentioned, is to raise the reimbursement permitted for college athletes to cost of attendance. Right now scholarship calculations cover focus on books, tuition and meals, but has no room for actual living expenses. The formulas systematically underestimate the real live cost of attendance. A number of groups are pushing the NCAA to mandate this as the baseline for scholarships, but  face immense resistance from programs. The poorer programs especially resist this as making it further difficult to complete since they barely survive and must subsidize their programs with student fees, transfers and fund raising as it is. The NCAA should change here because student welfare demands it.

The next time you hear the claim "pay the players," remember this is not about pay, it is about investment and life.

Fan's Dilemma: Love the Team: Disrespect the Coach

I have followed Michigan for years. My years living in Ann Arbor and teaching in the Michigan system marked me as a Michigan fan. I lived through snow howling Michigan/Ohio State games and would sneak into Bo Schembechler's Monday morning press briefings. I endured the taunts of my Washington colleagues when Michigan lost to Washington in the Rose Bowl. I had the immense pleasure of being in the Kingdome when Michigan with the fab five won the NCAA championship .

Watching Michigan's fall over the last decade has been painful. Basketball  never recovered and seems perpetually mired in mediocre hires, scandals, unable to rise to a level of excellence that makes it worthy to watch; but I still root for them. I could follow Michigan with pride and heart break as the football team played excellent football, won a national championship and lost to hated Ohio State five times in a row. Lloyd Carr exemplified an honorable and good college coach who coached well, recruited well and helped his players grow as people, students and athletes. The NFL is seeded with his players.

Now Michigan has scraped through a series of admitted NCAA violations around having too many coaches and excessive conditioning time. I have written about these and the NCAA let them off with a slap but not a punch by extending their probation one more year. They let them off on the critical issue that Coach Rich Rodriquez had created a culture of noncompliance.

The NCAA should have come down harder and let the coach and school off on the technical issue of intent of coach, but the NCAA ignored the negligence of the coach in not even knowing the rules and internal procedures as well as ignoring them. This would not have happened under Carr's watch.  Carr was pushed into involuntary retirement by a craven administration caving  to boosters. Rich Rodriquez emerged as a back up choice after several humiliating turn downs for he school. His philosophy and success at West Virginia with a spread offense never felt like a good fit and as many groused he was definitely not a "Michigan man" meaning an updated version of Schembechler. See Jim Harbough at Stanford for a modern mutation of the archetype.

The problem arises not because the Michigan team team struggles. A good fan stays with their team through winning and losing. The team is starting to win although unevenly, but rather to me the coach does not seem to be an honorable coach. The leaks on conditioning violations came from players. The extra coaches existed under his watch and he denied responsibility, when it is clearly his. With help of his AD, he threw his director of compliance under the bus.

Rodriquez makes clear to his players that playing and conditioning are their first, second and only priority. Professors teaching the football players notice a difference between the new culture under Rodriquez and the old under Carr. Players are essentially penalized for taking academics too seriously.

What does a fan do when the team and school remain an object of loyalty  but the coach does not deserve your respect? Even as Michigan turns around and starts winning, it would still not raise my respect for the coach or assuage my ambivalence about winning. Maybe at Kentucky you can swallow your principles and honor and unabashedly root for a team coached by an untrustworthy climber like Calipari, but I can't. Most Michigan fans prided their team on doing it the right way, on being different in a good way, and they will struggle with the same grudging issue.

So how can a fan handle this dichotomy? I simply cannot root for Michigan to lose so that Rodriquez will get fired for the wrong reasons--he can't win. But I can't really hope they rebound because this means the school will ignore the lack of character and the denial or responsibility and the lack of commitment to academics and keep him on.

When I watch the maize and blue, I root for them. I enjoy the football and color and nutty helmets. I glory in the full big house even though I am not snuggled up with spiked cider against the wind and snow. I am glad when they win, although I mistrust the offense. The real difference is when they lose. I can't get too upset. I sorrow for the young men who play, but don't care about the coaches and have the sense that the University is getting what it deserves, even if the young men are not.

I can only hope Michigan recovers its principles and vision of itself and does the right thing about the wrong coach.

Voices in the Wind: Missing Dave Niehaus & Ernie Harwell

Sound shapes place and time. The prattle of rain,silent whisper of snow, the moody uncertainty of wind, all infuse memory with indelible sense of place and time. Sound along with sight and smell power our memory, and memories build into identity. These realities enshrine the sound of radio broadcasters with memory and significance for many of us. As certain as the call of a robin, rolling baritone voices signaled the clarion of spring. Baseball broadcasters gain a special prominence  because of the sheer length of the season and number of games, 161 meetings a season with them. Baseball's combination of smaller scale and static to sudden movement lends itself to radio with the time and scale to  cover and paint an aural picture. The speed, complexity and movement of the crowded worlds of  football, basketball and hockey fit more with TV.

Last week Dave Niehaus the long time baseball announcer for the Seattle Mariners died, In May 2010 another "voice from the past" disappeared when Ernie Harwell the long time voice of the Detroit Tigers died. Harwell had called Tiger games for 42 years; Niehaus had been the only voice of the Mariners and often the only good thing about the Mariners from their founding in 1977. Both voices called the seasons of my adult life.

Both announcers spoke with sonorous tones that rolled across late spring and summer evening. Both grew up in a world before TV and knew how to create word pictures and deploy the stops, breath, modulation and rhythm of voice alone to convey the strength of a story. Harwell filled the air with a unique eloquence and clarity in creating word pictures. Niehaus wove homespun stories and often hokey but stick in your head metaphors and signatures for home runs and calls. Neither felt cowered by networks constraints to be kind and would let us know when the play "stinks" to use one of Niehaus's favorites.

Their soothing, rhythmic portrayals of baseball etched a special place for me and my friends in the long hot Ann Arbor summers and the weirdly sunny but cool Seattle summers. Life, chaos, hazards, work, children roiled about me and them, but on the way home in the car, or hiding away for a restful moment, or even sharing some time with the kids, the voices of Harwell calling the great Sparkey Anderson teams and Niehaus plodding through endless mediocre seasons with relentless bonhomie threaded and finally being rewarded ith the great Griffey and Ichiro teams filled  my nights and life with something constant for a few hours.


Their voices saturated the air and the sound of summer for me and many like me.Their voices created a social space to enjoy a sport, be with friends and feel like I was visiting with a wonderful raconteur.  When I wonder why I felt such sadness when Harwell died and now Niehaus, I realized I experienced them as friends and companions who shared long evenings over three seasons each year. Their voices shaped and made the seasons as real as the weather and as true as the weather. I miss their voices in the wind.

Don't Ask: Don"t Tell: Football Style

ESPN Magazine published an anonymous panel poll of 85 college players last year. One of the questions revealed that 49% of the football players revealed knowing at least one gay teammate in the locker room. In the PAC-10 the number rose to 70%. No one seemed to mind but none of players could or would reveal the names, and none of the gay players would reveal their orientation.  Now that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates favors eliminating the U.S. military's Don't ask: don't tell policy about homosexuals in the military, maybe it is time for American football to loosen up  its own militant culture of don't ask; don't tell.

Before I go on it is important to remember why don't ask:don't tell  is so problematic. First, the culture it creates forces individuals who desire to serve to hide an essential aspect of their dignity and humanity. These individuals wish to work with others and express loyalty, courage and physical and mental toughness as they master the skills of combat. Yet they must hide and pretend to be other than they are. The position requires them to be either hypocrits or live in denial of their identity. Second, the policy requires that the institution and fellow members live a lie. Fellow teammates know but have to pretend not to know, just to help the survival of the gay person.

Military images saturate football and the sport celebrates its disciplined violence along with loyalty, courage, physical and mental toughness. Players, coaches and broadcasters refer to football players as warriors. Coaches love war and military metaphors to mobilize and train their teams. With its stylized combat, physical risks, violence and uniforms, rhetoric and logistical complexity, football presents itself as a surrogate for war. Early advocates of football in college defended it as preparation for soldiering. I guess it makes an odd sense that a similar culture of abhorrence permeates the informal and formal culture of the sport.

It should come as no surprise to know that as near as I can tell, no active gay football players play football in the United States. In fact only three past NFL players have admitted to being gay. I have searched. While a few courageous young men in college or pro ball may have come out to their teams, I cannot find them. Now this may be the case, but I would bet that a few closeted gay males play football, but cannot announce their sexual orientation because of fear of ostracism, rejection, humiliation and media voyeurism.


A similar version of the military arguments about morale probably reflect the fears that demarcate this football culture so powerfully. Having same sex desire loose in the team and locker room  could disrupt morale and make people uneasy. The theory goes that this untrammeled emotional possibility will  undermine the easy comraderie among players. Amatory possibility could heighten tensions if relationships develop within the team and cut across team loyalty and common focus.

All players, even male players, refer to how they "love these guys" on all sides of the gender line. Love plays a critical part in team cohesion. The amalgam of affection, care, loyalty and commitment to each other grounds teams. Playing with and defending each each other and having each other's back, all grow from a kind  of love. The possiblity of erotic love entering this can cause heatburn and heart ache to players and coaches.

Interestingly women have carved out a level of social and media acceptability for lesbians within the sports world. Pioneers like Billy Jean King and Martina Navratilova with great public courage first broke barriers in tennis, but players of diverse sexual orientation inhabit many women's sports as players and coaches. Notice the first declared  pioneers broke the barriers in inidividual, not team sports, just as the few males have come out in individual sports.

Female and male archetypes may play some role in the level of acceptance. Women athletes move into a traditionally male dominated domain and express virtues normally associated with masculinity such as physical toughness and endurance and team loyalty and courage on behalf of each other. This movement across archetypes from feminine to masculine perhaps make it easier for women who express masculine virtues to act like or take on male personas in their relationships.

For men, the archetypes cut the other way. The American male language of insult and excoriation deploys anti-gay language as an insult to masculinity. Faggots and associated insults impute physical, emotional and mental weakness. The merciless teasing of young gay males drives this lesson home. The media and so called gay friendly shows heighten the flamboyant or feminine edge of male homosexuality. So a male athlete who is gay not only confronts the cultural taboos and potential ostracism by team members, but confronts a deep archetype that if they are gay, they embody a form of feminine weakness and lack of physical courage.

The gay football player or gay team athlete confronts two hurdles. The phalanx of possible opposition from their teammates and coach based upon fears and distortions of the emotional relations that undergird their cohesion. Second, they transgress and challenge archetypes in American society about what constitutes male and female virtues and identities. No wonder they don't seem to exist.

In women's sports the power of pathfinders broke these archetypes apart. The great success of women's sports has been to dethrone reigning and confining notions of what feminine consisted of.  While starting in individual sports, gay female athletes proved that cohesion, commitment and team loyalty can coexist with love and different gender orientations. Workers in offices and teams prove this every day around the country.

 Don't ask:don't tell does not mean fellow athletes don't know. The culture just means everyone must play a costly and hypocritical game of  of denying each other's full humanity in the interest of maintaining an illusion of manhood. It is too much to ask young athletes to come out on their own, but the beginning may lie with their teammates  knowing, accepting and supporting. Only that change will lower the barriers to athletes being able to be themselves with dignity.

Flowing Beer & Clouds of Smoke: Sport and Community

By a very circuitous route of daughter and boyfriend, I ended up rooting for the San Francisco Giants in the World Series. And by freaks of nature and talent, they won! Iwould text back and forth with my daughter as the games wore on without the normal torture. Lo and behold I ended up rooting for a World Series Champion. Now Tim Lincecum has urged me to celebrate San Francisco style with "flowing beer and clouds of smoke."

As people lined up for 36 hours to get a place for the parade I enjoyed the celebration for the Giants and the region around San Francisco. 54 years is a long time to wait. Even more I enjoyed watching how a winning team can bring together a community.

It heartens me to know that a community that can be suffocatingly politically correct can revel in sport gaiety. The irony of political correctness, of course, is that if it works as a formal cultural constraint, it permits a much greater degree of diversity to flourish under its sometimes self-righteous banners. Anyone who knows San Francisco knows that you can find Halloween any night of the year on its streets, so the game did not need to be played on Halloween in SF.

But beneath the cosmopolitan city, and amid the burgeoning craziness and energy of its wild diversity, baseball brought together the various strains ethnic, cultural, gendered, class and whatever other categories we need. It created a social opportunity and space for all the denizens of  the city to enjoy themselves  with the quality of the team, but also with the quality of the players.

Unlike the corporate Yankees or the really corporate NFL that permits little deviation in acceptable public persona, baseball, like its ball parks, still permits a remarkable degree of individuality to flourish. On winning teams energized cultures will pick up mantras or identify avatars--remember Johnny Damon's prophetic beard and the bus signs, "What Would Johnny Do?" in Boston? I still wonder "what would Johnny do?" Anyway,  when he went to New York, he had to cut his hair and beard, so much for the prophet and the World Series was just not as interesting or fun.

Well the Giants brought back both with abundance. The Rangers were powered by great stories like the redemption tale of Josh Hamilton, Benji Molina's revenge and the laser  zen efficiency of Cliff Lee, but the Giants were powered by sheer weirdness.

A 23 year old catcher who looks 12 brought up at mid-season grows into a backbone star. A tortuous capacity to make games close and turn easy victories into excruciating adventures roiled games all year. A 21 year old pitcher who looks 16 pitched with preternatural calm. A panda bear exemplified my son's claim that baseball players simply do not look like athletes. And only the fans could take a meaningless corporate slogan, "magic inside" and turn it into signs painted "torture inside." And only San Francisco could turn flagellation into a joy, "we love the torture" said one sign. I get it, I think.

Players destined for heaps or where-ever unwanted baseball players end up like Edgar Renteria or Aubrey Huff have redemptive seasons all at the same time. While it is hard to beat the magic jeweled thong that Huff wore to ensure victory,  Fear the Beard  became a cultural rallying cry for the fans. Brian Wilson, the Giant's closer's beard can't really match Damon's, but Wilson's oracular pronouncements, fierceness and proclivity for creating jams and then escaping them added more fun to the torture. Wilson's antics spawned his own mini-industry in fake beards. Then, of course,  (truth in advertising I served as FAR when Tim Lincecum pitched at Washington), The Freak. If you add his hair to Wilson's beard, you do get Johnny Damon!

The Giants won with superb pitching and career years from journeyman players. The crown jewel of their pitching does not look like a pitcher, even when he's pitching--all arms, and elbows and ergonomically insane angles. Long greasy hair, bow ties, marihuana problems, and two Cy Youngs in his first four years. Lincecum gave an ease and edge to a team that patterned its own identity around its mismatched parts and slightly nutty mainstays. You can do this when you are winning and you can do this when you have Sanchez and Posey and others to offset Lincecum and Wilson.

Winning makes it possible. You can take what might be problems when you are losing--recalcitrant pitchers, close games, closers who come close to blowing games, mediocre hitting that does not come in the clutch--and  laugh and joke about them when you are winning. It all changes if you lose. Momentum and winning turn irritations into cute, even irresistible. Winning  turns heartburn into posters and fake beards.

I enjoyed this series because there were no bad guys. Both teams were good guys, so the good guys won. But the good guys brought along a great city with them and generated some fine madness, just what we all need before an La Nina winter.

Let"s Ban Cheerleaders from Women's Sports

A long time ago I took my daughter to her first women's basketball game. I wanted to expose her to a sport I loved and give her an idea of how young women can play a sport with strength, intensity and beauty. She loved the game and squealed and yelled and devoured food. When we got home she excitedly told her lawyer mom, "I want to be one of the girls that wears the cute dresses." Needless to say, my wife was not pleased that I had inspired my daughter to aspire to be a cheerleader.

I still go to women's athletics events and endure cheerleaders on the side. Yelling, twirling, wearing very short skirts and bare midriffs, and hunky guys who hold them up after they kick and grind and unveil rictus smiles to the crowd. Cheerleaders at women's games make no sense. They parade an alternative definition of women projecting sexualized supporting objects on the sidelines. If you want you can go to the site "hottest girls of cheerleading" to comparison shop.

Women's sports exists to provide an arena for young women to excel in areas of body and space denied them in the past but now open to them. It expands the definition of physical and moral attributes available to women. Young women who play sports develop strengths and self images not available in the normal course to women thirty years ago except as pathfinders and outliers. Now sports and its excellence exist as a normal aspiration from the age of five on.

So why do we continue to parade cheerleaders on the sidelines? It makes a distorted sense that they shout and pout on the sides during men's basketball games with its preening ego exalted  show boat  ethos. How nice to have supportive little women on the sidelines. And of course they seem to belong amid the militarized splendor of football with its ultra-montane exaggeration of male violence and swaggering corporate dedication to gaining TV exposure. Having cute girls (sorry I mean young women) on the sidelines bumping, grinding, yelling and doing whatever diluted hooker moves are allowed these days, all fit with the spectacle. They shouldn't be there, but they are. I once asked a very thoughtful senior female administrator why we still have cheerleaders. She looked at me and said, "marketing, marketing pure and simple, look at the demographics." She was not smiling.

OK. I get it, but it makes no emotional or moral sense to have this alternative vision of  girls (sorry I mean young women) can be co-existing with the proud secure accomplished women of college athletics.

The terrible irony here is that the cheerleaders are there because of Title Nine. If the men's basketball team gets the band; the women's basketball team should get the band. If men's basketball teams get spandex encased dancers; women's teams get dancers. If men's team's get cheerleaders, then women's teams should have cheerleaders.  The logic makes a bizarre sort of sense, but women cheerleaders mock the deep intent of Title Nine.

Let's just get rid of them.

Mascot Wars II: End of the Rebel Colonel

I was sitting in the stands barking along with 10,000 other people one day and wondered why I was sitting surrounded by perfectly rational adults and not so rational students barking? Of course the answer is perfectly rational--WE are HUSKIES--so we bark for the team! We also wave our arms up and down to rhythms and have a secret W hand sign, sort of like "Live Long and Prosper," only harder. We become extensions of Huskies to assert our unity with each other and with our teams.

Coaches use avatars as a focus for their teams. Huskies, Wolverine, Beavers, Gators provide an endless list. The avatars embody values such as courage and endurance and loyalty and destruction (think Idaho Vandals) that good coaches roll into a culture and aspiration for team identity. This explains why the ironic anti-avatars of the sixties campuses remain such abominations, "slime like a banana slug" or "stretch like a gooey duck?"

Avatars and their corrupted cousin, mascots, do matter for the identity of the team and the identification of the fans. This means picking one or affirming one does matter in a communal and moral sense. The latest change occurred at University of Mississippi who retired the controversial rebel colonel and replaced him with the Rebel Bear.

The replacement of the colonel reflects a long discussion the state of Mississippi has had with itself and its black citizens about its relationship to the "lost noble cause" of the civil war fought to repel northern cultural aggression and of course to end slavery. Two decade long contentious battles over eliminating the confederate flag and rebel yells from the campus and games reflect this. Of course it becomes more complicated when the majority of the football and basketball players who now represent proud ol'Miss. are black players.

The colonel has a long history with the fans both with his romantic fetish of the noble cause, the iconic gentlema/soldier of southern imagination and as a social fetish where Mississippi alums and students hold their own outdoor summer dress parties and age old  keggers. The school informally prides itself upon its ability to hold a party; "we may lose a game, but we never lose a party," as the saying goes.

The school set in beautiful Oxford got it pretty much right in the end. They kept the name "Rebels"and had a plebiscite where students, faculty and fans could vote. They kept the colonel off the ballot despite a backlash. A strong majority voted for the bear.

The process has been slow and sometimes ugly but the decision to go with the bear reflected both a local totem, much like a badger or wolverine, and links itself resolutely to one of its greatest citizens writer William Faulkner and his harrowing story "The Bear." So the school has an avatar true to the spirit of a real avatar with noble virtues and tribal ability to align with its strength and power as well as one grounded in its regional history with deeper literary resonance, a tradition Mississippi has always prided itself upon.

This one did not require court cases but it did grow from the civil rights movement. The length of the controversy and depth of the emotions remind us again that avatars for teams reflect more than cute mascots to sell merchandise. This change arose from a complex renegotiation of identity with its past and coming to terms with a new reality of a multi-racial campus and world.