When first I set foot in the US, a decade and a half ago, I knew little of American football beyond a few vague perceptions gathered from comic books. But having chosen the Pennsylvania State University for my education, I found that a thorough grounding in football fundamentals was as important as a working knowledge of finite elements and infinitely more useful than differential equations. After all, even the most earnest of students typically do not discuss energy methods of analysis or solutions to polynomial equations when they get together outside class. And since football is the great secular religion of modern America and Penn State was one of its mega-churches, I learned fast, and well. I bled blue and white. I groaned when our backs were hit, and I roared in concert with a million lions when our linebackers wreaked havoc on opposing offenses.
But through it all, I clung to one great truth about Penn State's football: we were a school first, one that happened to play good football more often than not. In Joe Paterno, we had a coach who epitomized the finest qualities of the position, a man who demanded that his athletes pull their weight in class, that they grow as men as much as athletes. I was proud of our winning tradition, but I was prouder that we had the highest graduation rates of athletes amongst colleges. I cheered the wins that Joe Pa racked up but I cheered all the more his dedication to the school's libraries and core programs. There was a deep pride in having one of the lowest paid head coaches in the nation, and certainly one who asked far, far less than anyone in his position. I supported him when we did well, but I was fanatical in my support when we lost and the coach put those losses in perspective: this was sports, teams lost and it was how the players carried themselves in victory and defeat that really mattered. Joe was not perfect - like any human being, he fell short of his and our ideals - but there was always a real feeling that he understood that colleges are educational centers, whose primary goal is academics, not sports and that success on the gridiron was secondary to succeeding in the classroom and in life. This was what college football was meant to be.
But Penn State was a school out of step with the rest of the world, and the days of our anachronistic attitudes were drawing to a close even before a shameless mass of innuendo and outright lies by the media drove Coach Paterno out of his job and hastened the end of his career and life. For the moment we may try to cling to our traditions, but the changes have come, the old days have ended and will never return. We may delay but already the attitudes are changing and in a few years we will be little different from the rest of our peers. At best we may settle down to be like Stanford or Notre Dame, or we may fall all the way to the attitudes of the average Division I school.
Perhaps a Golden Age never really existed when colleges sports were about extra curricular activities for students, but now there is not even a pretense about the aim of college football (basketball may be even worse, if anything, but is still a much smaller brother to football). Coaches are hired and paid to win games, not build their charges' character through sporting competition. They know that their jobs depend wholly on their record of wins versus losses and that nearly anything else will be tolerated if they can deliver those coveted championships and Bowl victories. With Nike as their patron, coaches know that fielding the most talented team is all important, and since the best athletes are not usually the best students (by inclination alone, even when intelligence is not the reason), they have every reason to ignore the academic achievements in favor of raw athleticism. Flaws in character are far less important than one's 100 yard dash time. And so they pay lip service to the ideals of collegiate sport while relentlessly chasing victory at all costs on the field.
This is not a knock on the men who coach those teams. Though they are not above reproach as a community, many of them genuinely care about their young charges and truly rejoice in their success; unfortunately, they have bought into an idea that success for their athletes is a National Football League career and nothing less. More importantly, they know that their own career depends solely on the number of games won and on taking their teams to prestigious Bowl games. And that means fielding the most talented and skillful set of players they can recruit. Coaches also know that their greatest recruiting tool is selling their high school marks on a career in the professional football league. Though less than two thousand players will earn an NFL paycheck at any given time, every athlete is recruited on dreams that he will make it. Around eight thousand athletes play at the college level, yet only around 250 will be picked in the annual drafts, but a vast majority of those college athletes will have been sold on the dream of a professional career. The colleges have become little more than a farm development for the professional league, all the protests of the college administrators to the contrary. It's been long recognized that money drives the college sports world, and that colleges are totally addicted to the money they generate off their athletes. To be sure, when students ask for a piece of the cake, the national and college administrators are quick to tout the amateur status of student athletes and trot out tired cliches about how students are in college for an education. But their policies give lie to their words. If education was paramount, student athletes would not be allowed to leave for the pros till they had graduated; current eligibility rules are but a fig leaf that allows our colleges to pretend that their athletic programs are about academic excellence. If this was about education alone, colleges would not be paying multi-million dollar salaries for big name coaches, whose sole virtues are good recruiting and/or detailed knowledge of football plays. And most importantly, colleges would not fire coaches for failing to win games. Or to win enough games. Or to win the big games. All these excuses are used, and accepted as routine, when a program decides on a coaching change. Never once is a coach released for failure to mold his athletes into mature and responsible men. Or for failing to challenge his team to outstanding academic performance. Or for not inspiring his team to be better people. Perhaps even worse, every coach knows that success in the latter group would never, ever save his job if he failed at the former goals.
The root of the problem of course, as in so many problems that plague modern American life, is an over abundance of money. Both professional football and collegiate sports are awash in money, from sponsors and media broadcast fees. In addition a winning team draws in fans, fills stadiums and generates massive amounts of profit off concession fees, parking and merchandise. And since success in college football is strongly co-related to strong recruiting, and strong recruiting requires selling prospective students on their chances of being drafted to the NFL, colleges are quite content to play along as a farm system to the pros. Addicted to money generated from their athletes, colleges can no longer afford to hew to the ideals they espouse and claim to revere. The only way to bring back a modicum of old school idealism to college sports is to divest it of the money that corrupts it.
Easier said than done, of course, but the key lies with the public. Especially with the alumni of the various schools. We have a louder voice than the students (and incidentally, the students are far less fair-weather fans than their seniors) by virtue of our numbers and our power of purse. We need to stop making our support for our alma mater dependent upon its winning record. But that is not the real battle, though it would be a good first step. The real key is to challenge our schools to eschew the money that goes with game telecasts. Maybe we use our influence with our schools and College Conferences to abrogate million-dollar telecast deals and instead make the games available online for free, or nominal charges to cover only cost of broadcast. We push our schools into accepting only such game fees as are needed to cover the basic costs of travel. We demand that our schools make academic achievement more important than winning, and we require that no student receiving a college scholarship be allowed to enter the NFL draft before graduating; those that wish to leave early must pay back their scholarships before entering their names (this will force students to truly evaluate their chances at making the professional rosters).
But the biggest changes need to come outside the college system. The NFL honors the pretense and hypocrisy of college sports because it provides them with a farm system of talent development for free. In reality, the idea that a player can enter the pros only after a couple of years in college is indefensible. Attending two, or three years of a four year program, especially with no requirement that the classes taken be tied to a reasonable degree provides no benefit to the players. But it does provide a training above high school and weeds out, though failure or injury, those who are not desired in the NFL. Football is a violent sport, and young players need to reach their full physical development before entering the rigorous professional world - colleges find the best high school prospects, train and develop them, and then send them on to the pros just as they finish the majority of their physical growth; the NFL gets all this for free. To really save colleges from the plague of monetized sport, we need the NFL to stop honoring the academic requirement - let them find, recruit and train talent on their own. And most importantly have the patience to hold those kids back and not rush them into play in hopes of short term gain. European soccer clubs already do this - Arsenal nurtured Theo Walcott, Barcelona famously paid to have special growth hormonal treatments to let a certain Lionel Messi grow to normal height when he was just twelve years old and entering their academy and one might say it paid off quite handsomely. In the US even, baseball has a form of this and hence college baseball is not wracked by the same glut of money as football and basketball.
Let's stop pretending that these athletes gain much from their college education. The top athletes currently find themselves treated as superstars, courted, coddled and cozened through college, a class apart from their fellow students which is unfair on the remaining students and unhealthy for the athletes. An academy, or series of academies attached to the NFL teams, would surround the players by their peers and remove them from the bubble of hero worship they enjoy on college campuses. If they enter a more focused training system, perhaps fewer of them will reach adulthood dreaming of finding the pot of gold. And since, inevitably, they will be paid to commit to the training maybe fewer of them will live a rags to riches story when they sign their full-time NFL contracts. The league could also provide some management training so that those who do find the pot of gold do not fritter it away unknowingly. There are many aspects that would need to ironed out, but this would move the development of tomorrow's players away from college fields and into the hands of their future employers, which is how it should be, for the good of colleges and athletes. Some teams will be foolish in one or more phases - recruiting badly, hurrying their players through development and signing them to action before their time. Others - the Green Bay Packers and New England Patriots seem likely candidates - will take their time and stay ahead of the game. And colleges can go back to being just centers of learning where average athletes compete on Saturdays for fun, pride and a break from studying.
But through it all, I clung to one great truth about Penn State's football: we were a school first, one that happened to play good football more often than not. In Joe Paterno, we had a coach who epitomized the finest qualities of the position, a man who demanded that his athletes pull their weight in class, that they grow as men as much as athletes. I was proud of our winning tradition, but I was prouder that we had the highest graduation rates of athletes amongst colleges. I cheered the wins that Joe Pa racked up but I cheered all the more his dedication to the school's libraries and core programs. There was a deep pride in having one of the lowest paid head coaches in the nation, and certainly one who asked far, far less than anyone in his position. I supported him when we did well, but I was fanatical in my support when we lost and the coach put those losses in perspective: this was sports, teams lost and it was how the players carried themselves in victory and defeat that really mattered. Joe was not perfect - like any human being, he fell short of his and our ideals - but there was always a real feeling that he understood that colleges are educational centers, whose primary goal is academics, not sports and that success on the gridiron was secondary to succeeding in the classroom and in life. This was what college football was meant to be.
But Penn State was a school out of step with the rest of the world, and the days of our anachronistic attitudes were drawing to a close even before a shameless mass of innuendo and outright lies by the media drove Coach Paterno out of his job and hastened the end of his career and life. For the moment we may try to cling to our traditions, but the changes have come, the old days have ended and will never return. We may delay but already the attitudes are changing and in a few years we will be little different from the rest of our peers. At best we may settle down to be like Stanford or Notre Dame, or we may fall all the way to the attitudes of the average Division I school.
Perhaps a Golden Age never really existed when colleges sports were about extra curricular activities for students, but now there is not even a pretense about the aim of college football (basketball may be even worse, if anything, but is still a much smaller brother to football). Coaches are hired and paid to win games, not build their charges' character through sporting competition. They know that their jobs depend wholly on their record of wins versus losses and that nearly anything else will be tolerated if they can deliver those coveted championships and Bowl victories. With Nike as their patron, coaches know that fielding the most talented team is all important, and since the best athletes are not usually the best students (by inclination alone, even when intelligence is not the reason), they have every reason to ignore the academic achievements in favor of raw athleticism. Flaws in character are far less important than one's 100 yard dash time. And so they pay lip service to the ideals of collegiate sport while relentlessly chasing victory at all costs on the field.
This is not a knock on the men who coach those teams. Though they are not above reproach as a community, many of them genuinely care about their young charges and truly rejoice in their success; unfortunately, they have bought into an idea that success for their athletes is a National Football League career and nothing less. More importantly, they know that their own career depends solely on the number of games won and on taking their teams to prestigious Bowl games. And that means fielding the most talented and skillful set of players they can recruit. Coaches also know that their greatest recruiting tool is selling their high school marks on a career in the professional football league. Though less than two thousand players will earn an NFL paycheck at any given time, every athlete is recruited on dreams that he will make it. Around eight thousand athletes play at the college level, yet only around 250 will be picked in the annual drafts, but a vast majority of those college athletes will have been sold on the dream of a professional career. The colleges have become little more than a farm development for the professional league, all the protests of the college administrators to the contrary. It's been long recognized that money drives the college sports world, and that colleges are totally addicted to the money they generate off their athletes. To be sure, when students ask for a piece of the cake, the national and college administrators are quick to tout the amateur status of student athletes and trot out tired cliches about how students are in college for an education. But their policies give lie to their words. If education was paramount, student athletes would not be allowed to leave for the pros till they had graduated; current eligibility rules are but a fig leaf that allows our colleges to pretend that their athletic programs are about academic excellence. If this was about education alone, colleges would not be paying multi-million dollar salaries for big name coaches, whose sole virtues are good recruiting and/or detailed knowledge of football plays. And most importantly, colleges would not fire coaches for failing to win games. Or to win enough games. Or to win the big games. All these excuses are used, and accepted as routine, when a program decides on a coaching change. Never once is a coach released for failure to mold his athletes into mature and responsible men. Or for failing to challenge his team to outstanding academic performance. Or for not inspiring his team to be better people. Perhaps even worse, every coach knows that success in the latter group would never, ever save his job if he failed at the former goals.
The root of the problem of course, as in so many problems that plague modern American life, is an over abundance of money. Both professional football and collegiate sports are awash in money, from sponsors and media broadcast fees. In addition a winning team draws in fans, fills stadiums and generates massive amounts of profit off concession fees, parking and merchandise. And since success in college football is strongly co-related to strong recruiting, and strong recruiting requires selling prospective students on their chances of being drafted to the NFL, colleges are quite content to play along as a farm system to the pros. Addicted to money generated from their athletes, colleges can no longer afford to hew to the ideals they espouse and claim to revere. The only way to bring back a modicum of old school idealism to college sports is to divest it of the money that corrupts it.
Easier said than done, of course, but the key lies with the public. Especially with the alumni of the various schools. We have a louder voice than the students (and incidentally, the students are far less fair-weather fans than their seniors) by virtue of our numbers and our power of purse. We need to stop making our support for our alma mater dependent upon its winning record. But that is not the real battle, though it would be a good first step. The real key is to challenge our schools to eschew the money that goes with game telecasts. Maybe we use our influence with our schools and College Conferences to abrogate million-dollar telecast deals and instead make the games available online for free, or nominal charges to cover only cost of broadcast. We push our schools into accepting only such game fees as are needed to cover the basic costs of travel. We demand that our schools make academic achievement more important than winning, and we require that no student receiving a college scholarship be allowed to enter the NFL draft before graduating; those that wish to leave early must pay back their scholarships before entering their names (this will force students to truly evaluate their chances at making the professional rosters).
But the biggest changes need to come outside the college system. The NFL honors the pretense and hypocrisy of college sports because it provides them with a farm system of talent development for free. In reality, the idea that a player can enter the pros only after a couple of years in college is indefensible. Attending two, or three years of a four year program, especially with no requirement that the classes taken be tied to a reasonable degree provides no benefit to the players. But it does provide a training above high school and weeds out, though failure or injury, those who are not desired in the NFL. Football is a violent sport, and young players need to reach their full physical development before entering the rigorous professional world - colleges find the best high school prospects, train and develop them, and then send them on to the pros just as they finish the majority of their physical growth; the NFL gets all this for free. To really save colleges from the plague of monetized sport, we need the NFL to stop honoring the academic requirement - let them find, recruit and train talent on their own. And most importantly have the patience to hold those kids back and not rush them into play in hopes of short term gain. European soccer clubs already do this - Arsenal nurtured Theo Walcott, Barcelona famously paid to have special growth hormonal treatments to let a certain Lionel Messi grow to normal height when he was just twelve years old and entering their academy and one might say it paid off quite handsomely. In the US even, baseball has a form of this and hence college baseball is not wracked by the same glut of money as football and basketball.
Let's stop pretending that these athletes gain much from their college education. The top athletes currently find themselves treated as superstars, courted, coddled and cozened through college, a class apart from their fellow students which is unfair on the remaining students and unhealthy for the athletes. An academy, or series of academies attached to the NFL teams, would surround the players by their peers and remove them from the bubble of hero worship they enjoy on college campuses. If they enter a more focused training system, perhaps fewer of them will reach adulthood dreaming of finding the pot of gold. And since, inevitably, they will be paid to commit to the training maybe fewer of them will live a rags to riches story when they sign their full-time NFL contracts. The league could also provide some management training so that those who do find the pot of gold do not fritter it away unknowingly. There are many aspects that would need to ironed out, but this would move the development of tomorrow's players away from college fields and into the hands of their future employers, which is how it should be, for the good of colleges and athletes. Some teams will be foolish in one or more phases - recruiting badly, hurrying their players through development and signing them to action before their time. Others - the Green Bay Packers and New England Patriots seem likely candidates - will take their time and stay ahead of the game. And colleges can go back to being just centers of learning where average athletes compete on Saturdays for fun, pride and a break from studying.
