Retiring Calhoun Represented College Hypocrisy on Sports

One down and a bunch more to go.

Jim Calhoun the championship winning coach of the University of Connecticut’s men’s basketball team retired this week. Calhoun won three national NCAA championships, and coached and recruited with a passionate intensity to win at all costs. He collected as many violations and probabtions as championships, but he and his school did not care. He embodied the coach whose sole purpose in life remained to win, period. He was not worried about character, grades, education, but about winning championships, and he succeeded and his University rewarded him for it.  I'm glad he's gone.

The predictable econiums are coming his way from the paid literati of sports media—he always made good stories, valiantly fought cancer and defied the NCAA. The media made him into a sort of a bandit folk hero rather like Gerry Tarkenian at Nevada Los Vegas. This is misplaced praise and respect. He’s a schmuck. I will not miss him and neither should anyone else.

Calhoun epitomized a long and ignorable tradition of college basketball coaches who won and won big, but could care less if his players got an education. He treated NCAA rules as signposts to be ignored when convenient. He ranks up there with Bob Huggins of Cincinnati and West Virginia with his mockery of the academic and student side of being a student-athlete. I would put him with John Calipari of Kentucky, but John Calipari lives in a different moral universe entirely where students, grades and academics not only don’t matter they don’t exist.

Calhoun is interesting from another aspect. Despite his resolute inattention to academics and graduation, the various UConn Presidents supported him. Why? Because like Joe Paterno at Penn State, Calhoun helped put UCONN on the map. No one knew about the university until it became a basketball power. The school, like Penn State, hitched its reputation and recognition to its athletic program. Like Penn State it has been willing to look the other way and put up with penalties and undue booster influence to win championships and market itself. Who knew about UConn before Calhoun? So the University defended its coach even as he made a mockery of its educational mission. 

I won’t go into Calhoun’s record, nor his championships. His strength was playing to his talent. Players loved playing for him although he could be cruel, demanding, irascible and relentless. After all no one had to go to class, no one worried about grades or about money and the players won. Two dozen went on to three and eight year careers at the professional level. His teams played with relentless intensity and players reached their maximum athletic potential under him. He knew how to draw out the best athletic performance from the talent he recruited. For this he deserves recognition.

But from the perspective of the NCAA and someone who believes in student athletes as both an ideal and a possible reality, Calhoun represented the worst, except for Calipari, that college basketball could offer. His kids did not go to class and when they did, they did not perform.

Calhoun was not a big character guy; he was a winning guy. Most of the really good coaches try to impart character and life development through the skills and focus needed to succeed on the court. Calhoun, to his credit, never claimed to care about character or about teaching kids to live well. This fit with his utter lack of concern about them actually getting an education. The kids cooperated in this because at the talent level he recruited many expected to and would play professional ball.

We will leave aside the fact that the average professional career is three to five years and 70 percent leave the pros bankrupt. The great advantage of the American system over the European system lies in the fact that college can leave its student athletes with a life and career and skills after sport abandons them.

A team has to work hard to have a low APR, which is a surrogate measure for staying in school and graduating. But the APR provides a pass for players who become professional athletes early. This means we are looking at a very small number of basketball players at Connecticut under Calhoun. The only other master who approached this was Huggins in his days at Cincinnati where he burned through players and left them by the way side without a degree or an education.

Calhoun and Connecticut have unique honor of being one of the first schools for being denied entrance to the NCAA tournament for failure to graduate students at the 50 percent rate demanded by the APR. You have to understand that this rate excludes students who leave early to become professionals—they are given a pass. So this means that the students who do not go professional do not graduate and do not get the educational advantages or tools that the colleges promised the kids but especially the parents and guardians.

I am not a Pollyanna. Most college basketball and football players are not particularly excited about going to class and learning. They believe in, and often their entourage is invested in, the dream of going professional. But most fail and even when they achieve it, they end up at age 25 without sports or an education. So good coaches and committed schools use the motivation of play, or practice time and invest in tutoring and guidance to help those reluctant students learn to learn and grow into students by their junior or senior year. We have abundant data that this can and does occur with a very high level of frequency; it also happens far more now than before the reforms of the last six years.

Calhoun was not a good college coach. He won, but he was not a good college coach from any perspective linked to education. He leaves his team on probation and banned from tournaments. If the rules had been in place earlier, they would not have gone to a tournament for years.

But let’s be honest. Calhoun, Huggins and Calipari could not exist if the colleges pledged to the idea of student athletes did not let them. The colleges not only let them get away with not attending to education, but pay them huge salaries, name buildings after them. The Presidents of Connecticut and Kentucky praise their coaches as educators. As a teacher I can rail all I want and as a teacher I can respect the coaches who do take education seriously, get their students to class, made education and character aspects of coaching—but modern college Presidents are notoriously willing to hire and lionize coaches who do nothing but win. Calhoun is a representative of the worst moral hypocrisy of the system. I won’t miss him, but there are plenty more like him.

The Education Case for Keeping Student Athletes in College I & II

I want to discuss why professors, college presidents and most coaches who care about teaching want the kids to stay in school for three to four years. I do not want this to become another polemic about one and done but rather a discussion of why and how college athletes uses a three to five year time horizon to transform athletes into student-athletes and into college educated graduates. This is a long one, so bear with me.

Take a hypothetical top recruit coming into a major university. If we focus pon the major revenue sports, statistically many of them are minorities, and many are academically “at risk.” This means that they have taken the NCAA required high school core but done it with minimum grades and usually have very low SAT or ACT scores. Often they come from high schools with problematic academic standards. The combination of disadvantaged social economic background and awful academic preparation means a very high percentage of the top recruited players in the revenue sports come to their colleges woefully underprepared as students. If you predicted their graduation rate based on their academic profile, it would hover below 20%. In reality, however, these young minority “at risk” athletes graduate from college at a higher rate than non-athlete minorities and match regular rates at many schools.

This occurs because the committed universities have figured out a multi-year process to help underprepared student athletes grow into viable and effective students. These young men and women regularly defy the statistical odds and graduate with reasonable educations, but it takes time, resources and commitment by players and coaches.

These elite young athletes identify at athletes first and often barely register on the “student” identification model. This matters because an individual’s identification as a student predicts very highly whether they will actually learn and graduate from college. We need to remember that this does not just affect student athletes. The identification as a student as a predictor of academic success applies to all students, and many undergraduates especially at large state schools come in not particularly committed to being students and often take two years to full change their identification and become serious students.

Most elite high school athletes primarily identify as athletes for good reason—they have been playing sports and being praised and rewarded for it since they were 9. Sports is the one area they excel. For many of them the classroom often remains a site of failure and disappointment.

Consequently one of the huge challenges for any student athlete is to learn to become a student and identify as a student. This requires mastering student skills even as they continue to devote 25-40 hours a week of their life to college athletics. Being from a disadvantaged and poor school amplifies this since many high-risk athletes have failed as students and been failed by their school systems. They have no reason to care and many reasons to fear and reject the classroom as humiliation and disappointment.

We need to remember, again, that many students take two years to really adapt to the shell shock of college, find their direction and commit to their studies. A very large number of students ease into student-hood their first two years by taking required but not particularly demanding classes. They change as they enter their majors at the end of their second years.

This process of becoming a real student as well as athlete takes several years, usually at least 2. This matches the intellectual and emotional developmental arc of many students.  At the beginning of year three many of the athletes realize they will not become professionals. It happens earlier for the kids from more middle class backgrounds or in Olympic sports since they have more social capital as students when they get to college or have fewer professional options.

Honestly during year 1 and part of 2 many underprepared athletes along with lots of other students do take standard core courses but not demanding courses. Some schools, but surprisingly few at major universities, have easy classes for parking student athletes. Most do not do this anymore. The key is to remember these young athletes are not yet prepared academically or emotionally—for that matter neither are many freshmen kids.

Academic support and planning ease them into classes and learning to be college students. The student-athletes gain some small victories, sometimes they discover they can be students and sometimes they discover passions to learn in areas like social work, justice administration, art, education or the oft maligned ethnic study programs. When it works, and it does more often than anyone credits, individuals discover new dreams and identities beyond being an athlete.  Student athletes often make a leap in their third year where they learn to become learners—the great advantage of the American education system.

Time horizons and coaches are critical to this process. Athletes are motivated at the beginning to play. The only way they can play is to stay eligible and make academic progress. Good coaches push, cajole and threaten to get players going to class and taking class seriously. The first two years can be hard on students, staff and coaches. The best college teams have coaches who monitor class and academic progress since eligibility and APR depends upon it.

The point to remember here is that the uneven growth from being an elite high school athlete to a college student takes time, motivation and support. The coach has to be an academic motivator because he or she is a teacher and he or she has self-interest in the athlete being a student. 

This link of academic progress to degree and getting to play keeps a lot of student athletes on track. It also explains why the move to minimize the time student athletes stay in school has such pernicious consequences on the education of student athletes.

Part II

The loss of a three or four year time horizon is what makes one and done so problematic from an academic perspective. The entire arc of becoming a student and succeeding as a student falls apart. This is not about the impact on the college game; I could care less. This is about the failure to treat the student-athlete as a real student.

Modern NCAA academic reforms, for all their limits, build upon this philosophy of pushing students over three to five years to make progress towards degree. Students must meet certain percentages of total classes towards degree at the end of each year; they must meet certain minimum grade standards and they must declare a major. In addition staying eligible and returning become critical markers for coaches who seek to protect scholarships in the APR rate. The data overwhelming suggests that meeting these targets tremendously increases the chance for a student to both get an education with a major and to graduate.

It depends like most undergraduate education upon an unfolding four year pattern of learning and maturing on the part of the students.

A vague and uneasy peace protects this time line and balance in baseball and football. In baseball athletes can be drafted out of high school, but if they choose to go to college, MLB leaves the athlete alone for three years. Football has achieved the same equilibrium. The NFL will not draft a player until three years in college and since many players redshirt, by the end of junior years many football players have already amassed enough credits to graduate or be very near. The same is true in baseball. Both sports make ample use of summer classes to move students towards graduation and buffer against academic setbacks. Recent reforms push the baseball players to an even more aggressive progress towards degree. In a surprising high degree of cases students who leave after three or four years have graduated or lie within striking distance when they return to college.

MLB and NFL are not saints. Both benefit from the three or four year stay because the development of skills and body in their sports takes longer to mature. At the same time their window permits athletes to become students.

The problem with basketball is that 18 year olds are ready to play professional basketball. They possess the physical strength and skill sets to play what passes for modern NBA basketball. The can and have gone right from high school to the NBA. 

The NBA has absolutely no incentive to align with the three or four year time horizon that enables colleges to motivate and actually educate and graduate student athletes. Their kids are ready. One year is gravy because it gives professional teams an extra year to assess future players. But neither union nor the league will change their 19 year-old rule that leads talented NBA ready athletes to seek 9 months of basketball finishing school at college.

The number of athletes affected by this three and four-year horizon in baseball and football is small, maybe 1.6 to 2.5% of the graduating classes. But it covers high impact players who leave as graduates or near graduates. Modern athletic programs push students to take summer classes both to maintain progress towards degree and also provide a balance for summer workouts. The combination of summer school, strong motivation to stay eligible, and year round academic support gets many students towards graduation.

As a teacher who cares about student athletes and believes in them as students, I know we take huge academic risks with some of our at risk student athletes. I know it takes strong academic support and a team to help them get through the first rough two years of overcoming their academic and cultural lack of preparation. They gain a more complex and rich life. They may end up as professional athletes. But that career lasts on the average of 3-5 years, so at the age of 26, even the elite of the elite will have finished their avocation of sports. They will move on to new lives and careers that their education will help support.

I do not subscribe to the defeatist logic of let them major in football or basketball because this makes a mockery of any attempt to prepare them for life after sports. Even if they choose to enter the 100 billion dollar a year sports industry, they still need to write, think analytically, work with numbers and graphs and a host of other academic skills that advance their own understandings and prepare them for life off the field, even if they stay in sports industry or education. To the extent that the revenue sports bring to college many minorities and underprivileged students who would not make it to college except for sports, it takes on a social justice dimension. The university permits athletes to play what they love and gains from this, but the university promises to the students and their parents or guardians that it will do its best to provide an education and graduation opportunity for the student athlete. This takes the 3-5 year arc but also means students need to master skills and attributes beyond their sport prowess.

This is the ideal that sustains the NCAA. It is not easy and can easily be corrupted for the ultra-elite athletes. In fact the life can be hell on students and academic staff and coaches, but it generates a type of person who has played out their love with passion and excelled. This peculiar American model does not throw students onto the athletic ash heap at the age of 25 as they do in Europe and other counties but gives student athletes enough education and discipline to start another career when sports leaves them behind.

The one and done player remains just that a player and an athlete. Hanging out at college and doing sport finishing school fails the ideal and the motive of intercollegiate athletics.  In 6-9 month horizon of the one and done student, students have no incentive to go to class, to learn, to get grades or even to stay eligible beyond a three-month period. The 6 month or at best 16 month time horizon is just too short to move the individual to identify as a student and succeed in the classroom. It is too short to permit individuals to learn to learn which is the great accomplishment of American undergraduate education. That is why one and done really qualifies as academic fraud.

It makes no legal or moral sense for the NCAA to try and require student athletes to commit for two or three years in college basketball. Nor does it make a lot of moral sense to prohibit anyone they think might leave after one or two years from going to college.

The NCAA does not have many morally palatable ways to protect its academic ideal in this situation and especially given the self-interest of the NBA and its union. I have two small suggestions that might help on the margins.

First, the NCAA can expedite the rule that entering freshman have higher academic standards in grades and score. The new proposals calls for a year of academic residency for at risk students who fall within a certain range of academic unpreparedness.  The new and unprepared student athletes would have limited practices and no play or travel for their first year. They would concentrate on academics. They would still have four years of eligibility.

If we were really serious, we would simply go back to freshmen ineligibility for basketball period. This would solve a multitude of problems with a clear bright line rule.

If the NCAA required a year of academic residence for at risk students, it would catch a fair number of one and done athletes. Those of us who have sat through admission hearings and processes know they are often very special admits who sit at the borderlands of any credible case for admittance to college. Remember they have had no reason to study or work hard academically because their high school and AAU world has praised and supported them for their basketball skill and pro future. This would eliminate a number of the one and dones because a high percentage would be required to sit for a year of academic residency. They would simply bypass college all together.

Second, the NCAA could actually make years in residence a criteria of how it evaluates the APR. Right now if a student athlete goes pro before graduation, as long as they are eligible, then it does not count against a team’s APR and does not affect its scholarships or championship eligibility. This enables Kentucky to lose six freshmen and sophomores and still have a sterling APR.

The NCAA could impose an APR penalty point upon any school that had a player leave for the pros before finishing the equivalency of three years of class. Players can transfer but if they leave for the pros before meeting a number of credits, then a penalty would be assessed.This approach is no guarantee but it would create some disincentives for coaches to overload upon one and done. It would at least acknowledge that getting students to class and learning something does count in the NCAA calculation of value. I have no doubt Calipari and his ilk will figure out ways to game this since that breed of coach does not care about getting their students educated, but we need to change their incentives and limit their entry points.

These may not be the answer but they point to how we might start with the academic mission and move from there rather than starting with the game and tournament and move backward to academics.

The point of the game here is pushing to keep student athletes in school makes strong educational sense. It flows from taking seriously the student in student athlete, and it is one of the few answers to cynics. 

The Business of College Sports versus Student Athletes

“The business of college athletics”  describes how athletic directors and college Presidents refer to the college athletic enterprise. Entire programs and degrees are now dedicated to the business model of sports. My conference, the Pacific 12, one of the few conferences left that can actually count its actual membership, just signed a massive multi-media deal that can be worth 3 billion dollars over the next 12 years. Yes 3 billion dollars! The sheer amount of money involved certainly points to the word business. I distrust the phrase and remember a conversation with Mark Emmert of the NCAA when he talked about how much he dislikes and worries about it when athletic directors talk about "the business" of college athletics. We worry because the business model undervalues education ans students.

Language matters; it sinks in and shapes how we think about and perceive reality. The mania about "paying athletes" is driven not only by ignorance of the economic realities of sports and by the ignorance of what student athlete life is actually like, but by the belief that players are employees of large corporations who are exploited them. “Paying” athletes only makes sense if  business explains and justified the enterprise.

The metaphor and concepts have sunk deep into the consciousness of college sports. For one, college sports is expensive and in this time of budget cuts, programs are being pushed to generate revenue streams and minimize the internal subsidy that central university funds must provide for them. Any athletic director worth his or her salt is obsessed with generating maximum revenue and as they will tell you in business speak, to garner revenue, they must "deliver a good product" or provide "a great customer experience at the games."

The average elite college program employs more marketing and fund raising and ticket folks than non-football coaches. Schools redesign mascots to raise revenue streams from paraphernalia and do focus groups to create children's mascots that might not scare kids. Tradition, community and identity matter far less than consultants and TV and T-shirt friendly logos.

Remember the colleges themselves push this model when they demand that athletic programs become economically self-sufficient. This drives the fund raising; this drives the demand for stadiums; this drives the obsession with recruiting to get winning teams. Winning teams "fill the stands" and generate demand for "eyeballs" for television windows. It also drives much of the dynamic behind expansion or movement among conferences as conferences seek to lock up markets and geographic areas or "trophy" teams that draw national attention.

So athletic directors goaded by Presidents and Boards of Regents and local pride and fund raising and marketing imperatives push coaches to put "great product" on the field to deliver bodies and eyeballs.  I witnessed an athletic director fire a coach who had just returned from the NCAA's for the fifth time in seven years and graduated all her players for seven years. Why? The AD wanted more "sizzle" and a more "entertaining" brand of sports. Winning is not enough, coaches must win and entertain.

The real problem with this set of metaphors and language lies in what it does to student athletes. First, the "business" model has no room for students; the business model downgrades the mission of education. The ideal of a student becomes a "transaction" cost of winning. Schools need to keep the athletes in school and eligible, but only for the purpose of winning to generate revenue.

Second, the business model not only degrades the student ideal and reality, it transforms the student-athlete’s life. Students spend thirty hours a week on athletics when not in season. Second seasons flourish and 40,000 people fill spring football stadiums for intra-squad scrimmages. Athletic demands now fill their entire year and studying is devalued even as it is marketed and trumpeted.

Third, the business model transforms student athletes into commodities. The athletes and their teams are products produced to generate revenue. In most elite programs the football and basketball programs consume everyone’s time and focus because they generate the revenue; the Olympic sports become an afterthought or the only place where the ideal of student athletes can still exist. Student athletes reduce to commodities produced and marketed and sold to generate revenue and reputation and visibility for the university. No wonder some elite athletes in revenue sport mutter about being paid leaving aside the rather good life they have. No wonder these athletes wonder why the continued use of their likeness after they graduate should be the “property” of the school.

But this is the point, isn't it. College sports should be about student athletes, it should have student athlete welfare at its moral core. The ideal of college athletics and the reality for the vast majority of college student athletes, including the 99 percent of elite football and basketball athletes, who will not be professional athletes, should celebrate and attend to their achievement, welfare, teams, health and competition.

If you go to banquets of college teams, you experience this reality, not the business outcomes. Win or lose, the players remember and celebrate each other, "I luv you guys" gets repeated by men and women's teams. They give awards to each other and coaches tell stories of victory and defeat and honor the young men and women. The good teams celebrate the students who will graduate. The parents and students cry remembering that college athletes are students, not commodities.

Love and Basketball: John Wooden as Coach

I don't have any more accolades to add to those being heaped upon John Wooden at his death at the age of 99. I did have the pleasure of growing up watching his teams play and having his style of play and coaching imprinted upon me as an ideal to be sought and admired. But more important for me and some students, I teach his books, especially his biography/coaching manuel They Call Me Coach.

The book always startles my students who aspire to become coaches. At first they get impatient because he really tells a love story between him and his wife Nellie from Indiana. His growth as a hard working midwestern country boy weaves through the love story and ties in his discovery and love of basketball. His earliest high school coaches taught him how to grow but also deal with failure and success.

The students wonder why they are reading about this story that seems so far away. Young basketball players have no clue about him, and very few students have heard his name. But slowly its power holds sway as he discusses various coaching and playing styles he assimilated as well as how he strove to create a balance with family, Nellie and basketball. He was lucky because his passion for Nellie matched, nourished and renewed his passion for basketball. His first lesson for my students is that love matters in life and you need to work hard to find, nurture and respect it.

After establishing that loving centers living, he discusses coaching and the cumulative impact of his championship teams. He speaks of the roots of his conditioning and defensive philosophies. He speaks at length about the need to adapt to the talent you have and how his teams evolved in light of his various teams and players especially Lew Alicinder/Kareem Abdul-Jabaar and Bill Walton.

In modern America we don't normally associate coaching with love. Too many of us have memories of psycho-dads screaming and demanding as coaches or spectators. The indelible image of Vince Lombardi and win at any price and Woody Hayes attacking players at the end of his career tend to erase the deeper more lasting reality that many great coaches and Wooden excelled them all, coach from and through love.

The biography reveals the second love, love of the game. He revels in exlpaining how much he learned from others. The book is not about X's and O's, but he reveals a deep curiosity and sheer joy in discovering a complex zone defense, adapting it to his players and other teams and integrating conditioning and quickness into a philosophy of play. His stories reveal how the losses linger and at the end of each season and beginning of each he sets goals that infuse what he does. The game and its intricacies always remain with him with his fine mind mulling, thinking, inventing. The point of the game is love of the game.

But the most important love for a coach is love of his players. I don't mean love in a sort of dry agape way that thins out because it encompasses everyone; I certainly don't mean love in an erotic or homoerotic channeling towards players. No I mean an abiding care, a rock bottom emotional commitment to the player and team as individuals. This care, this emotional focus upon the person seeks the best for that person. It has a family resemblance to parenting, but without the sometimes twisted variations or self-identifying that can infuse parental love. Abdul-Jabaar said "he was preparing us for life." His players often mentioned they knew he cared for them even if they fought him, and his lessons only really sank in later. The truest test of a coach and teacher is if students return to meet with him, and his players constantly returned.

Wooden was not a nice coach. He makes that clear. He rode referees and players (something he truly regreted later). His coaching style demanded an immense commitment from student athletes. Essentially it demanded that individuals meld or subordinate their talent to a team concept. His most interesting stories and the ones he clearly values and relishes are discussing how players like Sidney Wicks and Bill Walton fought with him and worked with him to grow into superb players. Over some issues, it was simply "my way or the highway." Wooden also makes clear he learns from them. He demanded that players earn respect but gave them love. He may not like them but gave them love, and they knew it as a rock bottom reality to their lives.

This mutual learning never sacrifices his authority, but it grows from his love of the players. He knew them, watched them, demanded of them. His intimate knowledge of them coupled with his vision of whom they could become enabled him to match their talents to the evolving system.  Even when one would quit, he always gave them second chances because once long ago, and he never forgot, he had quit a team out of anger at perceived injustice. His own high school coach let him back and Coach Wooden believed that loving a player required room for players to redeem themselves.

I sometimes think his idea of love can only flourish at high school and college. Something about the nature of professional sports, of the contractual nature, the money, the self-protective brutality of the sport to both its players and its coaches--in most sports it is cheaper to fire a coach than a star player, makes the type of patient, demanding, forgiving love that Wooden exemplified, impossible.

Wooden's testament, as he insisted, has never been the trophies or the unexcelled record of 10 NCAA championships. It remains the quality of people his players became. Wooden did not walk in the sands of time with footsteps that blow away. He helped boys grow into men, and those men helped their own children grow into adults. Even today his books help me help others grow into coaches. Certainly that is love at its best.