The Sandusky Verdict and the Limits of Team Culture

The guilty verdict on Jerry Sandusky for 45 counts of child abuse confirms what we all knew. It also confirms Sandusky’s invincible denial and rationalizations that matches the patterns of most abusers. But Sandusky’s now legally established guilt only reinforces the institutional moral lessons about how dangerous team culture can be to moral integrity.

High achievement in professional fields including sports usually requires successful teams. Sports teams exemplify this reality but it lives in any team at any level of public or private sector. It ranges from the immensity of the Manhattan Project to snow removal. Yet, as Sandusky’s case shows, the dynamics of high achieving teams can lead teams to deny, tolerate or hide immense moral evil in the name of the team.

First, every team produces imbedded authority. At the simplest level members internalize values and commitments to each other. This commitment to each other reinforces and circles back on a commitment to achieve a common purpose. Team members self-censor and do not violate team norms.

Second, internalizing norms proceeds hand in hand with deferring to authority and leaders. Successful sports teams understand that execution depends upon deference to coaches, who recruit team members, socialize them and can cut them for not meeting expectations. In college and high school, the power of coaches to determine the moral and behavioral expectations of players is immense. This is reinforced by the player’s commitments to a common goal.

Teams commit to a mission. This does not require committing to each other, but grows into this on the field and practice. Goal commitment obliges players to get along in practice, the locker room and on the field.

Teammates learn as a matter of course to “live with” the idiosyncrasies and even grossness of other players or coaches. Everyone has idiosyncrasies from the way their sweat smells or how they fart to their behavior off field or dating habits. Players and teammates school themselves to get along with this. They may make jokes about it, but they stuff it for the mission of winning.

These differences can be obvious like race, ethnicity or geography or very personal. It might involve player’s life off field and how they treat partners or their gender preferences. Fellow players will tolerate or simply ignore differences and problems with players who may be jerks or violent or assholes as long as it does not enter the locker room or impact performance. Teammates shrug, “it’s just Manny being Manny,” but they often will not socialize with the idiots.

This goes doubly for coaches and authority figures. The coaches may scream, yell and even abuse players, but they possess huge authority and often grudging respect if they “know their shit.” 

School or club coaches often turn teams into almost family units with care and attention lavished on their players. In college many players were recruited and courted by a coach as well as and developed by a coach.  Even then, on the road players can see coaches misbehaving sometimes, either drinking, womanizing or violating team norms. They may dislike it and resent it, but they will put up with it and keep it silent for the team.

In these tight knit groups, peer authority and identity can be so strong that people can literally miss what they see or reinterpret what they see. Social psychology research is replete with cases where individuals will stifle their own moral initiative under peer pressure or literally realign what they saw to bring into line their perceptions with their beliefs.

This is how Sandusky could get away with his abuse for so long. His actions may seem weird and strange, but if it happens enough, it normalizes his deviance. So bringing along teenage “guests” to practice or road games where the “guests” sleep in his room becomes just “Jerry being Jerry.”

It took a lot of moral courage, maybe all he had, for Mike McQueary to acknowledge to himself that he really did see the coach who recruited and trained him and worked with him raping a young boy in the shower. I imagine his whole body and mind screamed to deny or reinterpret whatever he saw.

But McQueary did see it and fought the temptation to ignore or reinterpret it. He reported it to his revered coach, Joe Paterno, a man who could have ended it all in a microsecond if he had listened or acted. Mike McQueary may not have done enough but he did what most team members cannot do. He reported evil; he snitched; he had the level of self-honesty to see the truth. His testimony at the trial provided independent adult corroboration for the sordid remembrances of the young men who had to dredge up painful and conflicted memories of Sandusky’s embraces.

Penn State is desperately working to eliminate the scandal and rewrite history. The stadium will not be renamed after Paterno, not for lack of trying. The school is tenderly approaching the victims about settlements. They painted out Jerry Sandusky from the famous mural with Penn State players and coaches, rather like 1984. Now they have replaced the blanked out portrait of Sandusky with a leader in the fight against child abuse.

But rewriting history will not be enough here. If new CNN reports are accurate, then the athletic Director Mike Curry and the Vice President Gary Shultz actually planned to report the incident as required by law. But a discussion with Paterno changed the Vice President’s mind. According to CNN, his email stated, he decided to talk to Sandusky and limit his access. "This is a more humane and upfront way to handle this.” They essentially did nothing. Sandusky continued to use Penn State facilities, continued to be free to abuse and continued to use his Penn State status to legitimize his cultivation and grooming of young victims.

One final point, most teams develop a no snitch rule. Not snitching lies deep in any committed group identity; it exists as strongly as “I’ve got your back.” No snitching makes perfect sense because team members do not want to reveal the strategies, skills or training that give a team its identity and strengths. Not snitching prevents opponents from knowing a team’s weaknesses or fissures.

I have watched investigations of teams where a fight had occurred at a party and thirty team members saw the fight. Some tried to break it up, others urged people on, but under investigation no one saw it and no one would reveal a word about not only about who started it but also who fought, period. A wall of denial faced team and department leaders trying to figure it out.  Teams stand together even to hide the bad.

Combine no snitch with the denial and culture of living with the gross stuff, and Sandusky’s actions reveal writ large the horrible mutations that the good of teams can produce.

What the Fiesta Bowl Scandal Reveals about College Football II

So why did the Fiesta emerge to become one of the four BCS bowls?

Well years of cultivating local and national politicians gave it a very strong political base. Years of lavish gifts and trips and junkets with the BCS elite oiled relations but the piece de resistance grew into the Fiesta Frolics.

Recently renamed the staid sounding “The Fiesta Bowl Spring College Football Seminar,” the Fiesta Frolics grew into a notorious and bloated celebration, networking and sponsorship boondoggle. The Fiesta Bowl for twenty years invited every major AD and staff at all the major football schools, every football coach, all the major Conference Commissioners and staff to meet in Phoenix for a three day orgy, I mean meeting. The attendees paid for transportation, but the Fiesta put them up at the best resorts, paid for two days of golf and gave spa certificates to them and spouses. Nike, ESPN and other “corporate partners” hovered like flies providing endless free food, recreation and networking.  A few meetings occurred—I actually used to attend budget meetings linked to the Frolics—but the key lay in the relentless schmoozing and lobbying that yellow blazered Fiesta Officials did. The Frolics became the unofficial national meeting of Athletic Directors, coaches and Commissioners. More attended the Frolics than the NCAA convention and more business actually occurred there. Last year the Fiesta Frolics cost 1.3 million dollars in nonprofit funds.

Networking, business, free gift bags from NIKE and ESPN at every room, and endless food, entertainments and Fiesta marketing—this won the Fiesta bowl its status.

The Fiesta created the prototype of a corporate city driven device to market the city and bring money into the region. It worked. It at least has a semblance of community connections, more than the Cotton or Sugar now have. It paved the way for the endless number of ESPN inspired TV fodder bowls that proliferate now.

Players enjoy them, as I have written about, and coaches love the two extra week of practice the bowls grant them. Going to a bowl can even be a motive to get players to attend to studies in season because they cannot go now if they are no academically eligible.

The Fiesta Bowl did not stint on to whom it gave money to. Both Arizona US Senators, the Governor, two members of the House of Representatives, the Secretary of State and the President of the Arizona Senate are beneficiaries of the $46,000 in illegal campaign contributions over ten years.

Given the politics of the BCS as a quasi monopoly and its relations to the bowls, it makes sense that the Fiesta would try to figure out a way to influence politicians. To be honest, it probably did not need to give money given how many free gifts and trips and tickets it sumptuously provided civic and political leaders for twenty years.

So the Fiesta lessons expose the slick world of moneyed relations and networking that dominate college football and media right now. I have long disliked the idea of a national championship and view the NCAA March Madness with equal parts horror and wonder, but a football version might be preferable to the insidious moneyed corruption that winds around modern bowl politics.

But besides it success at creating and mastering the modern world of bowl and sponsorship complicity and collusion, the Fiesta Bowl teaches a deeper lesson about corruption and unaccountability.

Remember intercollegiate sports are grounded in nonprofit finances. The Fiesta Bowl really consists of four separate nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits have a privileged and unique status in America. Their status and respect go back to DeToqueville’s characterization of American as a country of associations and joiners.

Many modern nonprofits are not just philanthropic organizations that receive donations and provide services needed by the community. Many now sponsor or launch projects that generates revenue such as film festivals, art festivals, refurbishing, or housing projects.

The nonprofit Fiesta Bowl provides a service and product designed to improve the economic and social welfare and visibility of the state of Arizona. Its constitution touts that it provides maximum payout to provide money for education. The Fiesta Bowl epitomizes a modern profitable nonprofit. The profits are not distributed to shareholders, but often gobbled up by the senior officials and the sleek events associated with creating partnerships and sponsorships. Every contribution, every junket, every fancy meal or golf trip could be defended by Fiesta officials as business related to the building artful relations that sustained the enterprise.

Fiesta’s long-time Director John Junker drove and created the Fiesta Bowl and to achieve his ends helped create the modern bowl world. This world builds on relations and networks that he assiduously cultivated and worked for twenty years. Most of the gifts given at Thanksgiving or the donations from the Fiesta Bowl came from him and were charged on his credit cards. In fact the Fiesta Bowl paid all his credit card bills and then tried to recoup whatever money it thought might be “persona’” versus business. It did not help that he did not keep receipts for many of his questionable activities.

What happened here in this cocooned world of nonprofit success and privilege happens everywhere unaccountable and secret power and deals flourish. Junker began to treat the Fiesta Bowl as his own fiefdom, and the Board of Trustees, like many boards of large corporations, fed his benefits and never questioned him because of his success.

The portrait is familiar to anyone who followed the Red Cross scandals or the scandals around high living corporate leaders. He and his spouse drove rich cars provided by Fiesta. Fiesta contributed money to his favorite Catholic charities; Fiesta bought several expensive golf memberships and subsidized family trips. It paid for business trips to strip clubs where money was spent on lap dances. It paid tens of thousands of dollars for a special 50^th birthday party where the guests were flow to Pebble Beach for three days. I could go on, but unaccountable power, whether nonprofit or for profit, breeds personal and institutional corruption.

The corruption scales to tyrannical coaches in AAU teams creating their own nonprofits to extort money from basketball coaches to athletic directors who lie sleek life styles to coaches who rule mini-kingdoms that no one questions until they get caught or lose.

The Fiesta scandal is swiftly being swept under the rug by the NCAA and BCS because they are all complicit. It reminds us again that the NCAA has no effective control over the bowls and cannot gain it because of restraint of trade issues. So the bowl world will continue, and as long as the BCS continues its quasi-monopoly pretensions the sleaze that infects college bowl life will continue.

What the Fiesta Bowl Scandal Reveals about College Football I

The Fiesta Bowl scandal continues to run its course. The NCAA punted and let them off with a wrist slap. The BCS expressed outrage, fined them a few bucks and let them remain a BCS bowl. Now the politicians who took illegal campaign contributions from a nonprofit refuse to give their money back. Each revelation adds to the report on the Fiesta Bowl commissioned by the Board of Directors and published one month ago. The whole story excavates the sordid modern football bowl landscape.

The Fiesta Bowl is the prototype of modern bowls. For over half a century the Rose, Orange, Sugar and Cotton dominated the bowl landscape. Mythical national championships were fought out in media and only by accident occurred. The bowls were anchored in the conferences, and conference champions played out in the bowls.

The original bowls were not pure creations, what is in the America? They arose from city and trade boosters looking for ways to sell their cities and products and boost local visibility, civic pride and wealth. The truest and longest existing of them remains the Rose Bowl sponsored by Pasadena, not LA. The Rose really does have thousands of volunteers who work year around to put on not only the bowl, but a unique and old spectacle, the Rose Parade.

I have watched hundreds of volunteers painstakingly pasting one petal at a time for the magnificent floats, many from cities, but more and more from corporations and now even countries. The parade still boasts local bands and drum and bugle corps and rodeo groups. It hybridizes a deep American tradition with modern corporate sponsorship run amuck. The Rose Bowl remains the only bowl with deep roots in the community and huge numbers of long-term volunteers who make it happen each year.

The Fiesta Bowl changed the landscape in a big way. As the internal report says it “elbowed” its way into a major bowl and finally became, against all odds, one of the major BCS bows that rotate the national championship. It still rankles the Cotton Bowl folks when it shot past many older and even local anchored bowls to gain that honor.

The scandal arose from the way the Fiesta Bowl fought and bought its way into the top ranks. Make no mistake, the Fiesta success did not happen by accident. If you read the Constitutions of the Fiesta bowl and its Insight Bowl appendage, you find a clear corporate mission to build national recognition and presence for the bowl and the city of Phoenix and Arizona. In  2006-07 the combination of Insight, Fiesta and National Champion bowls brought over 400 million dollars to the city and state.

How did the Fiesta Bowl do this? Well first it is a nonprofit so it escapes many legal constraints and reporting constraints upon private enterprises. Second, it formed deep partnerships with the political and economic development and business establishments of Arizona. It spread the wealth around so everyone had a stake.

In classic style, it regularly subsidized trips for senior politicians to go for “education” purposes to see other teams play in Chicago or Dallas or Boston. A Boston trip ended up costing over 54,000 dollars and putting up senior Arizona politicians in the Ritz Carlton and wining and dining them for three days while watching BC play V-Tech This trip, like many before, “educates” leaders about the role, importance and selection of teams. The Fiesta ensured that every local leader got access to good seats and events.

The world of bowls and college athletics runs on relations. The Fiesta Bowl raised the bar to levels unseen by other bowls. In a typical year, the bowl would send Thanksgiving gifts, such as exotic flow bouquets, to every BCS AD and Conference Commissioner. Memorial contributions to charities were funneled to commemorate deceased wives or children of major BCS figures such as coaches or athletic directors.

All of this money and effort and contributions was driven by the desire to “stay on the good side” of major actors in college sports.  The Fiesta bowl schmoozed and codoodled and greased relations across the spectrum of college sports.

As the old bowl system collapsed and new bowls grew like weeds, ESPN ensured the death knell of the small oligarchic world of bowls and college conferences. Fiesta wooed TV as powerfully as it wooed the rest of the college sports establishment. It understood before anyone else that bowls now would be product placement opportunities, and their value lay in TV exposure and as TV windows, not being a community tradition. Tradition mattered nothing compared to TV exposure and wealth.

So the Fiesta Bowl elbowed aside the rickety and broke Cotton and ignored the languishing Sugar and erupted as a preeminent bowl with Orange and Rose. The creation of the BCS eliminated the conference connections and essentially doomed the Sugar to irrelevance. The demise of the conferences the made the Cotton matter left more room for the Fiesta to rise in the ranks. The Rose remained true and pure and the P-10 and B-10 tried to keep the tradition and spirit of bowl rivalries and conference connections alive, but they failed. Fiesta barged into this vacuum to become the preeminent TV BCS bowl.

Part II will look at how this happened and how it spawned the scandal.