What Should a Student Athlete Graduate Look Like Part II

Graduating from college is no guarantee of a job, and this applies to students athletes as well as most college graduates. The modern economy has made clear that getting a job is much harder than graduating from college, and many colleges are struggling to connect career preparation with traditional university generalist education. One of the major changes in higher education in the last twenty years has been the increasing importance for experience based learning of internships, extra-curricular activities or service learning or in experience based labs and exercises

We also have to remember the baseline entry level will shape the baseline of the graduates. The exact level of skill and exacting rigor and reasoning capacity may be tied to the mission of the university and level of commitment by the student body at large including student athletes. I don't’ expect the quality of knowledge and skill on average of many state college open admission students to match that of an elite private student graduate, but I do expect it to match strong standards of writing, reasoning and competence needed by business and life paths.

The vast majority of student athletes graduate at rates comparable or above similarly situated populations at their universities. This has been the great unheralded success of the NCAA and college athletics over the last twenty years. 

Graduating surveys support that graduating student athletes possess comparable levels of skills in the first three areas to their peers. Few university graduates master the professional path. It is even rarer to master the professional path given how hard it is for student athletes to get the advanced class requirements given their travel schedules.

I also want to acknowledge the real challenge that colleges face in bringing in a number of special admits each year to play athletics. Many of them are minority athletes from low social economic status backgrounds. Many come from broken urban or rural high schools and have not received the resource investment or education to be prepared for college level classes.

These special admits are admitted in clear knowledge that the admitted student does not fit the academic profile of regularly admitted students. These special admitted students will need strong academic and personal support the first two years to become a viable college students with their reading, reasoning analytic, math and class room skills.

These students come in identifying as athletes and aspiring to become professionals. Their reading levels may hover around 10^th grade and they have grown up seeing themselves as academic failures and athletic successes. The amazing thing is that with strong support from staff, a strategic academic plan over two years and relentless pressure from coaches linking their ability to play to their performance in the classroom, the vast majority of these special admits can grow into viable academic students as well as athletic students. Colleges are now graduating minority student athletes at record high levels after twenty years of sustained effort and making it in coaches’ interests to get athletes to class and move towards degrees. I don’t want to romanticize this, a large number of schools still need to bring up the graduating level of their minority basketball and football players.

The key lies in strong investment in academic and social support for this development and unremitting coaching support. The NCAA reforms are all aimed at changing coaches’ incentives to put more effort into pushing academics and invest in robust academic support.

The Broader Case for Student Athletes

Here I want to make a case about what college athletics can also achieve. Many students learn the most in their internships, extra-curriculars or service learning or in experience based labs and exercises.  I would make the case that student athlete graduates possess not only the three academic dimensions but have gained other vital capacities that will stand them in good stead for life and careers.

Here are four vital skill sets that student athletes graduates often have gained.

1)   Goal setting, self-discipline and time-management are inbred into the process of being a successful athletic student.

2)   Cooperation, self-sacrifice and team coordination and commitment are ingrained in athletic team competition.

3)   Sophisticated pattern recognition of situations that develop in real time. Athletes must master complicated patterns of play and real time opposition and understand, integrate and deploy this perceptual skill.

4)  Taking responsibility and making decisions that have real time consequences based upon the pattern recognition while under intense stress. This real world acclimation to deploying knowledge and judgment under competitive stress infuses all athletic activity.

The data on the cognitive and emotional attributes of athletes supports the maturing of student athletes in these areas. I found one of my greatest hopes and frustrations was getting students who are athletes to understand how these athletic driven attributes transfer to the academic classroom and to the life they will face after college. When young student athletes figure this out, their lives change profoundly. 

I cannot emphasize enough how much this second set of attributes depends upon a high and moral quality of coaching, the type that the recent Rutger's scandal illuminates what should not happen. 

I believe that if the student athlete graduates from college and if the combined endeavor of the athlete and the college have achieved three of the four outcomes above, then colleges have done justice to the student athletes and vice versa.

I also believe that the value added attributes generated from athletic participation enrich and deepen the quality of the person who graduates from college.

What Should a Student Athlete Graduate Look Like--Parts I & II

The NCAA defense of the concept of student athlete drives the immense efforts and progress college athletics has made over the last decade in increasing the graduation rates of student athletes. This increase has occurred in all areas and also led to pronounced increases in graduation rates of minority athletes as well as athletes in revenue sports. This progress is by no means perfect and requires constant pressure on schools and recruiting. The NCAA assumes that if a person graduates from the school, then the college has achieved the purpose that it sets for all entering students—a college graduate.

I want to discuss what this ideal of graduating from college looks like for a student athlete to see if it makes sense. Most media critics of the NCAA seem to assume that no student athletes graduate and that their degree is meaningless. This gives credence to their claims that the system is a “plantation” and based on “exploitation” because the student athlete, beyond playing what they love for four years, gains nothing of lasting value.

What should a graduated student athlete look like?

We need to remember that American higher education exists at many levels from private colleges to state comprehensive or open enrollment universities to R1 world-class research institutions. Each set of schools has different missions and different graduation rates. 

Students coming from well off homes and attending good private colleges may graduate at rates of 90 percent over a 6 year period while students coming from wildly diverse homes to open enrollment comprehensive state schools may graduate over six year period at 40 percent rates.  The NCAA covers all these rates, but reasonable rates across all levels suggest that strong state schools—which can be a proxy for NCAA colleges, will graduate students at the rate from 50-65%. This is a simple rate where you take the number of students who enter at a given year and divide it by the number who have graduated six years later. This simple division rate is what the federal government uses for its graduation rate numbers. This “target” rate drives the NCAA’s own efforts to graduate student athletes at the rates normal students graduate. The NCAA ideal would be to have student athletes graduate at an 80 percent rate.

This simple federal rate does not capture the complexity of student lives. While few students flunk out of the modern universities, many drop out from lack of money or lack of motivation or they transfer. Many drop out for a while and come back later.

Schools know simple 6-year averages do not capture the true reality especially at large schools serving diverse populations where the path to completing college can be nonlinear. This same issue impacts college athletes in a powerful way. Simply measuring the number of athletes who enter a class and those who graduate 6 years later tells you very little for two reasons.

1)   Many student athletes transfer and move on to graduate from other schools. In sports like men’s basketball the transfer rate can be over 30 percent. The federal rate misses this while NCAA numbers positively account for a transfer who graduates. 

2)   A very few student athletes leave to become professional athletes. This is not the norm but afflicts a few elite institutions. The effect is mitigated in baseball and football by rules made by professional teams who do not draft players until they have at least three years of college. Given the modern emphasis upon summer school classes and progress towards degree, a student athlete at the end of three years is often very close to graduation and well ensconced in a major. The NCAA does not penalize a school who leaves in good standing to play professional ball. 

As a membership organization the NCAA tries to respect the autonomy of different schools with different missions. The schools demand that autonomy. The NCAA gives schools immense freedom on their classes and graduation requirements but requires markers to ensure student athletes make reasonable progress toward graduation. This seeks to avoid past scandal where schools could go years without graduating their players.

What Graduates Should Know

Let’s get down and dirty and ask what a college graduate should possess and whether a graduated student athletes possess this. I believe we want to see several outcomes from any college graduate:

1)            They can read, write and reason. This is the bottom line of college, and many fine state universities face high school populations who possess real deficits in their ability to read and comprehend advanced prose, or reason and express it in writing. 

This miscarried outcome of modern high school education wounds the capacity of many college freshmen to reason or write clearly. Universities around the country have scaled down introductory writing and expanded writing requirements to adapt to this shortfall bringing students up to higher writing and reasoning levels. The reading and writing ultimately are means to a deeper end, the trained capacity to reason about problems.

2)            Students know basic math and can deploy sensible math including statistics skills to understand the world around them and use it to budget their lives and understand the realities of business and government. This remains the most fundamental failure of modern American education. Universities around the country have scaled down math requirements deal with the mathmatically illiterate populations they get from high schools. With the exception of technical professions that require strong mathematical literacy, modern higher education struggles to secure reasonable proficiency in applied math or statistics or even spread sheet math required by so much of modern life. Colleges strive for this but are floundering in achieving it for all their students.

3)            Reading, writing and math literacy—sound familiar? These should provide the basis for a college student to enter a major—a selected area where a student masters a field of knowledge and can solve problems within it using the technical and language based skills of the field. Many majors such as sociology, my own political science, anthropology, English literature, history etc. teach a student to reason about issues and integrate reading and analysis, but not necessarily practical mathematics, to engage serious problems. 

None of these majors guarantees a job or job preparation. 

Many social sciences and humanities rank very low on some the job preparation scales. Good majors provide the chance for students to become educated individuals capable of thinking through issues, reasoning about them, communicating their reasoning and writing about them. These skills contribute to multiple career and life paths.  Some majors such as economics, applied math, or modern empirical psychology provide a level of mathematical and analytical competence that can be deployed in many professional paths that differ from the reasoning and analysis of many social sciences and humanities.

4)           Professional competence that prepares students to leave school and enter into a professional career path. This is a more rare outcome, and the vast majority of college students do not pursue this route. Students, however, who enter engineering programs, science programs or information science or computer science for example can achieve this as they can in applied humanities such as design or art or theater programs.  Business schools offer undergraduate degrees but with the exception of accounting, most of the “skills” tend to be softer and lead to less efficacious reasoning outcomes than anticipated.

I think any student athlete who graduates as a true student must meet categories 1 through 3 at least—in this they would join the vast majority of American undergraduates.

Graduating from college is no guarantee of a job, and this applies to students athletes as well as most college graduates. The modern economy has made clear that getting a job is much harder than graduating from college, and many colleges are struggling to connect career preparation with traditional university generalist education. One of the major changes in higher education in the last twenty years has been the increasing importance for experience based learning of internships, extra-curricular activities or service learning or in experience based labs and exercises

We also have to remember the baseline entry level will shape the baseline of the graduates. The exact level of skill and exacting rigor and reasoning capacity may be tied to the mission of the university and level of commitment by the student body at large including student athletes. I don't’ expect the quality of knowledge and skill on average of many state college open admission students to match that of an elite private student graduate, but I do expect it to match strong standards of writing, reasoning and competence needed by business and life paths.

The vast majority of student athletes graduate at rates comparable or above similarly situated populations at their universities. This has been the great unheralded success of the NCAA and college athletics over the last twenty years. 

Graduating surveys support that graduating student athletes possess comparable levels of skills in the first three areas to their peers. Few university graduates master the professional path. It is even rarer to master the professional path given how hard it is for student athletes to get the advanced class requirements given their travel schedules.

I also want to acknowledge the real challenge that colleges face in bringing in a number of special admits each year to play athletics. Many of them are minority athletes from low social economic status backgrounds. Many come from broken urban or rural high schools and have not received the resource investment or education to be prepared for college level classes.

These special admits are admitted in clear knowledge that the admitted student does not fit the academic profile of regularly admitted students. These special admitted students will need strong academic and personal support the first two years to become a viable college students with their reading, reasoning analytic, math and class room skills.

These students come in identifying as athletes and aspiring to become professionals. Their reading levels may hover around 10^th grade and they have grown up seeing themselves as academic failures and athletic successes. The amazing thing is that with strong support from staff, a strategic academic plan over two years and relentless pressure from coaches linking their ability to play to their performance in the classroom, the vast majority of these special admits can grow into viable academic students as well as athletic students. 

Colleges are now graduating minority student athletes at record high levels after twenty years of sustained effort and making it in coaches’ interests to get athletes to class and move towards degrees. I don’t want to romanticize this, a large number of schools still need to bring up the graduating level of their minority basketball and football players.

The key lies in strong investment in academic and social support for this development and unremitting coaching support. The NCAA reforms are all aimed at changing coaches’ incentives to put more effort into pushing academics and invest in robust academic support.

The Broader Case for Student Athletes

Here I want to make a case about what college athletics can also achieve. Many students learn the most in their internships, extra-curriculars or service learning or in experience based labs and exercises.  I would make the case that student athlete graduates possess not only the three academic dimensions but have gained other vital capacities that will stand them in good stead for life and careers.

Here are four vital skill sets that student athletes graduates often have gained.

1)   Goal setting, self-discipline and time-management are inbred into the process of being a successful athletic student.

2)   Cooperation, self-sacrifice and team coordination and commitment are ingrained in athletic team competition.

3)   Sophisticated pattern recognition of situations that develop in real time. Athletes must master complicated patterns of play and real time opposition and understand, integrate and deploy this perceptual skill.

4)  Taking responsibility and making decisions that have real time consequences based upon the pattern recognition while under intense stress. This real world acclimation to deploying knowledge and judgment under competitive stress infuses all athletic activity.

The data on the cognitive and emotional attributes of athletes supports the maturing of student athletes in these areas. I found one of my greatest hopes and frustrations was getting students who are athletes to understand how these athletic driven attributes transfer to the academic classroom and to the life they will face after college. When young student athletes figure this out, their lives change profoundly. 

I cannot emphasize enough how much this second set of attributes depends upon a high and moral quality of coaching, the type that the recent Rutger's scandal illuminates what should not happen. 

I believe that if the student athlete graduates from college and if the combined endeavor of the athlete and the college have achieved three of the four outcomes above, then colleges have done justice to the student athletes and vice versa.

I also believe that the value added attributes generated from athletic participation enrich and deepen the quality of the person who graduates from college.

The Precarious World of College Coaches and ADs

As I reflect on the new year I can’t help but think about the 25 college football coaches who changed jobs at the end of last year. About 20 were fired, and the rest moved to new jobs. The coaching slaughter at D1 athletics occurs annually. Sometimes it is richly deserved as with Bobby Petrino for his scurrilous lying and cheating at Arkansas. This year we learned elite college coaches now only have two years to turn around programs with Jon Embree at Colorado. Sometimes it ends a fine career as with Ted Tedford’s ten years at Cal. This predictable year-end carnage got me to thinking of how brutal college athletics leadership has become, and how insecure the tenure is for the senior elite college athletic leaders—coaches and athletic directors. I believe this  remarkable insecurity helps drive  the craziness of recruiting, cheating and salaries in elite college sports.

To get some perspective I thought over my almost eight years serving as a faculty athletic representative in the Pacific 10/12 conference. While my numbers may not be perfect based upon faulty memory, here is the carnage of the 10 original Pac 10 schools over that 8-year period:

Athletic Directors            21

Football Coaches            22

Basketball Coaches         24

30 leadership positions associated with revenue sports—67 personnel changes—200+ percent turnover.

The PAC 10/12 is a destination conference; most leave involuntarily. Only six left voluntarily, one to be a college vice president and one to be a conference commissioner, 2 to the NFL and 1 to the NBA. The rest left under duress. Athletic directors and head football and basketball coaches do not get fired or hired these days without the involvement of the college presidents.  This means all these firings involved the complicity of the President and often regents of the university.

NCAA President Mark Emmert dislikes the locution “business of college athletics,” so do I. Maybe the "enterprise of college athletics?" Not sure, but no words can hide the brittle brutal reality that coaches and athletic directors get fired if they do not win. Winning brings revenue and prestige and can temporarily satisfy insatiable boosters. As I learned, it does not matter how many students you graduate; it almost does not matter how many minor or line skirting violations you have, unless you bring horrible scandal to the university. The reality and incentives for coaches and athletic directors are clear—Win. 

Commentators scream and bemoan the cheating and legal shading and excessive rules of the NCAA. But this constellation is all connected. Coaches and athletic director must win. They know that and despite the rhetoric, little else matters. The frantic drive to win and win fast and continue winning, drives the obsession with recruiting. It drives the obsession with keeping student athletes happy once they arrive. It drives the fixation on high salaries to get the best coaching talent, but also the knowledge of the coach that they can be fired in an instant even for a winning season.  These drives are fed by possessive, obsessive and over-involved boosters who pay for the bloated salaries and new facilities as well as sponsor the skirting of the rules outside of the boundaries of the program. The inordinate power of the boosters also accounts for how little time coaches now have to build programs and how little leeway they have to have a bad season or two.  Even as astoundingly successful coach as Chip Kelly at Oregon finds himself on the outs with boosters because he does not kowtow to their whims.

This win or nothing environment and the reality that a coach or AD can go from hero to pariah in three months shapes the environment that molds coaches and athletic directors.

We all know how tightly strung modern college coaches are. These are not laid back guys; they are driven competitors and hate to lose as much as they love to win.  We see them go off like volcanoes on the sideline sometimes against their own players or assistants. At practices they can sometimes seem almost maniacal in their intensity and demands on 19 year olds. Most morph into unbelievable control freaks focusing upon micro-managing details, recruiting and games. We can watch the living archetype with Nick Saban at Alabama and see the costs of it with what happened with Urban Meyer when he had to take a sabbatical from the game to protect his health and sanity.

We need to remember that coaches are human beings, and most of them stay in college because they love working with student athletes and helping athletes grow as people as well as players. They enter coaching as driven, smart and passionate human beings. But the ultra competitive and hair trigger firing environment shapes them in ways most of them would not choose to grow. Professional sports goes through coaches at a relentless rate; the day after the end of the 2012 NFL season 7 head coaches and 5 general managers were fired. But NFL teams make no pretense to educate, care for and help young men grow. Sadly most college coaches really do care about helping their student athletes grow as humans as well as players, but they also know they are not rewarded for the quality of humanity they instill in their students.

We can bemoan a lot of this, and it has always been with us. Go back forty or fifty years and the same problems existed, the same obsessions and the same corruptions. There was less money and less TV exposure, but college sports, like most things in life, never had a time of innocence.

The point I want to make here is that to a considerable extent the behavior of coaches and athletic directors is shaped by the precarious demands of their jobs and the signals sent to them about winning as the absolute priority. Even worse all the coaches see that moral sluggards like Bobby Petrino gets hired by whomever it was that hired him. 

Despite the craziness most coaches still coach. In most college sports they receive decent pay and graduate students and love their job, their sports and their student athletes. Even at the crazed elite levels of the revenue sports you still can see this shine through in quiet moments or early time before practice or team meetings. But the players are not stupid, they are 19-22 years old, but they know their coaches are on the firing line and they feel their own responsibility when a coach gets fired.

I want to make clear that the problem here ultimately lies with the Presidents and the boosters whom they serve. Every coach who has been fired knows what it is like to be a hero one day and a nonperson the next, wiped out of the history and marketing of the university as thoroughly as Orwell would wipe someone out in 1984.

The good Presidents know they are complicit and feel trapped, riding a tiger of revenue and passion they cannot ultimately control. Most Presidents have far more important and deeper issues to attend to than college athletics, but it takes an inordinate amount of their time and accounts for most of the press their universities receive. Few like or enjoy this, yet they continue to clamor to join Division 1A athletics and football even knowing the costs and losses.

I believe this anger and fear over being trapped accounts for much of the energy driving the Presidents for modern reform. They may never get the TV money monster under control, but they know they have to try. The changes in high school requirements, progress towards degree, the penalties of APR and the new attempts to deny access of NCAA championships tied to graduation rates all create cumulative vectors to redirect some of the coaches’ energy towards education and graduation of students. It also motivates athletic directors to invest more money in academic and student support.

But here again, even as they struggle to inflect academics back into the equations and change the incentive structure for coaches, we know that some president somewhere will reliably hire a moral failure like Bobby Petrino to coach again or that John Caliperi with two vacated championships will be hired again.

At this time of pressure and absurdity, the coaches face pressures and firing windows that exist in no other industry. Yet they stay in. The vast majority live almost nomadic lives moving from team to team when staffs are fired or they have a chance to move up. But the vast majority still care about the student athletes. They still struggle to teach about life along with sport; about learning along with winning.

These leaders live in a toxic system sustained by world class educators. Some make huge salaries, most make good salaries with very unstable and nomadic lives.  They coach from passion and joy in their sport and loyalty to their students. The incentives of the elite level and their putative academic leaders often erode this, but they carry on. I salute them.

Coaches Make the "Program" not the School

In college sports the coach trumps everything. Traditionalists and commentators like to talk about "programs" and "schools" as the major reference point for intercollegiate athletics. If we are honest, however, coaches are far more important than schools. Coaches recruit the talent, they motivate the players, they call the games. Coaches win games and become  the face of the university far eclipsing presidents and faculty. This reality defines the world of college athletic "programs."

Programs and schools do not garner wins, good coaches do. Programs and schools do not recruit students, good coaches do. And in a critical twist for me as an academic, programs and schools do not get students graduated, good coaches do. Schools like Penn State, UCLA or Michigan State do not rise in national stature through their academics alone, they rise on the coattails of iconic coaches such as Duffy Daugherty, John Wooden or Joe Paterno.

In a capitalist system, which intercollegiate athletics resembles on the field of competition, successful individuals will be rewarded. In a winner take all system, which intercollegiate athletics is in its purest sense, the "winners" will reap disproportionate rewards. Today more than forty D1 football coaches make more than 2 million dollars a year, and the percentage will continue to rise. The salaries of just decent coaches at second level BCS schools dwarf salaries of university Presidents, state governors or anyone else in states except for investment bankers and Presidents of successful companies. This makes a perverse sense because good coaches of highly successful college football and basketball programs--the only two programs that may make money or count in terms of visibility and reputation--act as CEOs of sprawling staffs, constantly work to appease shareholders (boosters and fans), generate profits via media exposure and present the image of the university to the public at large.

The predictable rise of elite and highly paid coaches can create the illusion that programs and schools still matter. For instance the great program of Bear Bryant, Alabama, rules collegiate football from the tightly coiled heights of Nick Saban's steely will and intelligence. This year legendary Notre Dame has been restored to the top of the football heap under Brian Kelly's inspired guidance.

Yet both schools illustrate the very issue that the school matters far less than the coach. Notre Dame struggled for 15 years through mediocrity and chaos with a succession of at best good coaches and would be saviors until they got Brian Kelly who longed for the job Alabama had suffered through many years in the wilderness, winning a random championship here and there, but struggling until it offered Nick Saban the highest salary in college sports as Saban looked for an excuse to flee the NFL.

Basketball reflects the same dilemma. Kentucky sits atop the greasy pole with its corrupt but untouchable coach who spits in the eye of every academic ideal the NCAA professes. But until he arrived with his baggage of vacated championships, Kentucky went through coaches like water. UCLA still lives in the shadow of John Wooden with no coach able to match his legacy. North Carolina suffered through a series of failures after the dynasty of Dean Smith despite its superb reputation until they got  Roy Williams from Kansas. Williams, the coach, restored the "program's" glory and position. Schools really don't matter in the end; coaches do.

All this reduces to the reality that for an intercollegiate program what matters is not tradition or stature, but money. The top ten paid coaches in D1 football track the relative wealth of the programs with a remarkable degree of accuracy. Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas, LSU etc remain powers at the moment because they have invested hugs sums of money in fine coaches and continue to pay top money to them. Alabama does not possess the sheer bulk or wealth of these schools, but like most SEC schools spends an inordinate amount of money on their football programs due to booster support beyond the size and status of the entire program.

That high salary usually reflects the ability to recruit and win which will usually determines the top contenders for national football honors. Basketball tends to be a more chaotic world. Although an oligarchy clearly exists, the sheer number of D1 schools, over 300, and the ability of schools to mount strong programs with eight players plus the surplus of young talented coaches means that the distribution or unpredictability of the talent and competitors is more widely distributed and more surprising than football.

But money alone will not guarantee success as professional baseball regularly demonstrates. Texas and Oklahoma pay some of the highest salaries to their coaches and are regularly in the hunt for the Big12 championship but not for the national championship for awhile. At the moment  legendary and fine coaches like Mack Brown at Texas may not be long for the conference. Smart and patient schools can hire up and coming coaches or be patient enough to invest in a long term program and coach and reap success with smarts and work.

Now a really smart and wealthy program can actually make this work to create the illusion that the school/program matters more than the coach. Ohio State has done this seamlessly with the implosion of Jim Tressel and the hiring of Urban Meyer. Michigan could have but precipitously fired a fine coach in Lloyd Carr, squandered their program with a misfit hire, and finally seemed to have recovered with another hire. Florida another rich school and smart school lost Urban Meyer and immediately went out to steal  coach in waiting Will Muschamp who got tired of waiting at Texas. USC a wealthy but not uber rich school hides its data since it is a private school, but stumbled for years before hiring Pete Carroll and is now stumbling with Lane Kiffin who may or may not grow into a fine coach,

The point to remember is that the name, tradition or pedigree of the school matters far less than the wealth of the program. This matters even more as the time for coaches to turn around programs shortens. The blood bath has begun this year with 12 coaches fired before the first of December, two after one year and one after two years. But all of them especially Gene Chizik of Auburn who won the national championship only two years ago requires huge buyouts.The SEC alone ran up over 20 million dollars in buyout costs in two years!

The NCAA has no power over coaches salaries as court cases have demonstrated. The salaries rise because university presidents and regents continue to pay them. But the NCAA has recognized the centrality of coaches and coaching responsibility in its  new reforms. Almost all the academic reforms aimed at pushing students toward graduation have the incentives of the coaches as their target. So schools that do not move students along to graduation lost scholarships which have direct impacts on coaches. The Calhoun and Connecticut penalties including banning from the NCAA tournament again target coaches for academic failure. The newly targeted suspensions and published graduation rates again target coaches as do the new laws to make coaches responsible for the activity of their cheating assistants all focus on the coach's centrality.

 Universities are not dominant athletic powers in a strong organizational sense at anymore. What matters is the quality of coaching at the top and the quality of assistant coaches and recruiters and conditioning staff. The key to building a college program that endures is either to get a great coach and keep him, the Penn State or Nebraska model. Or find the best coach money can buy for as along as you can afford him, the Florida model. Alabama created a model followed by many-- cycle through a coach every three years until you either find somone who sticks, or give up and go to the Florida model as they did with Nick Saban.

During the off season select coaches suddenly get new extensions; buy outs are increased; all to seal off coaches from the market. This means that the salaries of all coaches continue to rise. The relation between the coach and the university community thins out even further.

If there is a saving grace in all this, and I doubt it, it reminds us that there are no automatic passes based upon institutional status. Individuals and teams of individuals build quality institutions. Institutions do not continue on top just because they have a name. They have to earn it, every day, every year. Institutions do this with high quality people, not with reputation and inertia.